Fashion and Anti-Fashion: A Dialectical Approach

In this article I exam fashion and anti-fashion from a philosophical point of view, and I explain why I consider dialectics – the tradition and method of philosophising that understands negation, opposition, contradiction as quintessential, i.e. belonging to the very essence of all phenomena – as a promising approach to this question. In the case of the fashion/anti-fashion relationship this implies that neither the former can be understood separately from the latter, nor vice-versa the latter can be grasped if separated from its intrinsic, essential connection with the former (§ 1). The concept of dialectics employed in this article is mostly derived from Hegel and Adorno, but also takes into account the application of Plato’s original model of dialectics to the question of anti-fashion in a recent book by Nickolas Pappas (§ 2), and also relies to some extent on Simmel’s influential theory of fashion based on the dualism – or dialectics, as it were – of imitation and differentiation. on this basis, I conclude by inquiring into the connection of so-called anti-fashions with 20th- and 21st-century countercultural movements and trends, and try to show why a negative-dialectical model of thought, combined with Simmel’s philosophical and sociological approach to fashion, can be of great help to gain a well-balanced and “relaxed” (but for this reason not at all uncritical, simply “non-apocalyptic”) perspective on fashion, popular culture and the culture industry (§ 3).