CHAPTER 14
of G. Riello and P. McNeil, eds., The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives, Routledge, forthcoming 2010
L’Homme des foules, dandy, flâneur: Fashion and the Metropolis
1850-1940
Ulrich Lehmann
Introduction
Fashion has always been made by the city. In European languages the etymological root
of fashion lies in the word mode, although in English it is derived from the Latin ‘facere’
(meaning ‘to make’), which might be indicative of Anglo-American pragmatism over
Romanic intuition). In mode, the two meanings of manner or type – as in ‘mode of living’
or ‘style’ – and modern, that is contemporary and progressively changing, come together.
Fashion occurs most prominently in a constantly shifting environment, as this provides
both the economic conditions and the social impetus for expressing new perceptions of
the body, changing one’s status, and displaying conspicuous consumption.
This does not mean that, throughout history, fashion has not been produced away from
the city. Very often forms of dress and body decoration originated in less populated
areas, and over time fashion has often adapted from rural and very isolated parts of the
world the pragmatic considerations that lead to the development of distinct clothing
typologies. But our modern understanding of fashion, as a particular set of cultural
parameters, which are subject to constant alteration within capitalist economies and
industrialised societies, requires the spatial and conceptual setup of the city.
It is important to remind ourselves that fashion is not limited to clothes alone but
defines all forms of the production, distribution, and consumption of objects. Fashion
would be inconceivable without the interplay between textiles and furniture, ceramics, or
silverware, for instance. At a larger scale, the development of sartorial cover cannot be
contemplated without taking into account styles in interior decoration and private as well
as public architecture. These connections to other forms of material culture make
fashion in modernity – i.e. the period in the industrialised West that begins around the
middle of the nineteenth century1 – such a potent and multi-layered object for inquiry.
Fashion in clothes cannot be singled out in its cultural meaning nor can it be critically
analysed or structurally positioned without constant recourse to other fashionable
expressions in modern culture.
Such spatial proximity and conceptual connection to a vast array of contemporary
material objects needs the city as its stage. Historically, no other spatial organisation –
1
For a definition of modernity in relation to the advent of modern fashion, and related
discourses on Baudelaire, Simmel, Benjamin et al., see my book (2001) Tigersprung: Fashion
in Modernity, Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT.
not even the extensive court structures of ancient Ethiopia (800 BC), China of the Ming
Dynasty (fourteenth to seventeenth centuries), or early eighteenth century Versailles –
allows for the same degree of material manifestation of new norms and morals that
require expression in clothes, make-up and hairstyles. In a city the way in which aesthetic
ideas are developed from and in opposition to social sanctions, religious morality, or
ideological impositions, is marked out by close competition between actors and agencies
– which can appear, for example, as people competing for social approval and to vie with
each other for subjective self-expression, or through institutions like church or State that
prescribe vestments and uniforms for public use and sanction non-conformist choices in
dress.
People compete with each other for the most advantageous – which often implies the
most contemporary – expression of corporeal perception. Therefore it is paramount for
actors in a society to establish, modify, and display the body in order to survive their
environment or ascend across social strata, not to fall foul of government decrees while
ostentatiously flaunting them, and to attract a potential lover or partner while pertaining
precariously to existing gender stereotypes. Such social, political, and sexual negotiations
are most difficult, but also most successful, within a socially complex space that
comprises of various economic and social layers. In short, the close proximity of diverse
people living together in one and the same spatial structure poses the greatest challenge
and the best opportunity for the progressive development of fashion.2
Paris and Modernity
In a city the economic conditions for distribution and consumption are most favourably
met, even if the production of goods might have been moved away from the centre of
towns during progressive industrialisation. An apt and relatively early example for such
an economic configuration in the West is the Place Royale in Paris, which was conceived
2
As starting points for some of the methodologies that investigate the complex
organisation of cities see for example the extensive work by sociologist Richard Sennett,
in particular the volume by S. A. Thernstrom and R. Sennett (eds) (1969) NineteenthCentury Cities: Essays in the New Urban History, New Haven and London: Yale University
Press; the collected essays on urban politicised space by structuralist philosopher H.
