New satchel, new pair of trainers, new coat… While the start of the new school year is giving off its usual consumerist injunctions, the publishing house Allia is offering to approach fashion from another side, that of philosophy. On August 31, she published two books that invite reflection. Besides the reissue of fashion philosophy (1905), by the German Georg Simmel (1858-1918), founding text which underlines its inherent contradiction, always caught between quest for imitation and quest for distinction, the editor leaves out of mode, by Francesco Masci.
The Italian living in Paris has already published works that examine with suspicion the power and falsehood of contemporary images (Fun!2011, and Anti-sentimental treaty, 2018, both at Allia). This time, he tries to understand fashion with the tools of thought. But extracting definitive logic from the maelstrom that is fashion borders on the impossible, observes the author.
Masci recalls that the social reading proposed by Georg Simmel, according to which the working classes imitate the upper classes, the trendsetters, has lost its relevance since the street infuses the collections. Today, “it’s the market that adapts (very quickly) to taste and not the other way around”, he writes. Why then does a taste impose itself? Any hypothesis raised ends up being swept away: “Fashion prescriptions have an arbitrary and totalitarian character”, he observes.
An ever-deceptive mirage
Over the 96 pages written in French, Francesco Masci prefers to analyze the character “amoralist” And “anerotic” of fashion. It underlines its capitalist springs, but also its ” inferiority complex “ compared to the world of culture to which she would so much like to measure herself – a waste of time, according to the philosopher. But above all, in out of mode, Francesco Masci suggests thinking about fashion on the axis of time. Because if we short after, is that, according to him, it carries its own death within it.
“The trend is the last stage before the nerdy”, professed designer Karl Lagerfeld. False, disputes Francesco Masci: as soon as the trend hatches, it already becomes outdated. So, “everything in fashion begins again each time from nothingness to come back to nothingness”, he decides, it is only seen in “absolute present” so fleeting that it cannot have “neither past nor future”. A kind of elusive quest, an always deceptive mirage: “Thanks to fashion, the individual is riveted to the present, but he lives in the illusion of riding the wave of the future. »
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