Fashion and Materialism by Ulrich Lehmann

Author:Ulrich Lehmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

It is not cynical but historically appropriate to define art in this context as the fetishising of surplus value; as the social product that was valued over and above what the producer required materially for its making and for his own sustenance. After 1848 this had appeared as a new development that went hand in hand with institutionalising industrial capitalism in France and had become a logical consequence of its economic conditions and practices. Surplus value surpassed an assumed equivalent value for art and fashion, which they could not possess in reality, since they satisfied idealised social needs and not material ones that could be quantified through use value. Speculation within fashion assumed a dimension that resided not simply in direct financial transactions. Fashion was speculation itself; it had to create an object that the subject took to herself as self-determining. The gown, the dinner service, the chaise longue, the new way of showing oneself in the box at the races, all had to appeal to a social stratum in order to be comprehended as fashion. The créateur, or the applied or fine artist, could not plan simply how taste would develop, just as the client of the couturier or artist would not know if and when his investments would rise in the stock market (unless they had been privy to the above-mentioned insider information). But the designer, as much as the gallerist of the avant-garde, was able to create fashion through particular marketing strategies when he had situated himself as a taste-maker for his clientele and perhaps also in the public eye. Such a making of taste within modernity did not mean developing a cognitive subject but rather the emergence of a material object, a process to which fashion lent its essential rhythm and form.

Notes

1. For a detailed discussion of the coup in its political, economic and social contexts, Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte [1852] is indispensable. Among the more recent works on the socio-economic environment of the Second Empire are Charles H. Pouthas et al. (eds), Démocratie, réaction, capitalisme, 1848–1860 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984); Pierre Guiral, La Vie quotidienne en France à l’âge d’or du capitalisme: 1852–1879 (Paris: Hachette, 1976); and for the production of textiles and fashion, Claude Fohlen, L’Industrie textile au temps du second empire (Paris: Plon, 1956).

2. Émile Zola, La Curée, in Les Rougon-Macquart, vol. 1 (Paris: Lacroix, Verboeckhiven et Cie., 1871), pp. 123–5; Eng. trans. by A. Goldhammer, The Kill (New York: The Modern Library, 2005), pp. 98–100 [translation modified].

3. Émile Zola, ‘L’Ouverture’ [dated 2 May 1868], in Écrits sur l’art (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), pp. 191–5, here p. 192.

4. See also Charles Baudelaire’s subsequent eulogy on the l’habit noir as ‘heroism in modern life’ and exemplary for the close connection between mode et modernité in his review of the art at the ‘Salon of 1846’. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Salon de 1846: XVIII. De l’héroïsme de la vie moderne’, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), pp. 487–96.

5. Émile Zola, ‘Les Actualistes’ [dated 24 May 1868], in Écrits sur l’art, pp.

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