Lefebvre (1996) Wiritings on Cities, Oxford: Basil Blackwell; the literary response to
urbanity in R. Lehan (1998) The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History,
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press; the anthropologically tinged architectureand art history of J. Rykwert (1976) The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in
Rome, Italy and the Ancient World, London: Faber and Faber; the histories of urban
architecture and planning in L. Benevolo (1980) The History of the City, Cambridge, Mass.
and London: MIT; W. Braunfels (1988) Urban Design in Western Europe: Regime and
Architecture, 900-1900, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, K. Lynch, The
Image of The City (1960) Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT; the post-structuralist
challenges by the Situationist group, collected in K. Knabb (ed.) (1981) Situationist
International Anthology, Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets; and the classic volume on
radical urbanism by M. Tafuri (1979 [1973]), Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist
Development, Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT.
2
at the very start of the seventeenth century as a fashionable real estate development for
an emerging bourgeoisie and originally housed substantial textile works that would
produce luxury goods for consumption by precisely the same socio-economic clientele as
for the new apartment houses.3 In this example, the Place Royale – today’s Place des
Voges in the Marais-quarter of central Paris – shows how fashion is expressed in the
production of textile as much as in the planning and decoration of houses and the
staging of public spectacles.
For the purpose of this essay I would like to centre my discussion on the city of Paris.
This has a number of reasons that should, however, not detract from the fact that I am
thereby succumbing to a Western- and market-centric writing of cultural history that is
all too often unacknowledged as critical bias. My excuse, if one can be offered at all, is
the relative ease with which the tenets about fashion and the city can be demonstrated
within this orthodox perception of the cultural centre. It must be acknowledged, of
course, that a case study from outside Europe, for instance the pronounced urbanism of
the Mayan Empire in Mesoamerica (250-900 AD), the Dogon culture in West Africa
during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, or the metropolis of Edo, the ‘City of the
Floating World’ in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japan, could equally be used as
settings for the following observations. Yet the comparative unfamiliarity with some of
these historic cultures might necessitate anthropological and geographical discourses that
detract from the focus on fashion with a capitalist, industrialised modernity. Also, I am
sure that readers are aware that Paris is a very potent ground indeed for such an inquiry
as the progressive conception of much of modern fashion in the form of haute couture and
its rendition in various contemporary media like journalism, fine art, photography, etc.,
was here at its most advanced.
The Painter of Modern Life: L’Homme des foules, Dandy, flâneur
I would like to turn now to Paris and the advent of modernity, to the coinage of the term
modernité itself. The concept of modernity, as a cultural phenomenon that is intimately
tied to fashion – la mode and la modernité share the same etymological roots and the latter
is developed from the former, as both remain feminine in French – originated in the city
of Paris between 1850 and 1860. It first expressed and analysed in a series of newspaper
feuilletons by Charles Baudelaire. The fact that a progressive poet chose this journalistic
medium to express his ideas is perfectly in keeping with the conceptual relation between
fashion and the city. The constant movement in urban space and the economic
dynamism of an emerging couture industry demanded flexible and rapid theoretical
reaction. Baudelaire not only uses the medium of the newspaper feuilleton to postulate
his contemporary ‘philosophy’ for a developing fashion but also invents a fleeting alter
ego for his postulates.
3
In English the most extensive study of the place Royale is by H. Ballon (1991) The Paris
of Henry IV: Architecture and Urbanism, Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT.
3
This alter ego, or artistic projection, appears at first – confusingly enough – as a real
existing artist, Constantin Guys, Le Peintre de la vie moderne (the painter of modern life),
and only later becomes distilled into an ideal actor, l’homme des foules (after the eponymous
painting by Guys), the man in and of the crowds. Published in 1863, the feuilleton
renders the observing artist both ardent observer and philosophical reflection of existing
urban fashions:
[A] convalescent, contemplating with delight the crowd from behind the
window of a café, allows his thoughts to mingle with all the thoughts that are
active around him... He who was on the point of forgetting it all, now
remembers, and ardently desires to remember all. Finally, he precipitates
himself through this crowd in search of some unknown, by whose
physiognomy, caught by a rapid glance, he has been fascinated. Curiosity has
become a fatal, irresistible passion!4
This quote is to be read as imagining a scene as well as a discourse (i.e. both a textual and
a metaphysical structure) for the ideal observer, the man of the crowd who not only
distances himself through the glass screen from the mundane setting of the street, but
also remains inactive while the people bustle around him. Furthermore, he is a
convalescent who only remembers at present, which for Baudelaire means that he is
physically (and psychologically) primed to take an interest in anything, as he sees with
fresh eyes and is not yet jaded by daily urban contact:
[H]e delights, in a word, in universal life. If some fashion, the cut of some
garment, has been slightly transformed; if knotted ribbons or buckles have
been dethroned by cockades; if the chignon has come down a peg lower on
the nape of the neck; if the waist has been raised and the skirt amplified,
believe me his eagle eye has already divined it at an enormous distance.5
The fascination with a fleeting and resolutely contemporary world is not only an
individual obsession for Monsieur Guys; Baudelaire renders it an aesthetic programme.
