1 Individual and society
Simmel begins with a description of two fundamental forces active in our social lives, which we might describe as: a compulsion to be like other members of the group; and a compulsion to individuate ourselves. Satisfying these two demands is an expression of our “dualistic nature” as simultaneously communal and individual beings. See p. 541. At the same time, the demand is virtually impossible to satisfy, since no institution seems entirely to satisfy it. See p. 542. These demands are satisfied in terms of imitation and independence.
2 Fashion
Fashion sits at an interesting intersection of these two demands.
Now, the more or less obvious way in which it does so is by admitting of both the imitative and the independent elements. We dress, let’s say, like our peers, but not entirely like them. We absorb and exemplify enough of the general ‘look’ of others like us, but then tweak or otherwise individualize that ‘look’ for ourselves.
For each of us, the ‘group’ or set of peers we emulate is, say, the people we grew up with, the people at our school, the people we work with, the people who are into the things we’re into, even people we’ve never met but see on TV or social media or whatever. I think it is safe to say ‘group identification’, especially as it operates with respect to fashion, is highly complex today.
And for that reason it makes Simmel’s imitative/independent axis somewhat more complex than Simmel sees. First let’s consider his version. See p. 543.
Simmel describes group identification here merely in terms of class, which is probably overly simplistic for our society, but class is importantly not like dressing like tennis players or video game fans, because it is itself an axis of individuation. What I mean is: One way in which my dress is individual or can be individual is by breaking slightly from the group’s. The other way in which my dress is individual happens as it were at the group level: My group’s dress is defined in specific opposition to that of another group’s. Thus p. 544-1.
Relatedly, there is what is sometimes called the snob effect: Something becomes unfashionable or no longer cool the moment people who are unfashionable or uncool use/wear/say/listen to it. See p. 545-2. And note here again how Simmel’s high-/low-class axis is probably too simple for our own age.
The fact that fashion is tuned to this more or less narrowly social focus is made evident by something we all know well: that fashion is not dictated—or not dictated entirely—by material or practical needs. Indeed, fashion seems often to exploit this fact by forcing us to adopt “the most atrocious things for its sake alone.” See p. 544-2.
The imitative and the independent operate in a conspicuous way in fashion, and they transform our relations to nture and to ourselves. As Simmel claims here, the more a society comes to achieve objective awareness of nature, the more individuals strive to express themselves as individuals. By contrast, the more social we become, the less we take an interest in objectivity and personality. See p. 545.
Simmel has (pp. 545ff.) a bunch of weird stuff to say about class and civilization and fashion, and it is difficult to make use of it because most thinking people reject the categories he uses to discuss different societies. But the kernel of the point is one that I think is worth chewing over. Simmel says, in so many words, that fashion is chiefly an elite exercise, and the elite specifically of a (let’s call it) technologically advanced society. There is, in these cases, a constant dynamic of segregation of the elites from the others. Now, leaving all the noise out, here’s the kernel I think is worth considering: Is the aesthetic of dress an expression of that distinction? or is it the distinction itself? And, for any group, is fashion a way in which that group expresses itself or creates itself?
The basic function of fashion seems not to be group cohesion so much as distinction, and distinction filtered through the distinctively social fact of change. Thus ‘fashion’ at once denotes group differentiation and change. “As soon as the social consciousness attains to the highest point designated by fashion, it marks the beginning of the end for the latter” (p. 547). Constitutively, then, when “we feel certain that [a] fact will vanish as rapidly as it came, then we call it fashion” (p. 548).
Fashion lies at the intersection of the symbolically social and individual. It is, paradoxically, the easiest way to feel as if one stands out and is part of a group. Consider pp. 548–549. (Simmel’s notion of “the dude” here is of someone who follows every latest fashion to its extreme.)
It is notable, Simmel argues, that fashion functions independently of individual taste. There is no escaping fashion; the non-look is a look. The contrary of the dude is their own sort of fashionista. See p. 550.
3 Lessons
What are the salient lessons? Of course one point is that fashion is a social phenomenon (which we all know of course). And one maybe immediately interesting-to-Simmel fact about it is the unique sort of conjunction of group and individual dynamics expressed in fashion.
Let me capture the phenomenon Simmel is interested in differently by describing all of this as a way of being noticed. Let’s say that Simmel, or anyone who has thought about it, sees fashion as a way in which I make myself an aesthetic object for others, an object of others’ aesthetic awareness. “Dude” or non-dude, fashion sends others a message about who we are, and it does this in terms of appearance.
That alone says something different about the way that the aesthetic figures into our lives. It complicates first of all the idea that the presence of the aesthetic in my life is entirely passive; that the aesthetic concerns the nature and content of my experience. To the extent that fashion orients my self-presentation, the aesthetic is also a form of composure and projection. These senses of course relate to one another in what seem like the least fashion-oriented modes of dress, such as wearing what makes me happy. In these cases, I make myself an object of my own aesthetic appreciation. I wear comfortable fabrics in order to induce states of aesthetic pleasure in myself.
Simultaneously, Simmel’s reflections on fashion suggest the aesthetic may have a fundamental role to play in forging communal and personal identity. Through dress I come to play a part in one or another subpart of my community. I explore and reveal (to others as much, perhaps, as to myself) my individuality through dress. These are, of course, distinctively aesthetic modes of presentation (again, both to others and to myself) inasmuch as I strive not only to appear but to be noticed in certain ways. Making myself an object of appreciation is thus one way in which I negotiate my individual and communal identity.
It is also, we might note, not only a freely willed, say, merely aesthetic sort of thing. I mean that fashion makes of me an aesthetic object, whether or not I choose to be. My choice not to enter consciously into the vicissitudes of fashion does not give me free passage from interpretation as an aesthetic object. Nor does a decision to ‘live outside’ the changing world of fashion ever fully succeed. To exaggerate just a bit, fashion is thus a coercive phenomenon as much as it is a medium of self-expression. Fashion is not only a way in which I can navigate my social milieu but a way in which my social milieu determines and even limits me.