In the opening chapter I looked at a theoretical basis for the use of materialism in analysing fashion; in this chapter I would like to proceed to an example in which this theoretical basis has been applied to the cultural discussion of fashion and its relation to history. As will become clear, I regard this example as being rather problematic. But despite, or, better, because of its ambiguous use of theory, the example remains apt, since it speaks in such an original and poetic manner about fashion's transient and diffuse nature, which can render rather reductive any exclusive analysis of its concrete function or material use. In this context, I consider the ambiguity inherent in fashion as the antithesis to its relation with materialism and materiality that I explored in the first chapter.

Often we find that promoting a particular critical method moves the field of inquiry away from the material basis that one might expect to be at the heart of such a critique. This process might seem obvious in so far as abstract discourses regarding cultural phenomena are wont to ignore the actual, detailed circumstances of their production. But I intend to demonstrate in the following that abstraction has been crucial from the start to a historical discourse on fashion. At its most persuasive, abstraction shows the application of theory where universal patterns are traced and analysed across historical periods and cultural contexts, and it suggests the need to remove the object from its particular time and place and render it more generic (often approximating to a maxim) in order to explain, for example, wide-ranging anthropological or social processes.

In this chapter I would like to present the attempt by the cultural philosopher Walter Benjamin to trace, through oneiric and poetic evocations, a pre-history of modernity in the fashion of Paris after 1850.