The fashionable detail becomes the pretext for a new sketch; the latest carriage becomes
subject of a painting to be completed within a couple of nights. This allows for the most
fundamental analysis in Baudelaire’s Le Peintre de la vie Moderne, the definition of modernité.
The truly contemporary artist has to seek modernity in order to exist and to distinguish
himself, both in aesthetic outlook as well as succeeding in the marketplace. His work has
to be ultra-modern to account for the ever-changing modes of thought, patterns of
behaviour, and fashions that are present in the metropolis, before the background of
cultural and philosophical tenets that constituted ideals to be evoked and quoted from:
4
C. Baudelaire (1976 [orig. c. 1861]), ‘La Peintre de la vie moderne’, in C. Baudelaire,
Œuvres complètes, Paris: Gallimard, 1976, vol. 2, pp. 690; Engl. trans. by P. G. Konody, in
(1930) The Painter of Victorian Life, London: The Studio, p. 44.
5
ibid. pp. 692-93; Engl. trans. ibid. p. 55.
4
Modernity is the transitory, fugitive, contingent half of art, the other half
being the eternal and immutable.6
This dialectic of the fugitive and the eternal within the construction of art cannot be
underestimated as they elevate for the first time proper the meaning and need for
fashion, which represents the transitory and ephemeral per se. Art can no longer exist in
and for itself but requires material culture to negate and substantiate its meaning. The
canon of cultural forms has to be subverted and renewed constantly, and the production
of new objects and commodities is paramount in introducing such novelties to be
reflected in technique, symbolism, and narrative by progressive cultural expressions.
Besides the homme des foules, Baudelaire introduces another facet into his character of
Monsieur Guys that completes the modern artist and activates him from observer to
participant in fashion:
I should like to call him a dandy, and I should have some good reasons for it;
for the word dandy implies a quintessence of character and a subtle
comprehension of the whole moral mechanism of the world...7
Fashion not only provides the subject in modernity and situates the artist in the
contemporary marketplace, it renders him, too, victim to the recurring cycles of dress
styles, postures, table manners, etc. In order to accommodate and reflect on the dialectic
of modernity, the dandy and man of the crowds need to be afforded a counterpart,
which, although incorporating their negation, at the same time substantiates their
affirmation proper. Therefore Baudelaire introduces the facet of the flâneur.
For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate observer, it is an immense pleasure
to choose his domicile among the multitude, in undulation and movement, in
the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home, and yet to be always at
home; to see the world, to be the centre of the world, and yet to remain
hidden from the world – these are some of these independent, passionate,
impartial spirits’ least pleasures, which can only be clumsily defined by words.
The observer is a prince who always preserves his incognito.8
Here, the spectator moves from behind the glass screen into the urban street, forces him
to become part of the crowds, while ensuring never to be one with it. He will always
remain at a distance in order to observe and analyse the latest progress, trends, and
fashions. The dandy might well emphasise this metaphysical distance structurally and
materially by making it his business to constantly staying ahead of the fashion pack and
postulating a new aesthetic credo whenever the existing fashion is static. But he, too,
partakes directly in the crowd by reflecting the commodity structures that animate it and
6
ibid. p.695; Engl. trans. ibid. p.67.
ibid. p.691; Engl. trans. ibid. p. 47 [trans. modified].
8
ibid. pp.691-92; Engl. trans. ibid. p. 48.
7
5
by requiring the reflection in the window pane (of the urban café or elsewhere) to ensure
the correct knot in his tie, which operates as reason for his existence within the
hypertrophic capitalist organisation of nineteenth-century European cities. Only the
flâneur remains in opposition to such demands, by rendering himself inconspicuous and
refusing the seasonal change of fashions, although his keen eye is, of course, perfectly
aware of new nuances and very capable of describing and analysing them.
La Flâneuse
The language I am using here marks out the composite character of homme des foules, dandy
and flâneur as male. This is certainly due to academic conventions in patriarchal cultures,
but also alludes to the gender construction in fashion, where the man operates as
observer, artist, or even philosopher, while the woman resolutely remains his object, in
terms of studying, desiring or abusing her. Can there be female observers of the crowd
and fashions? Where are the flâneuses?
