Agamben, G. (2009). “What is the contemporary?” In What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays (pp. 39-54). Stanford University Press.
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Excerpts
“Fashion can be defined as the introduction into time of a peculiar discontinuity that divides it according to its relevance or irrelevance, its being-in-fashion or no-longer-being-in-fashion.”
If fashion is 'into' time, then fashion is the intensity of clothes. If the discontinuity of fashion is a naive question of whether it is a peculiar thing when placed alongside grand philosophical ruptures, then, conversely, one should ask not whether clothes are fashionable or not, but rather into what kind of time they enter.
“The time of fashion, therefore, constitutively anticipates itself and consequently is also always too late. It always take the form of an ungraspable threshold between a ‘not yet’ and a ‘no more’.”
The time of fashion is ahead of oneself (anticipation) and behind oneself (lateness), and it is distributed between the two (threshold). Fashion is not 'the present' or 'now', but a 'contemporaneity' without it; can one gaze at the present without the present? What does the one who cannot be reduced to any point look at?
“So, being in fashion, like contemporariness, entails a certain ‘ease,’ a certain quality of being out-of-phase or out-of-date, in which one’s relevance includes within itself a small part of what lies outside of itself, a shade of démodé, of being out of fashion.”
'Ease', a sewing term, whether coincidental or not, we can articulate it. The sewing term ease is a technique that invisibilises discrepancies and erases traces. The ease in this context refers to either a positional misalignment or a temporal misalignment, which is somewhat paradoxical. 'Out of fashion' is precisely when fashion, being contemporary, has the potential to challenge contemporaneity.
“Following the same gesture by which the present divides time according to a ‘no more’ and a ‘not yet,’ it also establishes a peculiar relationship with these ‘other times’ – certainly with the past, and perhaps also with the future. Fashion can therefore ‘cite,’…”
'cite' is a term Walter Benjamin used earlier to explain the French Revolution with ancient Rome, describing that revolutionary leap. It seems to bring the past into the present, but fashion sometimes quotes an imagined future. Immediately recalling André Courrèges' space age, and Hussein Chalayan's Afterwords.
Nevertheless, we can recognise that contemporary, citation, and all other such things are historically asymmetrical. The way citation functions is not the same; it either works or it does not. Can current fashion ‘cite’ power, markets, and politics as they are now?
Is fashion something wearable?
Opening
"The time of fashion" is a phrase that becomes impossible the moment it is uttered. Just as Agamben looked to fashion in order to ask the question of contemporaneity, fashion is, more than it is clothing, a machine directed at time. It cuts time into what is in fashion and what has gone out of fashion. This machine cannot be grasped, because the moment one tries to fix the instant of its work, it has already come to an end.
"The time of fashion" flows only as a structural contradiction that cannot help but get ahead of itself: an impossibility between "not yet" and "no longer". Say differently, the "now" is not contemporary. Fashion is already outmoded.
Could we read what Agamben calls "ease" together with ease as a sewing term: the method by which the difference in dimensions between two pieces of fabric is invisibly absorbed and stitched together? Fashion is a technique for sewing up temporal misalignment. This time-machine operates by citing other times. It is closer to a form of parasitic idling, one that must summon what has been declared dead and an uncertainty that has not yet arrived. For citations of the future, one might think of Courrèges's Space Age or Chalayan's Afterwords.
The problem is that this citation rarely recognises the working time within itself for what it is. Fashion turns away from the present that makes it possible.
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