Benjamin on Fashion

Fashion-Forward Benjamin: A Brief Introduction

- Fashion-forward Benjamin
- A qualifying remark: The limits of this study and the positivity of fashion
- Textual basis


Part One - Time/Fashion Models

1 On Some Systematic Aspects of Benjamin's Fashion Theory

- Has fashion ever been modern?
- Fashion as model and as chronotechnics
- Benjamin's fashion passage
- From phenomena in time to models of time
- Fashion changes little
- Being in fashion, being form (Simmel)
- Differentials of time and deviations of direction
- Any past's contemporary: Fashion as a temporal qualifier (the sentimental education of the discontinuous)
- Yesterday, and the day before (sorting time and what has gone out of style)
- Zeitkern (time kernel)
- The ends of Benjamin's time/fashion model I: Revolution
- The ends of Benjamin's time/fashion model II: Historical apocatastasis


Part Two - Benjamin and the Fashion of his Time

2 The Contingent Primacy of Sex(es)

- A sudden affluence: The view of garments gliding by
- Waists are up, skirts are down (1929/1930)
- An onscreen vignette: L'Herbier, Helm, Louiseboulanger
- Should Benjamin have attended fashion shows? Helen Grund, the expert
- The only contemporaneous fashion thinker
- The contingent primacy of sex
- (Schiaparelli's) Genital millinery
- Fashion, whores, Surrealists (The pitfalls of allegory and the forgetting of labor)
- Beyond the logic of the placeholder. Schiaparelli's (and Dora Benjamin's) fashion work
- Morphology of the silhouette (Benjamin vs. Focillon)

3 In/Elegant Materialisms

- Grund's additional notes on the essence of fashion (an unpublished fragment from the Walter Benjamin-Archiv)
- A theory of elegance: The animation of garments according to Helen Grund
- Theory of modeling
- The immanence of elegance
- Taking it to the industry
- Thing and dress (Schiaparelli, Apollinaire)
- The extraneous temporality of the fashion phenomenon
- The supple and the rigid: Two tendencies in 1930s Paris Couture - Vionnet and the Pavillon de l'Élégance
- Versions of inertia: Persistence of the fashion form
- The non-givenness of material
- Materialism à la mode

4 The Tiger's Leap and the Expression of History

- The charm of the previous century: A Manet show, a Belle Epoque collection, and filmic dreams of fashions past
- Striking a note in fashion history
- Morphology in history: Time as ground
- The tiger's leap as expression of the economy (Benjamin's fashion ideology)