One historic example immediately comes to mind: a writer at the time of Baudelaire;
more famous than he was, more attuned to the marketplace, more revolutionary in
practice (although both did fight on the barricades in Paris in 1848), and much more
influential in coining a particular fashion in dress than his ostentatious dandyism. I am
speaking here of George Sand. Born Aurore Dupin de Franceuil in 1804, she went to
Paris to escape provincial life and a failed marriage that had produced two children.
Reinventing herself as a writer of Romantic novels meant overcoming male prejudice to
literary production. Therefore, similar to her English contemporary Mary Ann Evans,
who published under the male moniker ‘George Eliot’, Franceuil became ‘George Sand’
in publication. However, unlike Evans, Sand extended this switch of gender to her social
role and, eventually to her style of dress, which became an extremely influential fashion
during the latter half of the nineteenth century.9
Sand beats the path for the Baudelairean flâneur by walking the streets of Paris to find
subjects for her modern artistic production. Yet her progress as la femme des foules, as
woman of the crowds is impeded by fashion. She recalls in her memoirs Histoire de ma vie,
the flâneries through Paris in 1831, as a 24-year-old:
I was eager to become deprovincialised and acquainted with all the ideas and
arts of my time... Except for the most famous works I knew nothing about
the contemporary arts. [But] I knew well the impossibilities for a poor
woman to indulge in these fancies... And yet I saw my young friends from
Berry, my childhood companions, living in Paris with as little as I and keeping
9
For an English biography of Sand and a critical analysis of her work see for example C.
Cate (1975) George Sand: A Biography, Boston: Houghton Mifflin; P. Thompson (1977)
Sand and the Victorians, London: Macmillan (on her relation to, among others, George
Eliot), D. Dickenson (1988) George Sand: A Brave Man, the Most Womanly Woman, Oxford:
Berg, 1988, and N. Schor (1993) George Sand and Idealism, New York: Columbia
University Press.
6
up with everything of interest to bright young men. Literary and political
events, the excitement of the theatre and the museum, clubs, the streets - they
saw everything and went everywhere. My legs were as good as theirs, those
steady little country legs which had learned to walk on rutted rods, balancing
on heavy wooden shoes. But on the Parisian pavement I was like a ship on
ice. My thin shoes cracked every second day, my sagging stockings tripped
me; I did not know how to lift my skirts. I was dirty, tired, sick with cold, and
I saw shoes and clothes, not to mention tiny velvet hats soaked by dripping
gutters, ruined with frightening speed.10
What is to be read as metaphor for the social disadvantage that a middle-class, educated
woman was confronted with – even in artistic circles – is also a very practical dilemma
for the female flâneur. Her distant spectatorship demands both an inconspicuous and
practical outfit to allow the modernist immersion into the transitory while retaining a
static position of immutable artistic presence. Sand’s solution to the combined pitfalls of
cumbersome attire and social disadvantage was as pragmatic as it would be paradigmatic.
Remembering the comfort of her childhood which she had spent in boy’s clothing, she
decided to radically challenge the existing dress code for young bourgeois women in
order to have equal access to aesthetic pleasure and, surreptitiously, change her status
from passive consumer and representative of conspicuous consumption, to active
trendsetter and even stylish subversive:
I had myself made a ‘sentry redingote’ of strong grey cloth, with trousers and
waistcoat to match. A grey hat and a large woolen cravat completed my
outfit... I cannot possibly express the pleasure my boots gave me: I would
have gladly slept with them on... My little iron-tipped heels kept me solid on
the sidewalks. I would fly from one end of Paris to the other. Nobody paid
attention to me or guessed at my disguise... I was unnoticed, unreproached; I
was an atom lost in that immense crowd.11
The flâneuse, like her male counterpart, becomes spectator and investigator of modern
mores, yet both still saunter through the city as positivists, as people seduced by progress
and in awe of their contemporary times, only very occasionally calling for social change
as such. They might criticise the crowds they find and mock extravagant fads and
fashions, but they do not judge the commodifying influence of the metropolis on social
structures. The aesthetic perception of the flâneur is subjective and, to the most part,
individualist. It might touch on societal ills or political problems like reifying social
structures or commodifying human relations but in the end his views are concerned with
the corporeal and psychological reaction of himself as subject alone.
