The Clothed Body

The Clothed Body
Finally, in the relation between these two writers, a concept of the world
emerges that has the same ambivalence as allegory. The modern world is,
indeed, a world of appearances, of the mystic veil, simulacra, ruins, corpses
and the inorganic, but it is also a world that can transcend its own illusory
nature (as a given order). Fashion is a system of exchange between the
world and merchandise; it is ‘a means of transferring the character of merchandise
to the cosmos’ (1982: 70). Its status makes it similar to
Benjamin’s ‘figure of passage’ (see Calefato 1992a). Moreover, fashion
exhibits the sex-appeal of merchandise, of the inorganic, in a paradoxical
game, a parodic inversion that does indeed make the lifeless fascinating
and seductive, and where the thing replaces the person.
The sex appeal of the inorganic – that is, the allegorical dimension of
fashion in the modern metropolis – doesn’t only have a negative value. On
the contrary, fashion is invigorated by the very duplicity of its forms of
seduction, crystallized in stereotypes and commonplaces, on the one hand,
yet overturning these very same stereotypes in a carnivalesque rendering of
bodily forms, on the other.
Benjamin’s reflections on fashion in the modern age, inspired by
Baudelaire’s writings and by a constant analysis of the material forms of
the nineteenth century metropolis, lay the grounds for understanding the
transformations, discerned by Simmel at the end of the nineteenth century,
that have taken place in fashion in terms of its ‘classical’ status. In Simmel’s
analysis of the status of fashion in modernity, fashion objectifies and equalizes
opposing currents: imitation and innovation, internal and external,
individual and society (1895: 61). Simmel’s concept of objectification
expresses the prerogative of fashion to make manifest, to promote to collective
image, the dialectic between individual and society, providing the
latter with a third horizon of representation that does not invade the individual’s
spiritual territory.
In looking at the revival of the classical status of fashion from a fresh
perspective, Benjamin nevertheless feels that this objectification has
become fetishism, that the mediation between the two tensions (individual
and social) adumbrated by Simmel has turned them into lifeless forms and
fashion into the parody of a decaying corpse (Benjamin 1982). Even the
concept of ‘passage’ in reference to the cityscape of Paris as the nineteenth
century capital, epitome of the modern metropolis, only becomes valid
when individual memory and experience have been ‘massified’ and spread
through the crowd. For Benjamin, ‘revival’ consists in making the dialectic
an up-to-date one, from a perspective of alienation implicit in the modern
division of labour, as well as in the automatism regulating how the urban
masses behave. Here alienation extends to intellectual, dream and sign
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