Benjamin on Fashion

Philipp Ekardt is a NOMIS Research Fellow at eikones - Center for the Theory and History of the Image at the University of Basel, Switzerland.

• 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 Models1 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 apocatastasisPart Two - Benjamin and the Fashion of his Time2 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silhouette (Benjamin vs. Focillon) 3 In/Elegant Materialisms - Grund’s additional notes on the essence of fashion (an unpublished fragment from the Walter Benjamin-Archiv) - A theory of elegance: The animation of garments according to Helen Grund- Theory of modeling - The immanence of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)

Philipp Ekardt’s monograph stands out with its originality within a multitude of Benjaminiana studies compiled over the decades. it is a superbly researched, theoretically sophisticated, and highly erudite book, that is also extraordinarily lucid and delightful to read. I hope that it will quickly find its way to a variety of graduate and undergraduate reading lists.