Some writers view fashion strictly as the product of designers. This perspective reifies designers as creators and also attempts to secure fashion as an ideal with privileged access (Grumbach 2014). In this scenario, the doors to fashion open only to those with funds to purchase designer products. The intrusion of the masses into the practice of fashionability threatens the aura of exclusivity associated with designer-centric fashion. Would the clothing practices of the middle- and lower-income populace be called “fashion” or merely “dress”? We, the authors, observe that dress of non-elites intersects with fashion, as demonstrated in the hip-hop fashions of the 1990s. Malcolm Barnard articulates our position when he argues that “even the most ‘basic’ ‘anthropological’ or biological functions of keeping a body warm and dry cannot be immune to style, they must take some form or other. . . . Variation and cultural location are at the heart of what fashion is and therefore we must say that fashion is always with us, and that it has always been with us” (Barnard 2014: 5).
Terms that are considered to be the opposite of fashion include categories such as ecclesiastical and ritual dress as well as uniforms. Ecclesiastical dress evolved from late Roman and Byzantine forms, and has persisted into the present with little change. The Armenian priests observed by Joseph Pitton de Tournefort on his tour of the Levant ca. 1700 wore liturgical vestments still in use today (Figure 2.6). Ritual dress, such as the forms of tallit worn by Jews during prayer and rites of passage, stay the same from generation to generation although the materials from which they are made may change. Other types of ritual attire, like baby’s christening gowns, reflect changes in fashion.
Uniforms are meant to reduce individuality in dress among a group of individuals, such as schoolchildren or flight attendants, but these too reflect shifts in fashion as seen in the nurse’s uniforms in Figure 2.7. The large sleeves of the uniforms worn by these young nurses mirror fashionable daytime dresses of the mid-1890s.
Figure 2.6 “Armenian Priests.” Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, 1717. Courtesy of Travelogues, Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation, Athens, Greece. Available online: http://www.eng.travelogues.gr/item.php?view=43567. Ecclesiastical dress, such as the liturgical vestments of Armenian priests, remained unchanged for centuries. Thus, it has not been considered “fashion.”
Figure 2.7 Studio portrait of nursing students, John H. Stratford Hospital Training School for Nurses, Brantford, Ontario, Canada, 1897. Canadian Nurses Association/Library and Archives Canada (e002414893). The students’ uniforms reflect 1890s fashionable silhouettes with their leg-of-mutton sleeves.
Recommended terminology
The common element in everybody’s definition of fashion is change. A central question for us is, “How rapid must the pace of change be for fashion to come into play?” Eicher and Sumberg (1995: 299), citing Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins, argue that people need to be aware of a change in dress patterns within their own lifetimes in order for that change to be considered fashion. Thus, a second question is, “Do individuals need to be aware of changing dress habits in order for that change to be considered ‘fashion’ rather than simply ‘dress’”? George Sproles, in a review of fashion theory, explained the fashion cycle as the secular evolution of one style to the next. He differentiated between long-run cycles, which could occur only once in an age or once per century, and short-run cycles, which might be as short as a single season (Sproles 1981: 117). For Sproles the overriding principle was not the length of time that a style was accepted, but the historical continuity of style changes. We support Sproles’s position and prefer not to put a time limit on the duration of a fashion.
In the textbook Survey of Historic Costume, now in its sixth edition, Phyllis Tortora and Sara Marcketti provide the example of ancient Egypt as a society without fashion, observing the static nature of dress, ultimately concluding that its dress was not fashion (Tortora and Marcketti 2015: 104). However, Egyptian dress and adornment did change over time with each political and technological shift. Although the pace of change was slow, change still occurred. For example, earrings constituted a “late addition to Egyptian jewelry” (Tortora and Marcketti 2015: 44). They also attained “popularity” in the New Kingdom (Gilbert, Holt, and Hudson 1976: 140). Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood carefully documented the changes in Pharonic Egyptian clothing, noting that styles of dress attained increased layers and complexity over time (Vogelsang-Eastwood 1993). History of costume texts conflate changes in Egyptian dress by necessity of concision, perhaps because of giving more coverage to Western dress and to more recent fashion history. However, the apparent stasis of dress forms is an inadequate basis to conclude fashion’s absence. Tortora and Marcketti continue the position held in earlier editions of this best-selling textbook, that fashion is a characteristic of Western dress, which appeared in Europe in the Middles Ages (2015: 9). Further, they exclude the “peasant” dress of Western Europe as being too divergent to include in a general survey of Western dress (2015: 10).
We argue that dress worn prior to the advance of capitalistic economies in Europe should also be considered as fashion. We propose that fashion is the preferential term for changing styles of dress, whether that change is slow or fast, in the shapes of clothes or the patterns on the fabrics, in hairstyles and colors, in cosmetic and body markings, or in permanent body modifications.
