The Fashion Businessin space but has escalated in the last five to ten years with the spread of
electronic and digital forms of communication.
This technological revolution, although very different in its effects, has
produced a sense of upheaval and change which can be compared to the
effects of industrialization in nineteenth-century Paris. Above all, the rise of
the information society has produced a comparable sense of rupture in
contemporary sensibilities and social practices.^53 The ‘intoxicating dream
worlds’ of the nineteenth century, with its ‘constantly changing flow of
commodities, images and bodies’^54 was replaced in the late twentieth century
by the rapid flow of signs and images. Although the contemporary experience
was lead by communications and new technology, rather than by industry,
both were periods of accelerated transition which perhaps explains the
prominent role of fashion in each. Fashion itself is about rapid change, and
can articulate modern sensibilities in a time of transition. Indeed, Gilles
Lipovetsky has argued that the instability of fashion trains us to be flexible
and adaptable, so that modern fashion is socially reproductive and not, as
some would argue, irrational and wasteful. He writes that ‘fashion socialises
human beings to change and prepares them for perpetual recycling’,^55 and
argues that the kinetic, open personality of fashion is the personality which
a society in the process of rapid transformation most needs.
Most theorists of postmodernism have posited it as a moment of absolute
rupture with the past. Yet there are also enough similarities, as I have sketched,
to suggest, as Lyotard does in The Postmodern Condition, that postmodernism
is simply another stage, or development, of modernism and that there is no
radical break with the past.^56 Galliano’s retro-images, ushering back the
historical styles of modernity, remind us of the way the past can continue to
resonate in the present. His nostalgic designs conjure up an earlier period of
idleness and luxury, yet the historical period he draws on was also, like the
present, a time of mutability, instability and rapid change, when all fixed
points seemed to be in motion, and in which the image of woman was
correspondingly highly charged. For the image of woman as commodity and
consumer is as ambivalently coded today, in the work of Galliano, as a
hundred years ago in the Parisian woman of fashion.
- For a discussion of the effect of new technologies on sensibilities and social practice see
Antony Giddens, Antony, Reith Lectures, London: BBC Publications, 1999. - Featherstone, Mike, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi:
Sage Publications, London, 1991, p. 70. - Lipovetsky, Gilles, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, Princeton,
New Jersey: trans. Catherine Porter, Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 149. - Lyotard, Jean-François,The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, University
of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis: trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Brian Massumi, 1984.