Showing How Rhetoric Works 111Closed system
The present tense of Fashion becomes here the guarantee of the
system’s declared arbitrariness: this system tends to enclose its
synchronic dimension more and more, as each year and in a flash it
goes completely into reverse and collapses into the nothingness of the
past.
Fashion neurosis
Each of these todays is a triumphant structure whose order is extensive
with (or alien to) time in such a way that Fashion tames the new even
before producing it and so accomplishes that paradox in which the
‘new’ is both unpredictable and yet already decreed.
Thus, with long-term memory abolished and with time reduced to
the duo of that which is rejected and that which is inaugurated, pure
Fashion, logical Fashion is never anything other than the amnesiac
substitution of the present for the past. We could almost speak of a
Fashion neurosis.
Note
1 Published in Change 4 (1969), 106–9. [Editors’ note: adapted from The
Fashion System, as translated by matthew Ward and richard howard,
London, Jonathan Cape, 1985.]