Politics of the Aesthetic: The Role of Fashion in Class and Gender

Abstract

Fashion plays a number of roles in the development of culture and society. The most important of these roles is the one fashion plays in giving of form to class and gender, in actualising cultural mores with respect to different forms of class and gender. This thesis uses Chanel as a case study and periodises the twentieth and twenty-first centuries into three distinctive Western capitalist eras so as to ascertain the impact of fashion in relation to class and gender over time. Each separate era is considered in terms of its capitalist development, its particular aesthetics, and its fashion processes in terms of production, distribution and consumption. Each era provides evidence of the parallels that exist between the development of Western capitalism and the development of fashion.

In the modernist era capitalist developments in industrialisation and mass production were manifested in streamlined functionalist aesthetics that accounted for both the technological advances of the period and also the social advances whereby women had increased social involvement. In the post-World War Two period, the Golden Age of Western capitalism, capitalism advanced towards the extremes of mass production and standardisation and the proliferation of fashion styles contributed to the increasing democratisation of dress which aided both social class and gender mobility. The postmodern era of Western capitalism witnessed the rise of globalisation and the unprecedented advance of technology. These developments were apparent in aesthetic style as dress became defined by postmodern hyperreality, imagery and spectacle. While the postmodern age was marked by greater class and gender fluidity than ever before it was also defined by a growing gap between the rich and the poor.

This study points to the political importance of fashion in the development of culture and society. However, it also acknowledges that the roles fashion plays are far from straightforward. The contradictions inherent in fashion as art, either as contestatory and antagonistic or as conservative and conformist, are recognised as being of primary importance in the development of the fashion industry and class and gender over time.