Abstract

The astounding flourishing of fashion we have witnessed for the past centuries would not have been possible without a range of specifically modern phenomena like capitalism, the rise of an ambitious middle-class, the growth and diversification of mass-communication, and the Industrial Revolution. However, there is yet another interesting link between the two as they both have a common ‘condition of possibility’, that makes them interconnected. In this paper I will argue that such a condition is what I loosely call a ‘will to novelty’. Following some of Herbert Blumer’s suggestions, I will argue that the quest for renewal remains probably the best explanation of all possible candidates in explaining the incessant change of fashion (one of such candidates being Simmel’s famous class-differentiation analysis). My claim is that such a pursuit of renewal is undertaken for the sake of renewal itself, and this is a key aspect that connects fashion with modernity, namely an aesthetic concept of modernity, which I will outline, in the footsteps of Michel Foucault and Matei Călinescu, as a quest for novelty and change. Unlike the bourgeois modernity or the scientific one, the aesthetic modernity does not innovate for the sake of profit or truth respectively, but for the sake of innovation itself. Like fashion, the aesthetic modernity is an expression of the ‘will to novelty’.