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Full Description
Benjamin on Fashion reconstructs and redefines Walter Benjamin's complex, fragmentary and yet influential fashion theory that he developed in the Arcades Project (1927-1940) and beyond, while situating it within the environment from which it emerged - 1930s Parisian couture.
In this insightful new book, Philipp Ekardt brings Benjamin into
discussion with a number of important, but frequently overlooked sources. Amongst many others, these include the German fashion critic Helen Grund, who introduced him to the contemporary fashion scene; Georg Simmel's fashion sociology; Henri Focillon's morphological art history; designs by Elsa Schiaparelli and Madeleine Vionnet; films by L'Herbier and others starring Mae West; and the photography of George Hoyningen-Huene and Man Ray.
In doing so, Ekardt demonstrates how fashion and silhouettes became grounded in sex; how an ideal of the elegant animation of matter was pitted against the concept of an obdurate fashion form; and how Benjamin's idea of 'fashion's tiger's leap into the past' paralleled the return of 1930s couture to the depths of (fashion) history. The use of such relevant sources makes this crucial for understanding Benjamin both as a thinker and a cultural theorist.
Contents
Fashion-Forward Benjamin: A Brief Introduction
- Fashion-forward Benjamin
- A qualifying remark: The limits of this study and the positivity of fashion
- Textual basis
Part One - Time/Fashion Models
1 On Some Systematic Aspects of Benjamin's Fashion Theory
- Has fashion ever been modern?
- Fashion as model and as chronotechnics
- Benjamin's fashion passage
- From phenomena in time to models of time
- Fashion changes little
- Being in fashion, being form (Simmel)
- Differentials of time and deviations of direction
- Any past's contemporary: Fashion as a temporal qualifier (the sentimental education of the discontinuous)
- Yesterday, and the day before (sorting time and what has gone out of style)
- Zeitkern (time kernel)
- The ends of Benjamin's time/fashion model I: Revolution
- The ends of Benjamin's time/fashion model II: Historical apocatastasis
Part Two - Benjamin and the Fashion of his Time
2 The Contingent Primacy of Sex(es)
- A sudden affluence: The view of garments gliding by
- Waists are up, skirts are down (1929/1930)
- An onscreen vignette: L'Herbier, Helm, Louiseboulanger
- Should Benjamin have attended fashion shows? Helen Grund, the expert
- The only contemporaneous fashion thinker
- The contingent primacy of sex
- (Schiaparelli's) Genital millinery
- Fashion, whores, Surrealists (The pitfalls of allegory and the forgetting of labor)
- Beyond the logic of the placeholder. Schiaparelli's (and Dora Benjamin's) fashion work
- Morphology of the silhouette (Benjamin vs. Focillon)
3 In/Elegant Materialisms
- Grund's additional notes on the essence of fashion (an unpublished fragment from the Walter Benjamin-Archiv)
- A theory of elegance: The animation of garments according to Helen Grund
- Theory of modeling
- The immanence of elegance
- Taking it to the industry
- Thing and dress (Schiaparelli, Apollinaire)
- The extraneous temporality of the fashion phenomenon
- The supple and the rigid: Two tendencies in 1930s Paris Couture - Vionnet and the Pavillon de l'Élégance
- Versions of inertia: Persistence of the fashion form
- The non-givenness of material
- Materialism à la mode
4 The Tiger's Leap and the Expression of History
- The charm of the previous century: A Manet show, a Belle Epoque collection, and filmic dreams of fashions past
- Striking a note in fashion history
- Morphology in history: Time as ground
- The tiger's leap as expression of the economy (Benjamin's fashion ideology)
