vienna

eautiful. This is partly due to the relief it affords in being different
from what went before it, partly to its being reputable. ” 101
Although the above text was written at the end of the
nineteenth century, there is still a lot of truth in it about our
contemporary situation. Prestige is still an important motivation
for the fashion cycle. Garments and furniture are, according to
Veblen, categories of consumer goods in which the beautiful
and the precious combine at their best. Prestige decides what
forms, colours, and garments find approval at a certain time. 102
This may have been true of the times when the above words
were written, but today we will have to take into account the
balance between production and consumption, and the balance
of power in claiming the necessities for a new trend and at
least the approval of it. Veblen also pointed out the importance
of novelty in showing prestige. For Boris Groys, novelty is an
important force in the economy of our culture today:
“The new usually appears in history as fashion. Fashion must
generally let itself be judged more radically rather than merely
strive for the new. A new and widespread form of this judgement
is the more often heard, contemptuous remark, ‘Oh, this
is just a new trend’. This means that the corresponding cultural
phenomenon has no historical consistency, it is transient by
nature and will soon be replaced by a new trend.” 103
Georg Simmel takes yet another approach, focusing instead
on the conspicuous consumption of novelties and on the dynamics
of class imitation. Class imitation is an internal mechanism of
the fashion system:
“The vital conditions of fashion as a universal phenomenon in
the history of our race are circumscribed by these conceptions.
Fashion is the imitation of a given example and satisfies the
demand for social adaptation; it leads the individual upon
the road which all travel, it furnishes a general condition, which
resolves the conduct of every individual into a mere example.
At the same time it satisfies in less degree the need of
differentiation, the tendency toward dissimilarity, the desire
101 Veblen (1934:177).
102 Veblen (1934:131).
103 Groys (1992:45)*.
The
Death
of
Fashion 39