Fashion and Its ‘Revolutions’ in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades

Abstract

In the Foreword of The Arcades Project,1 Walter Benjamin’s elaborate collection of literary fragments, the translators write that one of the purposes of Benjamin’s famously unfinished work was to ‘document as concretely as possible … the scene of revolutionary change that was the nineteenth century’ (AP, 1999, p.xii). Perhaps not surprisingly, this era of rapid transition was the period that gave rise to fashion both as a material object (for example, couture) and as a process (or a cycle of change). The industrialization and increased urbanization that characterized nineteenth-century Parisian life led to changes in clothing style that outpaced the slower, more gradual shifts in style of earlier centuries. The nineteenth century saw the emergence of fashion as a process (or rather, a set of processes) characterized by constant, ongoing, and rapid alterations in clothing styles or ‘fashions’ (as the items themselves also came to be called). The fashion ‘process’ — a cycle of continuous change — worked in tandem with the increased speed of production of clothing, as well as the increased rate at which various styles were taken up (and subsequently abandoned) by various ranks of city dwellers seeking to stay on top of the latest trend.