The Concept of Fashion in The Arcades Project

Convolute B in Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project is devoted to fashion. ¹ It contains no less than ninety-one items, but it would be quite wrong to assume that all of Benjamin's citations and observations on the subject of fashion—more specifically, on fashion with respect to clothes—are to be found only there. Remarks devoted to fashion are scattered throughout the rest of the volume, hidden away in various other batches of material. When Georges Bataille invited Benjamin to lecture at the Collège de Sociologie in 1939, Benjamin suggested fashion as his subject. It is a recurrent theme within The Arcades Project and one to which Benjamin gave considerable thought, although he was sometimes quite inconsistent in his attitudes toward it, as he veered between viewing fashion, on the one hand, as a manifestation of commodity culture—or, more specifically, of commodity fetishism—and, on the other hand, as the manifestation of a long-repressed utopian desire, to be reenergized at a moment of historical awakening (AP, B1a,2; K2a,4). In numerous remarks on the subject of fashion, Benjamin made use of his concept of the "dialectical image," a concept he seems to have seen as the keystone of his entire enterprise but that, given the unfinished nature of the project, still remains somewhat obscure.

As Ulrich Lehmann points out in his recent book Tigersprung, ² an absorbing and pioneering study of fashion in modernity, Benjamin's writings on the subject of modernity did not simply cite Charles Baudelaire but also derived conceptually from Baudelaire, as demonstrated, for example, by his observation in Central Park that "Baudelaire was perhaps the first to conceive of an originality appropriate to the market, which was at the time just for that reason more original than any other." ³ The important assumptions here are that "originality" is a virtue—one that Benjamin himself exhibited—and that it should be considered specifically in its historical context. Benjamin was ready to endorse Baudelaire's wish to find the originality appropriate to his context, that of a newly burgeoning market economy. Théophile Gautier had mistakenly understood Baudelaire's acceptance of fashion as paradigmatic for modern aesthetics as implying a surrender to the market. On the contrary, Baudelaire had proposed that the power of originality or novelty could be reawakened in the future, serving as inspiration for a further wave of change.

In this context, Lehmann cites Karl Marx's observation, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, that the great French revolutionaries "Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed their task in Roman costume and with Roman phrases, the task of unchaining and setting up modern bourgeois society." ⁴ Subsequently, linking Baudelaire directly to Marx, Benjamin noted, in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, that the site of history "is not homogeneous and empty time, but one filled by now-time. For Robespierre, the Rome of antiquity was thus charged with now-time and blasted from the continuum of history. The French Revolution regarded itself as Rome reincarnate. It quoted ancient Rome as fashion quotes a past attire. Fashion has the scent of the modern wherever it stirs in the thicket of what has been. It is the tiger's leap (Tigersprung) into the past." ⁵ From Baudelaire the torch passed to Stéphane Mallarmé, who actually edited a fashion magazine, La Dernière Mode, and from Mallarmé, via Guillaume Apollinaire's The Poet Assassinated, to the surrealists—André Breton or Max Ernst, with his lithograph FIAT MODES—pereat ars. We should also remember that Breton himself worked for the great couturier Jacques Doucet, just as Man Ray worked for Paul Poiret, and both Salvador Dalí and Meret Oppenheim worked for Elsa Schiaparelli. Surrealism and fashion mingled, just as surrealism and Marxism mingled.

However, to understand Benjamin's views on fashion more fully, it...