Fashion, a Strategy of Desire 81and conformity. So there is a paradox here which cannot but hold
the attention of sociologists. We all follow fashion and, in theory, it is
made up only of what is new. There is then a sort of contradiction in
terms. you have to imitate that which is in fashion in order not to be
imitable...
Henri Lefebvre: yes, just so long as we do not restrict fashion to
clothing. Fashion is also concerned as much with literature, painting,
music... It is a general phenomenon. The study of fashion can be
particularized by looking at clothing but it is the whole of society which
is implicated.
Jean Duvignaud: To stick with clothing fashion, I get the impression
that, since the revolution brought about by Paul Poiret—getting rid of the
corset, shortening of skirts etc.—fashion has been a way for women of
displaying their existence, in a society dominated by masculine values.
notice how women’s fashion is, by and large, defined and thought
about by men.
HL: It plays with the material or visual forms proposed by men; but,
so as these are absorbed by women, there must be something however
which originates with women...
RB: a pseudo-psychoanalyst in america says that men often create
aberrant forms of fashion to avenge themselves on women, to disfigure
them.^3
JD: When fashion undresses women in the way that today’s does, it
is not to disfigure them... Since the 1920s we have seen an explosion
in new forms, in the varieties of forms to be combined, which suggests
a much greater freedom.
Le NO: In your view, does a woman dress for herself rather than, for
example, to please men?
HL: here we are in a very ambiguous domain, linked to the ‘hygiene’
of clothes, which is there both to veil and to show what it is hiding, to
dissimulate or to suggest something other than what it is revealing. The
trick is the way in which this ambiguity is used.
RB: It is for this reason that, psychoanalytically, clothing has been
likened to a neurosis, a slight neurosis, to the precise extent that it
hides and advertises at the same time. In his Psychology of Clothes,
the Englishman Flügel provides a psychological interpretation for the
increase in the number of clothes. he cites the example of oriental