Fashion. A Theory: Mapping the Sociological Landscapes of Fashion and Clothing

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CONTENTS

Preface

Foreword

I. CLOTHES AND SOCIETIES

Chapter 1. Clothing and Social Anticipation

Chapter 2: The Importance of Designers and Fashion Magazines

II. FASHION IMAGES AND SOCIAL FIGURES

Chapter 3. Space and Time

Chapter 4. Sexual Identities and Sexuality

Chapter 5. Societies

III. THREE DESIGNERS

Chapter 6. Yves Saint Laurent and the Seventies

Chapter 7. Jean-Paul Gaultier and the Nineties

Chapter 8. Christian Lacroix against the grain?

Conclusion

Index

PREFACE

Dear readers,

It is with great pleasure that I present to you this remarkable work, Fashion: A Theory, the result of Frederic Monneyron's passionate and rigorous efforts. As a sociologist specializing in the study of cultural phenomena and creative industries, I had the honor of following the evolution of this project until its completion in book form.

The structure of the book reflects Frédéric Monneyron's desire to offer a unified theory of fashion by articulating different disciplinary perspectives. The book opens with a first part entitled Clothes and Societies, which explores the links between clothing and social anticipation. Monneyron highlights the importance of designers and fashion magazines in the construction of trends and sartorial imaginaries.

The second part, Fashion Images and Social Figures, delves into the spatio-temporal dimension of fashion, as well as its relationship to sexual identities and sexuality. The author shows how fashion participates in the construction of social representations and gender norms while offering spaces for subversion and creativity.

The chapter devoted to Societies is particularly enlightening. Monneyron analyzes how fashion reflects and shapes social dynamics by playing on the logics of distinction, imitation, and diffusion. He draws on numerous concrete examples, ranging from the dress codes of urban subcultures to the positioning strategies of major luxury houses.

The third part of the book, Three Designers, offers a fascinating dive into the world of three iconic French designers: Yves Saint Laurent, Jean-Paul Gaultier, and Christian Lacroix. Through these case studies, Monneyron highlights the connections between individual creation, socio-historical context, and collective imaginaries. The analysis of Yves Saint Laurent's work in the 1970s is particularly striking. Monneyron shows how the designer captured the spirit of an era marked by women's liberation movements and cultural revolutions while reinventing the codes of French elegance. The chapter on Jean-Paul Gaultier explores the subversive and ironic dimension of his work in relation to the social and cultural changes of the 1990s. Monneyron finely analyzes how Gaultier plays with gender stereotypes and marginal identities while establishing himself as a major figure in contemporary fashion.

Finally, the study devoted to Christian Lacroix highlights the uniqueness of this designer, who managed to assert himself against the grain of dominant trends. Monneyron shows how Lacroix draws on Provençal sartorial traditions and decorative arts to create a baroque and flamboyant universe, going against the minimalism in vogue in the 1980s and 1990s.

Throughout these analyses, Frederic Monneyron skillfully brings together the tools of sociology, history, and semiology to decipher the deep springs of fashion creation. His approach, which in some respects echoes Gilbert Durand's work on the anthropological structures of the imaginary, offers a particularly fruitful framework for understanding fashion as a total social fact. Gilbert Durand was a major thinker who theorized a rehabilitation of the imaginary, long devalued by Western thought. In his seminal work The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary (1960), he develops a figurative structuralism highlighting three major symbolic structures (heroic, mystical, and synthetic) that organize the productions of the imaginary. His multidisciplinary approach, combining philosophy, the study of myths, history of religions, depth psychology, and anthropology, paved the way for a genuine anthropology of the imaginary. However, while Durand's influence has been considerable in France and Europe, his reception in the United States has remained more limited. American sociology has developed more in a rationalist and positivist perspective, giving less space to the symbolic and imaginary dimensions of the social.

In this context, Frederic Monneyron's book Fashion: A Theory appears as an important contribution to making the sociology of the imaginary known and legitimizing it across the Atlantic. By applying a Durandian approach to the analysis of fashion, Monneyron shows the fruitfulness of this current to illuminate a total social fact. Through his case studies on Yves Saint Laurent, Jean-Paul Gaultier, and Christian Lacroix, he highlights how fashion designers mobilize and reconfigure the major anthropological structures of the imaginary identified by Durand. Monneyron thus shows how fashion, far from being reduced to a superficial phenomenon, is rooted in the collective imaginary and in turn helps to shape it. As he recognises himself : Accordingly, clothing should be regarded not only as being part of the anthropological objects of Gilbert Durand’s mythoanalysis but also as a fundamental element of it.

More broadly, Fashion: A Theory illustrates the relevance of the sociology of the imaginary for analyzing a multitude of fields of contemporary sociality, from the most classic to the most novel. By placing homo imaginans at the heart of sociological reflection, it opens up new perspectives to enrich our understanding of the social.

Ultimately, through its theoretical ambition and the richness of its empirical analyses, Monneyron's book appears as a major contribution to making the sociology of the imaginary known to the American public. It demonstrates the fruitfulness of this current to renew the sociological gaze by rehabilitating the place of images, symbols, and myths in the construction of social reality.

