The Need for Authenticity in the Totality of the Inauthentic: Some Remarks on Adorno’s Critical Approach to Fashion

The present contribution is focused on the aesthetics of fashion in relation to Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophy and, in particular, his influential aesthetic the ory, inscribed in the general context of his critical theory of society. At first sight the readers might perhaps consider this connection between Adorno’s dialectical thinking and the aesthetics of fashion as a strange and problematic one. Indeed, references to fashion are not particularly frequent in Adorno’s writings and, differently from Simmel, Benjamin, Fink, Barthes, Bourdieu or Lipovetsky, Adorno cannot be said to be a systematic theorist of fashion. In this article I aim to reconstruct an Adornian critical perspective on fashion through a dialectical reading of fragmented passages on this theme in his Aesthetic Theory and other writings. My goal is to present an analysis of fashion as a site of intersection between Adorno’s critical aesthetics and his rejection of the culture in dustry, aiming to show how this can also prompt a re-evaluation of other aspects of Adorno’s thought, including his conception of notions such as truth and authenticity, understood as dialectically interwoven with their opposite (namely, untruth and inauthenticity).