10
G Sand (1902 [1854-55]), Histoire de ma vie, 4 vols., Paris: Calman-Lévy, vol. 4, p. 80;
partial English trans. in J. Baryy (ed.) (1979) George Sand in Her Own Words, London:
Quartet, p. 320.
11
ibid. p. 81.
7
Metropolis and Mental Life
At the end of the nineteenth century a new discipline emerged from the positivist
embrace of progress and belief in scientific methods. In France and Germany theorists
like Gabriel Tarde, Émile Durkheim, Ferdinand Tönnies and Georg Simmel ushered in
an empirical approach to the analysis of social structures. Emerging from established
disciplines like economics, history, or philosophy they started to build a new academic
tradition.
Georg Simmel can be regarded as the originator for a sociology of modernité, in discussing
not only the most contemporary of topics but also rendering this very contemporariness
the leitmotif of much of his writing. Simmel is the first sociologist of fashion. In four
versions of an essay, which he started in 1895, he investigated the structures and
temporal movements of fashion, especially in dress, that would provide the basic
structure for much of today’s fashion studies. For instance, he postulated the death of
fashion at the very moment it becomes socially accepted: when a large number of
consumers start to follow a trend, its commercial, and perhaps even metaphysical,
impetus shifts the fashion away to another manifestation. This incessant and necessary
change subsequently allows him to analyse a particular rhythm to modern life and its
social and economic basis, for instance in his investigation of capitalism in Philosophy of
Money of 1900 (revised edition in 1907).
According to Simmel, the self-styled sophisticated city dweller in turn-of-century Berlin,
the metropolis constituted the ambiguous space for the production and consumption of
fashion. However, his was not only the aesthetic perception of the flâneur, he extended it
through the scrutiny of an academic researcher. Although his style of writing and
frequent excursions into metaphysical musings earned him the unflattering soubriquet of
an ‘essayist’, his quick reaction to new phenomena and his willingness to approach even
the most ephemeral of topics made his lectures at the Humboldt University in Berlin
widely popular events.
In his essay of 1903 ‘Die Grossstädte und das Geistesleben’ (The Metropolis and Mental
Life) Simmel developed one of the main themes of his sociological work, the inability of
the subject to maintain his position against ever increasing objectification of his culture.
This impotence against reification is particularly apparent in the city and most notable in
people succumbing to rapidly changing fads and fashions. Essays like this, although
heavily criticised by fellow sociologists like Durkheim who regarded it as non-empirical,
had a profound influence not only on the work of contemporary cultural theories but
gave rise to an international position of sociological research in form of the Chicago
School of Sociology, which from the 1940s onwards would centre on economic
dependencies and consumer culture.
Simmel begins ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ by stating:
8
The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists in
the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and
uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli. Man is a differentiating
creature. His mind is stimulated by the difference between a momentary
impression and the one which preceded it. Lasting impressions, impressions
which differ only slightly from one another, impressions which take a regular
and habitual course and show regular and habitual contrasts—all these use
up, so to speak, less consciousness than does the rapid crowding of changing
images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the
unexpectedness of onrushing impressions. These are the psychological
conditions which the metropolis creates.12
The visual impressions that the flâneur picks up so eagerly and often renders an artistic
credo are interpreted by Simmel as conflicting and confusing. The subject’s reaction to
such profusion of sensorial and economic impressions can become pathological. In
Simmel’s times the fashionable illness of ‘neurasthenia’ was ‘invented’, diagnosing the
city dweller with a nervous and mostly psychosomatic condition that resulted in migraine
and the inability of physical action.
Although far from being a historical, let alone dialectical, materialist Simmel had to
acknowledge, similar to his compatriot the economist Max Weber, Karl Marx’s emphasis
on the exchange value as a universal structuring device as well as the left-Hegelian
heritage of defining change through the move from a development of quantitative
increments into a qualitative leap, perceived often as a rupture in the socio-cultural
fabric. In his essay Simmel exposes the positivist mechanisms in contemporary life that
reversed the direction of real change into mere outward alteration of appearances:
Modern mind has become more and more calculating. The calculative
exactness of practical life which the money economy has brought about
corresponds to the ideal of natural science: to transform the world into an
arithmetic problem, to fix every part of the world by mathematical formulas.