Let us hope that Fashion: A Theory will spark new debates and open up new avenues of research on Fashion at the intersection of the social sciences and humanities.

Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb

FOREWORD

Clothes are truly subject to a peculiar neglect. While they clearly set humans apart from animals, differentiate individuals instantly, and mark specific eras, they have rarely been thoroughly examined. Their role in shaping both personal and social identities is often overlooked; their importance in social integration or dissent is underappreciated; and their influence on social behavior isn’t sufficiently recognized. For instance, the way we dress for a formal event, a garden party, or a tennis match affects how we behave in those settings. The mundane nature of clothes might be the main reason they're not studied or discussed much. This seemingly trivial point shouldn't be dismissed outright, yet their perceived frivolity may also contribute to their exclusion from serious research. In Western societies, a long-standing philosophical tradition prioritizes deeper meanings over surface appearances, thus reducing clothes to mere false impressions, favoring an unvarnished truth instead.

Then, to write on clothes implies the reversal of a whole philosophical attitude: trying no more to pose clothes as a source of mistakes, but as a mold, matrix, no longer as a secondary and accessory element, but as a very first and founding element, determining individual behaviors as the social structures. It is this reversal that, in a large interdisciplinary perspective, the conference I organized at Cerisy in July 1998 has already tried to promote. The conference has set the very basis and directions for further research. But this book tries to address what is obviously missing: a theory, and also —theories being reinforced by practices— the sociological practices of clothes and fashion. For failing to carry on the necessary reversal, the few attempts that have been made to date, from Quentin Bell’s and James Laver’s books.¹ to the Système de la mode, Roland Barthes's semiological opus, passing through more recent feminist studies, did not succeed in putting forth a very convincing perspective.

Some other considerations pushed me in that direction, too. An impression first: the impression that Norbert Elias, in his well-known analysis of the slow psycho-social integration of all the constraints that have modified our behavior and contributed to the dynamics of the Western world has forgotten, or at least underestimated, the part played by clothes. A regret, too. In the wake of my own research on the androgyne and on seduction,² in contexts where clothing was already an important element, I regret not giving it an even more significant role in the construction of sexual identities. Following these considerations, here are the questions that guided me: How can wearing a particular dress modify behavior or determine an identity? More generally, what is the social function of fashion today, and if it fundamentally provides models, how does it do so? Indeed, these models stem from images inspired by clothes. To what extent, then, are these fashion images, which have rarely been studied as such, significant indicators of a society's state? Additionally, what is elegance? Beyond the vicissitudes of fashion and time, does elegance exist in itself? If there are only different ways of being elegant, how can we define them?

To answer these questions and the ones that they stimulate, I have smoothly organized this essay in which the theory is followed by the analysis of an important iconography. The study of global clothing creation in a society is combined with the study of individual creations. However, some of these directions call for more comments.

When it came to applying the theoretical directions I have defined above, in other words, analyzing fashion images, I focused on the last fifty years that show some unity as they begin with the birth of ready-to-wear. It is more convenient, undoubtedly, to garner a consistent and significant iconography for a recent period than for a past one, but in doing so, I did not go for the easy option; I tried to deal with a significant concern. I was not intent on questioning the historical approach: it is, in many respects, indispensable and has produced the most exciting and innovative books on the subject,³ but I did challenge the historicism of the books dealing with clothing and fashion, the best and the worst, that don’t pave the way to a deeper hermeneutics. To set the time period to study, in part or in totality, in the lifetime of most of the readers and provide them with the necessary references and the possibility to relate to their own experience was also a way to measure and assure the validity of this hermeneutics.

Another concern arose when I focused on individual designers and attempted to link their work to a specific period without aiming to be exhaustive. Instead of expanding the research, it was preferable to focus on three highly illustrative creators. Indeed, others would have warranted a similar study where their creativity is analyzed as a writer's would be. However, in the decision I made to examine Yves Saint Laurent —whom Marguerite Duras could only perceive as a writer—⁴ Jean-Paul Gaultier and Christian Lacroix, I have pointed out the relations of three individuals to their time, as well as to elegance.

At last, for the analysis of fashion images to be larger than a mere and superficial description —a level that in many works it doesn’t go beyond— it had to be grounded in a hermeneutics of images set on a more significant philosophical vision. There is little doubt that this hermeneutics could not be found but in Gilbert Durand’s anthropology, the only one to offer a perspective that conjugates depth and epistemological coherence. And, that is, indeed, in adapting, with some methodological imagination, the main principles of the Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary to the very objects of clothing and fashion, that this book has achieved its best results and revealed what the stakes and the sense of appearance are.

1. Q. Bell, On Human Finery, London: 1976; R. König, Kleider und Leute, Zur Soziologie der Mode, 1968.

2. See F. Monneyron, L’Androgyne décadent. Mythe, figure, fantasmes, Grenoble: Ellug, 1996 and Séduire, L’Imaginaire de la séduction de