Fashion, a Strategy of Desire 83RB: In reality fashion is never functional, never utilitarian. If women
bought dresses only when they needed them, if a society bought
clothes only because of wear and tear, there wouldn’t be any fashion:
the buying rhythm must be faster than that of clothing wearing out.
HL: What bothers me in what you are saying is that you allow no
space for invention. There are nevertheless technologies, forms, new
materials...
RB: an invention which is purely that of combining remains an
invention. a limited number of elements to be combined can produce
the impression, a justified one, of a creation.
JD: It used to be the case that the manifestations of women’s
fashion were the forms of theatrical representation reserved for an elite.
nowadays, the acting takes place in the street. never have aspirations
towards performance been as pronounced as today. With its aspects
of fantasy, fashion corresponds to a need for a theatricalization in our
lives as they become less and less authentic. We are going towards
an affirmation of individual existence but one which is destroyed by
industrial society, towards the need to create a false existence which
we then want to become true.
Le NO: Fashion today lays emphasis also on youth.
RB: more than youth, we should speak of a ‘junior style’, as defined
by the boutiques on Rue de la Pompe,^5 with elements borrowed from
the fleamarket: a junior fashion where the two sexes take on values
which are hard to distinguish.
JD: here we are seeing the need to exist through costume...
HL: What is rather strange, since fashion is mimetic, is the way
people claim a personality via a model.
RB: We have not talked enough about the profoundly narcissistic
and erotic value of clothes. That includes all fashions. however,
paradoxically, I would say that there is not any ‘figure’ of fashion which
is erotic in itself; a body which is completely covered can be deemed as
erotic by society. Eroticism is linked to the contrast in norms in any one
society; taking off clothes is not an erotic act in itself.
HL: Strategy of Desire is the title of a book on advertising...
RB: yes, by Dichter, an american ‘psychoanalyst’, consulted all over
the world by advertisers of cigars, beer, fashion etc. he is absolutely
right about what is going to be fashionable over the next few years.