Only money economy has filled the days of so many people with weighing,
calculating, with numerical determinations, with a reduction of qualitative
values to quantitative ones. Through the calculative nature of money a new
precision, a certainty in the definition of identities and differences,
unambiguousness in agreements and arrangements has been brought about in
the relations of life-elements—just as externally this precision has been
affected by the universal diffusion of pocket watches. However, the
conditions of metropolitan life are at once cause and effect of this trait.13
12
G. Simmel (1957 [1903]), ‘Die Grossstädte und das Geistesleben’, in Georg Simmel:
Brücke und Tür, Stuttgart: Koehler, pp. 227-28; English trans. ‘The metropolis and mental
life’, in Kurt Wolff (ed.) (1950), The Sociology of Georg Simmel, New York: Free Press, pp.
409-10.
13
ibid. p. 230; English trans. ibid. p. 412.
9
The reaction to such conditions is either complete alienation and perfect anonymity in
the city – an analogy to Baudelaire’s and Sand’s flâneur/flâneuse who merges with the
crowds – or the utmost subjectification – a trait comparable to the dandy who renders
individual stylistic preferences, for example in dress, universal postulates to be adhered to
by those who aim to be truly elegant; only to be dismissed the moment they become
common stylistic currency.
The same factors which have thus coalesced into the exactness and minute
precision of the form of life have coalesced into a structure of the highest
impersonality; on the other hand, they have promoted a highly personal
subjectivity. There is perhaps no psychic phenomenon which has been so
unconditionally reserved to the metropolis as has the blasé attitude. The blasé
attitude results first from the rapidly changing and closely compressed
contrasting stimulations of the nerves. From this, the enhancement of the
metropolitan intellectuality, also, seems originally to stem. Therefore, stupid
people who are not intellectually alive in the first place usually are not exactly
blasé. A life in boundless pursuit of pleasure makes one blasé because it
agitates the nerves to their strongest reactivity for such a long time that they
finally cease to react at all.14
The consumption of fashion appears as an economic necessity in capitalism but also as
recurring psychological stimulus for the jaded perspective of the city dweller. In order to
cater for the ever-growing demand for new styles the division of labour within the
productive processes has to become all pervasive. Simmel quotes from a historic
example:
Cities are, first of all, seats of the highest economic division of labour. They
produce thereby such extreme phenomena as in Paris the remunerative
occupation of the quatorzième. They are persons who identify themselves by
signs on their residences and who are ready at the dinner hour in correct
attire, so that they can be quickly called upon if a dinner party should consist
of thirteen persons.15
Such extreme divisions of labour affect the structure of the commodity, the object
proper, as well as the subject’s reaction to it. In The Philosophy of Money, Simmel rendered
the production of fashion a metaphor for both cultural production and social structures
in modernity.
The radical opposition between subject and object has been reconciled in
theory by making the object part of the subject’s perception. Similarly the
opposition between subject and object does not evolve in practice as long as
14
15
ibid. p. 232; English trans. ibid. pp. 413-14.
ibid. pp. 238-39; English trans. ibid. p. 420.
10
the object is produced by a single subject or for a single subject. Since the
division of labour destroys custom production… the subjective aura of the
product also disappears in relation to the consumer because the commodity is
now produced independently of him. It becomes an objective entity which
the consumer approaches externally and whose specific existence and quality
is autonomous of him. The difference, for instance, between the modern
clothing store, geared towards the utmost specialisation and the work of the
tailor whom one used to invite into one’s home, sharply emphasises the
growing objectivity of the economic cosmos, its supra-individual
independence in relation to the consuming subject with whom it was
originally closely identified… It is obvious how much this objectifies the
whole character of transaction and how subjectivity is destroyed and
transformed into cool reserve and anonymous objectivity once so many
intermediate stages are introduced between the producer and the one who
accepts his product that they lose sight of each other.16
For Simmel fashion in the modern city must be read as a structural composite of cultural
manifestation and rhythm, economic process, psychological primer and metaphysical
principle. Such multi-layered significance of fashion accounts for the historical
fascination it would exert on a cultural philosopher who had studied at the Humboldt
University from 1912-14 when Simmel taught there. This student would become not
simply one of the most imaginative analysts of modernity but a dramatic figure himself,
whose life was lived on the margins of Parisian culture and Critical Theory alike. His
name: Walter Benjamin.
