The Fashion Businessthe preceding social system, have used the term to designate the enormous
social and cultural changes which took place from the mid-sixteenth century
in Europe.^44 For the sociologist Max Weber, the origins of capitalism lay in
the Protestant ethic; its leitmotifs were modernization and rationalization
but also, and crucially, ambiguity.^45 It is both this sense of ambiguity, and
the concept of historical rupture, which inform my exploration of the links
between women, fashion, modernity, the city and capitalism. It is beyond
the scope of this chapter (and beyond me) to plot a precise and structural
connection between Western fashion and modernity by tracking back through
European culture. Furthermore, such an enterprise might construct a linear
history which, in a sense, runs counter to my project.^46 As outlined earlier, I
have instead drawn on Walter Benjamin’s concept of dialectical images,
juxtaposing the more spectacular manifestations of the consumer explosion
of the nineteenth century against those of the late twentieth-century fashion
show to illuminate the historical relay between past and present.
Throughout I have drawn extensively on Elizabeth Wilson’s writing on
fashion and modernity. Although Susan Buck-Morss discusses fashion in The
Dialetics of Seeing, an imaginative reconstruction of Walter Benjamin’s
Arcades Project, published in 1991, only Elizabeth Wilson has focused
exclusively on the nexus between women, modernity, fashion and the city.^47
Wilson argues that fashion and modernity share a double-sided quality,
because they are both formed in the same crucible, that of ‘the early capitalist
city’.^48 It is this double-sided quality that informs my use of the term
‘modernity’; it combines, on the one hand, fragmentation, dissonance and
alienation with, on the other, euphoria, excitement and the pleasures of self-
- Turner, Brian S., (ed.), Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity, Newbury Park, New
Delhi: Sage Publications, London, 1990, discusses the major debates and cites key texts. - Bryan S. Turner, ‘Periodization and Politics in the Postmodern’, in Turner (ed.), ibid.,
pp. 1–13. - Benjamin, too, wrote: ‘in order for a piece of the past to be touched by present actuality,
there must exist no continuity between them’ for the historical object is constituted as dialectical
image by being ‘blasted out of the continuum of history’. Cited in Buck-Morss, Susan, The
Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, Cambridge, Mass. & London,
England: MIT Press, 1989. References in this article are to the paperback edition, 1991, pp.
- Wilson, Elizabeth, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, London: Virago, 1985.
See too Wilson, Elizabeth, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and
Women, London, Virago, 1991, which, like this paper, uses Walter Benjamin to connect the
nineteenth-century city to the urban consciousness of the present. - Wilson, Elizabeth, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, London: Virago, 1985,
p. 9.