Fashion as a Form

Abstract

When we expect that a style or pattern of social activity adopted by a group or class of persons is time-limited and may ‘vanish as quickly as it came’, we call it fashion. Anything, not only apparel, can become the ‘content’ of the ‘form’ of fashion, although some objects are less amenable than others. These features of fashion are part of Simmel’s account of fashion. Simmel also notes that fashion operates like ‘honour’ in its ‘revolving within a given circle’ and at the same time emphasising this circle as ‘separate from others’. The rapid circulation in the objects of fashion also differentiate time. Simmel’s dialectical general model — his usual vehicle for presenting and developing his sociological themes — is strongly evident in his treatment of fashion. Fashion is but one expression of a never-ending trend to social recurrence and renewal. It ‘is a complex structure in which the leading antithetical tendencies of the psyche can be represented’. Although in Simmel’s view it can enslave the individual socially, since it occurs at the ‘periphery of being’, it can also be used as a ‘mask’, leaving the ‘soul’ free. Thus fashion is also part of the endless dialectic of individual and society, the dialectic of ‘life’ and social forms. Absent in classless societies, in class societies fashion tends to flow from elites to the imitating middle class, but before class differences in fashions are eliminated, the elite move to a new, more fashionable mode.

Fashion is a form of imitation and so of social equalisation, but, paradoxically, in changing incessantly, it differentiates one time from another and one social stratum from another.

(Simmel, Soziologie, 1958: 541)