Arcades and the End of the flâneur
From 1927 up to his premature death in 1940, Benjamin assembled material for a study
of the nineteenth century which was to decipher modernity’s political, poetical and
philosophical potential from the visual and literary fragments – Baudelaire most
prominently among them – he found in the streets and libraries of Paris, a city he
proclaimed as the ‘capitale du XIXe siècle’. The assemblage of this material he
provisionally entitled Passagenarbeit (The Arcades Project), after what he considered to be the
architectural cradle of modern society. For him, the glass-roofed links between Parisian
streets and boulevards maintained in their often-dilapidated status the mystique of
nineteenth-century life and the remembrance of the dawn of consumerism. Here, fashion
is crucial as the manifestation that ties cultural objects to social observation and political
critique. In Benjamin’s writing the homme des foules, flâneur, and blasé Dandy move from
agents and dramatis personae to become analytical tools that allow for dissecting the
fashionable pre-history of modernity in order to pass judgment on contemporary life and
16
G. Simmel (1989 [2nd eddn. 1907]) Die Philosophie des Geldes, in G. Simmel,
Gesamtausgabe, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, vol. 6, pp. 633-34; English trans. by T.
Bottomore and D. Frisby (1990), The Philosophy of Money, London: Routledge, p. 457
[trans. modified by the author].
11
the writing of history as such.
The Arcades-Project appears as a poetic assemblage of fragments, fittingly ephemeral in
their origins and in their initial reception. Hidden deep in the vaults of the Bibliothèque
Nationale in Paris while Benjamin attempted his escape from the advancing German
army, they were only published in the 1980s as a series of thematically ordered bundles
of manuscripts sheaves, the most extensive of which is marked ‘Fashion’. This sheaf is
filled with almost one hundred annotated quotes and discursive comments that were to
be written up as a central part to the study of the city of Paris across the nineteenth
century:
And nothing else should be told about the arcades; an architecture in which
we relive, as in a dream, the existence of our parents and grandparents,
similar to the way in which an embryo in his mother relives the genesis of
animals. The existence in these spaces, accordingly, passes without
accentuation like the dream narrative. The rhythm given to such slumbers is
the action of the flâneur. 1893 saw in Paris the fashion for tortoises. One can
imagine how the flâneur adopted their tempo for his sauntering through the
arcades rather than for any promenade on the boulevards. Boredom always
remains on the outside of unconscious action. Thus it appeared to the great
dandies as a mark of distinction.17
Such an erratic fragment is typical for Benjamin. In one short paragraph he plays with set
pieces from an interpretative vocabulary of nineteenth-century France, from ontogeny as
phylogeny to political theory, while historical observation is combined with (literary)
references to the flâneur and dandy, and an analytical undercurrent of psychology and
sociology is maintained.
Looking closely at Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life whom he regarded as a central
figure for the new perception of the city, Benjamin sees the flâneur and his or her
attention to fashion not simply as indicative for modernity but as ideological operation.
‘The vogue of fashion breaks on the compact crowd of the oppressed’18, he writes, and:
‘Fashion puts its fig leaf always on the spot where the revolutionary nakedness of society
is to be found. One small shift and...’19. These reflections respond to the objectifying
power of modernity that Simmel had observed. The constant production and
consumption of novel commodities mask a social reality that cannot be contained
forever in existing ideological structures. Benjamin, aiming to adhere to historical
materialism in his later writing, hoped for the eventual liberation of the subject from his
alienation. But for a cultural philosopher like him this liberation was to occur first within
17
W. Benjamin (1982) Das Passagen-Werk, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, in Benjamin,
Gesammelte Schriften, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, vol.5, part 2, p. 1054; English trans. by H.
Eiland and K. McLaughlin (1999) The Arcades Project, Cambridge, Mass. and London: The
Belknap Press and Harvard University Press, p. 881 [trans. modified by the author].
18
Ibid. vol. 5, part 1, p. 460; English trans. ibid., p. 364 [trans. modified].
19
Ibid. vol. 5, pt. 2, p. 1215; English trans. ibid., p. 909.
12
his own discourse, in the writing of history itself. It would remain an intellectual quest
rather than a political programme.
Benjamin extracted from the Arcades-Project in 1939 a further set of fragments, entitled
‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’ (literally: ‘On Defining History’ or, as it is officially
translated, ‘Theses of the Philosophy of History’). In these he lends a particular
historiographical potential to fashion that sees the breaking up of any linear progress in
culture, society, or politics:
History is object of a structure whose site is not homogeneous and empty
time but one filled by now-time [Jetztzeit]. For Robespierre the Rome of
antiquity was thus charged with now-time and blasted from the continuum of
history. The French Revolution regarded itself as Rome reincarnate. It quoted
ancient Rome as fashion quotes past attire. Fashion has the scent for the
modern wherever it stirs in the thicket of what has been. It is the tiger’s leap
into the past. Yet this leap occurs in an arena commanded by the ruling class.
