Baudrillard, J. (1976) “Fashion, or the Enchanting Spectacle of the Code” in Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: Sage. pp. 108-121.
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Opening
When Baudrillard describes fashion as a féerie, what demands attention is that it is not beautiful but truly enchanting. It is granted this privilege of enchantment because it releases every domain from fixed meanings, allowing them to be endlessly recombined. In this context, a form no longer exists based on its inherent qualities but gains temporary value through changing relationships, similar to a currency with a floating exchange rate. Baudrillard’s wordplay suggests that the signifieds become unthreaded and slip away (se défilent), while the signifier’s parades (les défilés du signifiant) lead nowhere.
In the fashionable body, the mannequin, masculinity and femininity no longer remain fixed but gain a ‘second life’ as interchangeable signs. Consequently, the historically women-centric expectation now applies universally. Thus, fashion is neither merely decoration nor waste. Like commodities that must adhere to market rules, individuals must shape their bodies by the standards of sexuality and fashion. Fashion simultaneously encourages personal transformation and demands that each change uphold its order. The freedom of signs it offers also becomes an obligation. Since these models do not just mirror reality but serve as references that perpetually reproduce bodies, this is the mechanism of simulation Baudrillard describes in fashion.
Excerpts
- There is fashion from the moment that a form is no longer produced according to its own determinations, but from the model itself – that is to say, that it is never produced, but always and immediately reproduced. (…) Fashion is not a drifting of signs, it is their flotation, in the sense in which monetary signs are floated today.1
- Fashion grows deeper as it ‘stages’ the body, as the body becomes the medium of fashion (…) The play of dress is effaced before the play of the body, which itself is effaced before the play of models. (…) The mannequin is sex in its entirely, but sex without qualities. Fashion is its sex. Or rather, it is in fashion that sex is lost as difference but is generalised as reference (as simulation). Nothing is sexed any longer, everything is sexualised. (…) We can immediately, and clearly, see that fashion is a labour, to which it becomes necessary to accord equal historical importance to ‘material’ labour.2
- It is in this way that it diverges radically from the economic while also being its crowning achievement. In relation to the pitiless finality of production and the market, which, however, it also stages, fashion is a festival. (…) Wherever there are models, there is ian imposition of the law of value, repression by signs and the repression of signs by themselves.3
reader’s Notes
- The arbitrariness of fashion can be anything, but it cannot manifest itself in just any way. The openness of fashion can model the forms in which meaning appears, whilst increasing the number of possible meanings. ‘Choose freely’ is, in fact, a disciplinary command that reduces every action to a choice. ↩︎
- It is difficult to encapsulate within a single outfit which relationships are being rejected, upon whom that rejection imposes a cost, and what needs to be organised. Yet the signs on the body can be read and replicated instantly. ‘Wearable resistance’ is a resistance that succeeds in conveying political content through the body, whilst at the same time being an abbreviated form. Nothing is subversive, yet everything can appear to be so. Did Baudrillard view fashion as labour not because of the self-discipline involved in conforming to the ideal body, but because the subject must continually renew their disobedience in a recognisable way? ↩︎
- Since the unproductivity of haute couture is a privilege that cannot be measured in terms of productivity – rather than an act of ceasing production – we must take care not to base our criteria for identifying resistance on visual transgression, the slowness of handcraft, inefficiency or futility. As long as the question of who acquires name and value, and who controls time, remains unchanged, they are a premium. ↩︎
