F1412 Fashion and Modernity

The relation between fashion and modernity has always been taken for granted. Indeed, it is guaranteed in the very etymology of the French, Italian and German words “mode” and “modernité” ("moda", "modernità", "Mode und Moderne"). Yet, on closer inspection, there is a blind spot in this relation in that fashion seems rather to be the other of modernity.
The modern discourse of fashion testifies to the ambivalences and paradoxes in this relation. From the beginning until now, it is strangely split: there is fashion and fashion. Properly speaking, men’s fashion is not really fashionable. The perfectly functional suit without superfluous adornment is, in its world-wide constancy through two centuries now, almost invariably classical. Its staggering universal success is due to the fact that it is the ideal modern dress: beautiful, because functional. Women’s fashion, on the contrary, is a remnant of the old, effeminate aristocracy – a frivolous frill, an all-in-all dysfunctional ornament, an arabeske, badly in need of thorough modernization. The „new woman“ is born in agonizing pain and perpetual fallbacks: while Chanel almost lead us toward a functional feminine form, Dior’s new look was a setback. It brought back the unhealthy, restrictive corset and offered a slap in the face to the modern aesthetic dogma of „form follows function“. Fashion – a certain fashion, the feminine, the ornamental - seems to be strangely anachronistic within the aestetic politics of modernity. It is perhaps Mario Fortuny and his breathtaking arabesques who best brings to light this dialectics of fashion and modernity.
The course will center around this blind spot between fashion and modernity and the new gendering of fashion in the bourgeois, post-feudal era.