The Affirmation Principle — Fashion, between the Individual and Society

Abstract

In the early twenty-first century, fashion is so pervasive that it seems inherent to social and economic life, almost a “natural” thing that no one can escape. However, fashion as we know it — with its powerful industrial infrastructure, its widespread appeal as a career, and its media omnipresence — has not always been around. When and where did it appear? As pointed out by American historian Sarah-Grace Heller, the dominant position among scholars is that fashion originates “in the West in the fourteenth- or fifteenth-century courts of Burgundy or Italy, or more generally with the era referred to as ‘Early Modernity,’”¹ that is to say with the European Renaissance, usually considered to have started in the fourteenth century. This academic standpoint on what constitutes the “cradle of fashion” derives from the work of French historian Fernand Braudel, who saw the constant and regular change in dress as a byproduct of the emergence of modernity in Europe. Braudel’s central thesis is that fashion is what sets the West apart from other civilizations that have not known anything comparable until very recently.²