The Fashion Businessof ordinary people are always mixed, blending forms and themes, invention and
tradition, literate culture and folklore. Finally the macroscopic opposition between
“popular” and “high” culture has lost its pertinence. An inventory of the multiple
divisions that fragment the social body is preferable to this massive partition.^5It is the central contention of much recent work which places clothing in
the cultural sphere that clothing has played a defining, but largely uncredited
role in the formulation of such differences, microscopic, highly subjective,
and deeply personal though their manifestation in dress may be. Fashion
therefore requires a method of analysis that takes account of multiple
meanings and interpretations. Reductive connections between social influ-
ences and fashionable appearance have dogged much fashion history, unaware
as it has sometimes seemed to be of the difficulties and complexity of agency.
It is here that the new cultural history, in tandem with more recent work in
cultural studies, is of use, presenting a more questioning framework which
allows for explanations that are multi-layered and open ended. The historians
Melling and Barry have presented a model that acknowledges difference and
tensions between new cultural approaches, suggesting a more positive use
for the harnessing of divergent directions:
It would be misleading to present all these changes as moving in harmony and in
a single intellectual direction. For example, there is a clear tension between the
emphasis laid by some, notably literary critics, on the autonomous power of the
text and language, compared to the interest of others in recovering the intentions
of historical actors. Put crudely, the former are seeking to deconstruct the identity
and rationality of historical actors, while the latter strive to reconstruct them. To
some extent we are seeing, within the concept of “culture” as a basis of historical
explanation, a revival of the standard sociological debate between “structure”
and “action”. Should culture be considered as a given system or structure within
which past actors are predestined to operate? Or does the emphasis on culture
place higher priority on human creativity, on self conscious action by the individual
or society to change their condition. It would be ironic should this false dichot-
omy become too well entrenched, since the notion of culture has in many ways
been invoked precisely to avoid the need to choose between structure and action,
but the danger remains, if concealed by the inherent ambiguity of “culture” as an
explanation.^6These are useful suggestions for considering the relationship between fashion
and culture, though the passage also introduces the deeper problem of pinning
- Hunt, Lynn (ed.), The New Cultural History, Los Angeles: University of California Press,
- Melling, J. and J. Barry, Culture in History, Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1992.