Further, if fashion is defined as changing styles of dress adopted by people at any given time and place, then the West cannot be privileged. It is more truthful to understand that the desire to embellish the human body—the fashion impulse—is the dominant reason for dress and that humans seek novelty or change; thus, fashion is endemic to human nature and is the term that we prefer over dress, clothing, costume, toilette, and apparel.
3
FASHION SYSTEMS
Fashion is a form of imitation and so of social equalization, but, paradoxically, in changing incessantly, it differentiates one time from another and one social stratum for another. It unites those of a social class and segregates them from others. The elite initiates a fashion and, when the mass imitates it in an effort to obliterate the external distinctions of class, abandons it for a newer mode—a process that quickens with the increase of wealth.
GEORG SIMMEL
Georg Simmel, a German sociologist, first wrote these words in 1904 to introduce his trickle-down theory of fashion (Simmel [1904] 1957: 541). At the time, the Gilded Age was still in full swing; Simmel and other academics, such as economist Thorstein Veblen, tried to make sense of fashion’s hold on Euro-American society. Simmel’s work was so foundational to understanding the fashion system that the American Journal of Sociology republished it in 1957.
In this chapter, we summarize key theories about how fashion works as a social system because the various theories affect the interpretation of the terms used in fashion discourse. Disciplines differ in their emphases or issues of concern, as will be apparent in the key fashion theories discussed in this chapter. Additional perspectives and concepts appeared with the rise of cultural studies, which are presented in Chapter 4.
Key fashion theories
The previous chapter’s analysis of fashion’s lexicon reveals that fashion is a social process with components of change, temporality, spatiality, and adoption by groups of people. For more than five and a half centuries, thoughtful observers from a variety of perspectives have attempted to understand or explain fashion, offering both brief and lengthy interpretations. Fashion theory anthologies attesting to the range of commentary on fashion appeared in the early twenty-first century (Barnard 2014; Johnson, Torntore, and Eicher 2003; Purdy 2004). A French essayist named Michel de Montaigne commented on the custom of wearing clothes in 1575, which may be the earliest writing that attempted to theorize fashion (Johnson, Torntore, and Eicher 2003: 15–17).
Theories explaining fashion originate from diverse disciplines including social science fields such as anthropology, economics, and sociology, as well as from business fields such as marketing and co
nsumer behavior; and from other fields such as psychology, history, and cultural studies. Each scholarly discipline has its own foundational tenets, and each develops inquiry seeking to discover knowledge. Theory building refers to an ongoing disciplinary process that builds a framework of linked assumptions, concepts, and explanatory statements. Fresh observations put forth as propositions are tested or examined before scholars accept them as revisions to an accepted theory. Theoretical frameworks undergo constant, although often slow, development as new understandings or propositions become accepted and incorporated in the framework, or sometimes displace prior ones that are disproved.
Fashion theory, despite its apparent long history, was not a discrete scholarly field until the second half of the twentieth century. The broad field of fashion inquiry, drawing as it does upon a range of disciplines, has yet to concur on an overarching theory of fashion that comprehensively encompasses the various disciplinary perspectives. However, numerous concepts have emerged and have been incorporated into the various strands of fashion theory where contestation takes place in the field’s literature.
Fashion theories attempt to explain or characterize how and why fashion occurs. The following primarily chronological discussion focuses upon theories that mark significant shifts in the perception and explanation of fashion. Starting in the 1930s, a paradigm shift in intellectual discourse within the humanities and social sciences led these intellectual fields to move away from solely positivistic analytic approaches toward analyses based on cultural interpretative processes. Examples of related academic developments include feminist perspectives, critical and cultural studies, and area studies such as those focused on identity (e.g., gender, ethnicity, social rank). The more recent theoretical developments (cultural studies) that incorporate interpretive cultural analysis are discussed in Chapter 4. In this chapter we present key foundational fashion theories up to the cultural turn as proposed by Jameson (1998). The goal is to present a broad portrayal of the earlier progress in fashion theory and to observe the points at which selected faulty assumptions took hold.
Although observations about fashion by Western essayists began in the Renaissance and continued through the Enlightenment, no one attempted a theory of fashion until the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, the nascent status of scholarly disciplines in the nineteenth century and the constant development of knowledge must be acknowledged in a review of past developments. In the nineteenth century, knowledge had developed from observation and analysis sufficiently enough to lay the ground for the social sciences to emerge, and thus for formal theory development to proceed in the new fields of anthropology and sociology.
Change, imitation, and pursuit of novelty
In his 1854 essay “Manners and Fashion,” previously unrecognized as a key work of theory, British scholar and sociologist Herbert Spencer proposed that fashion oscillates between extremes and that fashion is founded on change based in the imitation of elites and in the impetus to seek the pleasure of novelty (Spencer 1854). Thus, he presented three concepts that have continued to be discussed in fashion theory: change, imitation of elites, and pursuit of novelty. In the early twentieth century, Georg Simmel ([1904] 1957), the German sociologist quoted at the beginning of this chapter, and Edward Sapir (1931), an American anthropologist, would echo the assumption that change processes are essential to conceptualization of fashion. However, in the nineteenth century, the notion that human cultures had developed on a hierarchical scale took hold of mainstream intellectual thought. This was to influence considerations of fashion and fashion change.
