110 The Language of Fashion
practise a rhetoric of pure observation of fact (loose dresses are in), and
all the fashion magazine has to do is report what is (‘we can see the
camelhair sweater coming back’), even if, like a wise historian, it knows
how to discern in a simple event the way the whole market is moving
(The Fashion for black-dyed mink is growing). By making Fashion into
an inevitable force, the magazine imparts to it all the ambiguity of an
object without cause, but not one without will.
Fashion trajectory
a fashion is recorded at the very moment it is announced, the very
moment it is prescribed. The whole of Fashion rhetoric is contained in
this shortcut: stating that which is being imposed; producing Fashion
and then seeing in it nothing but an effect without a named cause; then
retaining from this effect only the phenomenon; and finally leaving this
phenomenon to develop as if its life depended solely upon itself: such is
the trajectory that fashion follows so as to convert its cause, its law and
its signs all at once into fact.
Fashion infidelity
all new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion of the oppression
left by the preceding Fashion. Fashion experiences itself as a right, the
natural right of the present over the past; defined by its very infidelity,
Fashion nevertheless lives in a world which it wants to come into being
and which it sees as ideally stable, a world shot through with glances
that are conformist.
Fashion dogmatism
Fashion’s aggressiveness, whose rhythm can even be one of
vendettas, ends up itself being undone by a more patient image of
time; by that absolute, dogmatic, vengeful present tense in which
Fashion speaks.