This article involves a critical examination of the recent paradigm shift in the appraisal of women's dress. Whereas in the past, female fashion was criticized primarily in terms of its impractical and restrictive nature and more `functional' and `natural' modes of dress were advocated, in recent times the legitimacy of the notion of `functional' or `natural' dress has been challenged. As theorists such as Wilson, Sawchuck and Hollander have pointed out, to assume that there is a `natural' mode of dress (...) which reflects the body `as it really is' wrongly presupposes that the body pre-exists culture when in fact it is always inescapably encoded by cultural norms. However, as is argued in the article, while recent theorists have revealed the naivete of the functionalist paradigm upon which previous critiques of fashion have been premised, their alternative conception of liberatory dress as that which highlights the constructed nature of the body is equally as problematic insofar as it leaves unchallenged the reduction of self-identity to image which the advertising and fashion industries now endorse and promote. In championing the idea of dress as a parodic play in which the body of the wearer is denaturalized, postmodern theories of fashion display an unwitting complicity with our contemporary culture of the spectacle which privileges the cult of appearance over all other sources of identity formation. (shrink)

Through the critical examination of Baudrillard's concept of hyperreality, this article seeks to make a wider contribution to contempor ary debates about postmodernism. It draws on a post-Cartesian, Heideg gerian philosophy to demonstrate the weakness of the concept of hyperreality and reveal its foundation in a Cartesian epistemology. The article goes on to claim that this same Heideggerian tradition suggests a way in which the concept of hyperreality and nihilistic postmodern sociologies more generally might be dialectically superseded. Instead of these (...) theories being seen as saying anything insightful about recent social transformations, the epistemological void in which they position themselves should be inter preted as the intellectual expression of the wider cultural and postmodern trend of transgression. Key Words: Baudrillard • Cartesianism • Heidegger • hyperreality • postmodernism. (shrink)