Fashion, rather than a given system of aesthetic preferences or an instrument of individual expression (the fiction of originality through a “personal style”), is an instrument of power and the main weapon of the sovereign-commodity (5.6, 5.8). From this point of view the fashion industry is an essential piece of the puzzle of capitalist society. If, according to the postmodernist creed, modernity is a code, then fashion is its emblem.¹ Seen thus, according to Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, fashion acquires an outstanding function:

Recently, there was an interesting article in the British edition of the fashion magazine, Elle, that focused on Dior’s newest collection as a way of analysing, more generally, fashion as an early warning system of major cultural transformations. Modelled on Dior’s first post-World War II fashion line which… used previously rationed material as a way of privileging the consumer body to excess so necessary for the expansionary political economy of the 1950’s… ²

Needless to say, Dior’s postwar collection has a profound ideological bias and made fashion one of the scenarios of the Cold War: it stressed something the USSR simply lacked, the abundance of goods brought about by a robust market economy. Consuming, at least in the United States, became something inherently patriotic, it was not only a way to express one’s civil “liberties” (5.5), but a duty of sorts to one’s country, to the capitalist way of life. Thus, crinoline, lipstick and kitchen appliances became more than mere objects, they were public opinion weapons in an international confrontation.

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1. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic exchange and death, 89-90. ↩︎
2. Arthur y Marilouise Kroker, eds, Panic Sex in America, 16. ↩︎