Between History and Stories

Clothes tell stories, store passions and memories and construct a cartography made of the fabrics, colours, styles and rustles which have been deposited in the archive of memory as forms of mobile writing, which model the past but also sketch present and future landscapes. In modernity, fashion is the system which determines the sense and the social meaning of clothes, and it does so in a way that is literary at heart. Not so much because literary texts speak about fashion, but because the reasons and the tensions which animate fashion are made of the same fabric as literature, starting from the ‘aesthetic function’, of which Pëtr Bogatyrëv (1971) spoke in the 1930s among the most reputable representatives of the linguistic circle of Prague. Bogatyrëv identified a hierarchy of functions in dress – practical, magic, ritual and aesthetic – of which the latter was, in reality, the least functional. This function was similar to what, in those same years and intellectual context, Roman Jakobson (1987) identified as the phatic function of language, aimed simply at keeping alive the plane of communication. What is the meaning of fashion, and more generally of clothing, decorations and body decorations, if not, merely, to be ‘fashionable’ and to affirm a principle of light pleasure, which often depends on – but also constructs – taste as a product of common imagination? Cyclically, this principle mutates taste, forcing it at times. However, it always operates in the field of that same lack of functionality and phaticity which characterises the signs upon which literature is also founded.

There are multiple ways in which clothes, accessories, fashionable objects and the fashion system itself turn into narrative media. There are many stories about clothes, but fashion has a unique ability to tell them. It is the tangible manifestation of how history as such does not follow a trajectory based on the line of horizontal time. Instead, its path goes and comes back, jumps forward, but also backwards. As I have mentioned, in his theses on the philosophy of history, Walter Benjamin spoke of fashion as the leap (Tigersprung) into the past.