Towards a Sociology of Dress 33analysis that reveals the relative nature of such a term: for what is of
interest is not the diversity of clothing items but the relativity of the values
that they signify. There is in all this a sort of latent essentialism that cuts
explanation short, with Kiener having recourse to a set of essences that
remind you of the ‘soporific’ effects of opium (the essence of Woman,
the ‘spirit of the times’, the ‘life instinct’, the ‘need for change’, the
‘slowing down in growth’, etc.).
Certainly, nothing is simplistic in Kiener’s book; he has recognized,
if not exploited, the possibilities of a phenomenological analysis of
clothing, of what he calls the Kleider-Ich, the ‘me Clothing’ (even though
his observations on the extension of the self and on vestimentary
eroticism are already to be found largely in Flügel).^7 Furthermore, his
encyclopaedic sense and his thirst for tiny facts and contradictory
details (and the history of clothing is indeed a series of ‘inversions’)
give his work a kind of relativist dimension. But the price he pays is
a contradiction which he resolves badly: on the one hand, he resorts
constantly, but anarchically, to history (without, moreover, taking social
distinctions sufficiently into account), to the extent that clothing, in its
diachrony, becomes a monotonous series of ruptures, a disordered
succession of opposites; and on the other, his plan, the very aim of
his work, postulates a ‘natural’ anthropology, a kind of psychological
essence of the human body, which, if it were true, would logically lead
to a universal form of clothing, or at least to a very weak variation and
not an absolute variation as is the case in our world: if the neck is
a part of the body that must be protected, how is it that every form
possible, from covering to revealing the neck, has existed? There is a
contradiction here between history and ‘nature’, a hiatus between a
strict finality of the organ and the diversity of clothing experiments, and
the law of heterogony alone (which Kiener borrows from Wundt) is not
adequate to explain it.
all in all, what is valuable in this book is the detail: in order to have
a historical and anthropological inventory of clothing phenomena there
must be a lot of culture, supplied by very varied sources. many of Kiener’s
analyses of items are not only brilliant but also exciting, encouraging
us to think of problems which go far beyond the detail. unfortunately,
what we really need in this subject are systematic attempts to consider
clothing as a structure and not as an anarchic collection of tiny
events. Furthermore I doubt whether the very notion of an item could