Fashion theory and evolutionary theory
Charles Darwin emerged as the dominant natural scientist of the nineteenth century when he published The Origin of Species ([1859] 1999). He proposed the theory of natural selection that first explained speciation, which was based in part upon his observation of plants and animals in the Galapagos Islands. Darwin’s theory posited that speciation was an outcome of biological adaptation to environmental context over time. This idea stimulated intellectuals to pursue discovery of human origins. The idea was also misinterpreted in applications to human differences and to their societies.
Spencer, a widely influential intellectual, promoted searching for a universal law that governed development. In his response to Darwin’s work, Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” ([1864] 2002: 444). Spencer and others interpreted Darwin’s theory to propose that nature progressed on a hierarchical pathway, that evolutionary processes produced succeeding improvements. The “survival of the fittest” evolutionary concept skewed Darwin’s ideas, and today the phrase is not used in scientific discourse since it lacks specificity generally and does not describe current understanding of genetic adaptation. Darwin’s basic assumptions regarding biological organisms’ adaptations to their various environments were ignored in the theory’s application to social science. The new assumption that humans and human societies develop constantly toward an improved state without understanding the relationship to environmental context implied a hierarchical ranking of humans. Likewise, societal forms were determined to have developed in constant progression. The false assumption of hierarchy in regard to human and societal development would be incorporated in theorizing fashion.
Social Darwinism, a term applied to beliefs that interpret human developments including social and cultural patterns in a hierarchical scale, took hold among many intellectuals in Europe and North America. Social Darwinism is understood to have emerged at the nexus of colonial imperialism and ongoing developments in the nascent social sciences. This historical moment was preceded by the era of European exploration, roughly from the 1400s through the 1700s, when Europeans set out on seafaring quests to expand trade, acquire natural resources, and establish colonies in distant lands. Sometimes indigenous peoples were transported to Europe by explorers, a practice that occurred over several centuries. In 1566, an Inuit woman and her daughter were taken from Labrador by French sailors and exhibited in Augsburg and Nuremburg (Sturtevant 1980). By the mid-nineteenth century, the imperial programs of European nations also included exploration for scientific research, such as Darwin’s travels. Explorers and anthropologists collected artifacts of the cultures encountered, invaded, or occupied around the world. Artifacts of cultures far from the Western sphere became the basis of newly established museums. Not only were cultural artifacts displayed, but their resources, products, and people were shown at international exhibitions (Blanchard 2008; Greenhalgh 1988; Rydell 1984). From their position of power in the imperialist structure, Westerners placed their own capitalist societies at the top of the hierarchy. Conversely, the so-called primitive cultures were low on the scale and black-skinned people of African origins were the lowest.
Important to understanding fashion theory development before the late twentieth century is the acknowledgment of the confluence of social Darwinism and imperialism in intellectual thought and practice. Western capitalist societies that allowed social mobility (movement from one stratum to another) based on achievements were accepted as the pinnacle of civilization by many thinkers. It followed in this flawed logic that the dress practices of the West were also superior to those of other cultures. Fashion became associated with the cultural traits of the West. The dress of so-called primitives was outside of fashion. Several theorists set these cultures apart from fashion. Simmel claimed that “tribal and classless societies” do not have fashion (1904: 541); Sapir echoed that belief with the statement that “primitive” cultures have “slow non-reversible changes of style” and not fashion (Sapir 1931: 141). Such ideas shaped fashion theory until the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Communication, and imitation and differentiation
With focus upon their own cultures, Western observers of dress in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries described facets of fashion that they observed around themselves. This limitation in scope allowed several ideas to come forward. Theorists remarked upon directional flow of
fashion change from one status group to another, particularly the imitation of a higher status group’s fashions by the next lower stratum in social rank. Also observed was that the imitated would move on to another look or fashion once their fashion was copied. The notion that dress components or even participation in fashion were powerful communicators began to be understood.
In 1899, the economist Thorstein Veblen, who developed an interest in other social science disciplines, published the book The Theory of the Leisure Class. In it, he delivered a critique of capitalism. Veblen observed and analyzed the group he called the “leisure class,” whose unprecedented wealth resulted from the economic benefits of the Industrial Revolution. In Western fashion history, the era is referred to as La Belle Époque in France and the Gilded Age in the United States, terms that evoke the luxury enjoyed by some at the top of the economic ladder. A highly visible class of elites could be seen in Western cities enjoying theater and opera, large opulent mansions, and of course, fine clothing individually handmade specifically for them. Their lifestyle sharply contrasted with that of the workers in the cities whose limited wardrobes acted as visible markers of difference from the elites. Veblen, a socialist thinker influenced by Marxist philosophy, contemplated the role of the workers and that of the leisure class in relationship to society’s products.
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