Dandyism and Fashion 63no longer ever be unique. So ready-to-wear clothing was the first fatal
setback for dandyism. But, more subtly, what ruined dandyism for
good, was the birth of ‘original’ boutiques; these boutiques sold clothes
and accessories which were not part of mass culture; but because
this exclusivity was part of commerce, albeit within the luxury sector,
it became itself normative: by buying a shirt, a tie or cufflinks at X or at
Z, one was conforming to a certain style, and abdicating all personal
(one might say narcissistic) invention of singularity. however, it was
fundamental to dandyism to be creative, the dandy would conceive his
outfit exactly like a modern artist might conceive a composition using
available materials (such as pieces of paper stuck together); that is, it
was normally impossible for a dandy to purchase his clothes. But once
limited to the freedom to buy (but not to create), dandyism could not
but suffocate and die; buying the latest Italian shoes or English tweed is
now a very common thing to do in that it is a conformity to Fashion.
Indeed, Fashion is the collective imitation of regular novelty; even
when it has the alibi of individual expression, or, as we say today, of a
‘personality’, it is essentially a mass phenomenon in which sociologists
are very happy to be interested so long as they find in it the privileged
example of a completely pure dialectic between the individual and
society. Furthermore, Fashion has today become everybody’s business
as shown by the extraordinary growth of women’s publications
specializing in this area. Fashion is an institution and today nobody
believes any more that it distinguishes; only unfashionable is a notion of
distinction; in other words, in terms of the masses Fashion is only ever
perceived via its opposite: Fashion is health, it is a moral code of which
the unfashionable is nothing but illness or perversion.
So we have witnessed the following paradox: Fashion has
exterminated all considered singularity in clothing by tyrannically
appropriating its institutional singularity. It is not the clothing item itself
which has become bureaucratized (for example in societies without
fashion), but more subtly its aim towards singularity. To inoculate all of
contemporary clothing, via Fashion, with a bit of dandyism was always
going to kill dandyism itself since, in its very essence, dandyism was
condemned to be radical or not exist at all. It is not therefore the general
socialization of the world which has killed dandyism (as one might
imagine in a society with rigorously uniform clothing, such as Chinese
society today); it was the intervention of an intermediary power between