The very same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which
Marx has understood as the revolution.20
For Benjamin fashion and its stage, the modern metropolis, have reified into a field of
social contrast and conflict that cannot be contained. Marx’s postulates, formulated
already in the decades before Baudelaire penned his Painter of Modern Life, are now lived
by the flâneur whose dependence on fashion, although of great philosophical interest, is
now secondary to his involvement in political struggle. He turns from observer to actor
and his engagement must be realpolitikal in order to be culturally worthwhile. The city and
its social structures are no longer a field of fascination but a scene for political education.
This politicised flâneur might still be keenly aware of fashion’s role but his interest turns
to its reformation or negation even, as it is unmasked now as the pervasive agent of
economic and social alienation. From the contemporary and transitory playground that
Baudelaire had ascribed to it, the city and its fashion now exist for Benjamin in a space
haunted by the ghosts of past revolutions and unfulfilled promise. La mode, ingenious and
erratic as she is in her quotations, is no longer sovereign but becomes throughout la
modernité an ambiguous concubine to economic and ideological rule.
Conclusion
The trajectory of the homme des foules, dandy, and flâneur is not a one-directional descend
from positivist observer and commentator to complicit consumer of commodities.
Determining such a narrative would mean falling into the trap of teleological
argumentation, in which a final condition rounds off progress towards an idea (be it
20
W. Benjamin (1991) ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’, in W. Benjamin, Gesammelte
Schriften, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, vol. 1, part 2, p. 701; English trans. by H. Zohn
(1999) ‘Theses on the philosophy of history’, in W. Benjamin, Illuminations, London:
Pimlico, pp. 252-53 [trans. modified].
13
positive or negative). Even in a space as narrowly defined – in terms of its socioeconomic parameters and spatial organisation – as Paris in the second half of the
nineteenth century any mechanistic interpretation of change in the respective roles of the
Man of the Crowd, the streetwalker, or the sophisticated fashion victim must appear as
erroneous.
Following the historical method in Hegel, Marx and Benjamin, the change from
quantitative growth to qualitative leap, for instance in the commercial success and
cultural significance of fashion, must lead to a disavowal of its traditionally understood
role as flamboyant object of material culture. Once fashion is exposed within our defined
historical period as an ideological operation that fuelled the reification in modernity by
objectifying the subject through new styles in clothes, hair, make-up, transport, food,
housing, etc., this role has to be reversed. Such reversal occurs in the move away from
fashion’s superficial appearance (as costume history or social commentator of manners
and mores) towards emphasising its structural value for historiography – especially for
the historiography of the modern city as fashion’s principal stage. For Baudelaire this is
postulated by describing fashion as providing a new and decisive rhythm to cultural
production and consumption; for Sand a changed dress code erased the spatial restriction
on woman’s progress through the city; Simmel introduced dialectical thought (perhaps
unwittingly) to fashion’s negation, as fashion had to die first in order to survive;
Benjamin, finally, took Baudelaire and Simmel and radicalised their discourses on art and
society into a cultural philosophy in which fashion affects an absolute break within the
perception of history as linear: the new fashion always quotes the old in order to invent,
and therefore any historiography that emphasises continuation and progress (even it its
guise as reaction/counter-reaction) can only produce a false reality. The true
understanding of fashion resides in exposing its potential to remove the fig leaf of
conspicuous consumption and constantly changing styles in order to expose its own
radical character for re-structuring history.
In the city, this dialectic between an appearance that disavows structure and a structure
that negates (the significance of) appearances, both in visual character as well as in
contents, appears as principal movement. The transitory impressions of the urban crowd
display first the primacy of appearance and then quickly shift to reveal its dependence on
underlying ideological structures that define its passage, codify its discourse and impose
its consumption. L’homme des foules who immerses himself in the crowd, the flâneur who
slowly traverses it, and the dandy who strives to stand out from it, all become willing
participants in this dialectic movement, which is defined as much by their own ephemeral
roles as it is by the historiographical super-structure of modernité that has acted both as
their historical space and temporal deconstruction.
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