The Culture, Fashion, and Society Notebook 2020

Variety, change, pluralism, provocation, the power of assimilation and at the same time the impulse to differentiation, are all veritable keywords and distinctive features of modern culture in general. The main cultural productions and phenomena that we tend to consider as fundamental or even quintessential of the ‘spirit’ of the modern age, so to speak, seem to embody – among other things – the abovementioned features and to present them in different ways. Inasmuch as fashion, as has been convincingly explained by several theorists, belongs to modernity, it therefore seems possible to find all such aspects and features in fashion as well. As has been noted, “[t]he emergence of fashion as a historical phenomenon shares a main characteristic with modernism: the break with tradition and an unceasing endeavour to reach ‘the new’”.