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Adorned In Dreams: Fashion and Modernity by Elizabeth Wilson
When Adorned in Dreams was first published in 1985, Angela Carter described the book as "the best I have read on the subject, bar none." From haute couture to haberdashery, "deviant" dress to Dior, Elizabeth Wilson traces the social and cultural history of fashion and its complex relationship to modernity. She also discusses fashion's vociferous opponents, from the "dress reform" movement to certain strands of feminism. Wilson delights in the power of fashion to mark out identity or subvert it. This brand new edition of her book follows recent developments to bring the story of fashionable dress up to date, exploring the grunge look inspired by bands like Nirvana, the "boho chic" of the mid 90's, retro-dressing, and the meanings of dress from the veil to soccer player David Beckham's pink-varnished toenails.
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First published January 1, 1987
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About the author
Elizabeth Wilson
8 books7 followersElizabeth Wilson, born 1936, is Visiting Professor of Cultural Studies at the London College of Fashion. She has written for The Guardian and New Statesman and is a frequent broadcaster on BBC Radio 4.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
April 4, 2016
Fashion is about creativity, gender performance, personal identity and control, not letting Sumptuary Laws or Religious fundamentalism dictate what we wear. It is difficult to separate politics and fashion, as clothing can be subversive, dangerous and rebellious, seeking to overthrow the establishment. Wilson writes a very cerebral book indeed. Clothes define us, make us anonymous or visible, create a boundary between the natural self and the world. Clothing is armor and "fashion is an art form".
August 11, 2023
Find myself referencing it and sharing it with so many. It's a powerful way to further understand history and our relationships with the past, ourselves and our present. Very engaging and thought provoking read
July 14, 2014
A good read filled with cultural anecdotes but its not exhaustive when it comes to insights regarding various fashion trends and cultural movements
January 31, 2023
Fascinating. Great read if you are interested in meaning and symbolism behind fashion.
June 27, 2018
Chapter 1 – Introduction
p.3 – Fashion is dress in which the key feature is rapid and continual changing of styles. Fashion, in a sense is change, and in modern western societies no clothes are outside fashion.
p.5 – Constantly changing, fashion produces only conformity, as the outrage of the never-before-seen modulates into the good manners of the faultlessly and self-effacingly correct. To dress fashionably is both to stand out and to merge with the crowd, to lay claim to the exclusive and to follow the herd.
p.6 – Yet despite its apparent irrationality, fashion cements social solidarity and imposes group norms, while deviations in dress are usually experienced as shocking and disturbing.
p.9 – Fashion, in fact, originates in the first crucible of this contradiction: in the early capitalist city. Fashion ‘links beauty, success and the city.’ (Franco Moretti, “Homo Palpitans: Balzac’s Novels and Urban Personality,” in Signs Taken for Wonders, London: Verso, 1983, p.113). It was always urban (urbane), became metropolitan and is now cosmopolitan, boiling all national and regional difference down into the distilled moment of glassy sophistication. The urbanity of fashion masks all emotions, save that of triumph; the demeanour of the fashionable person must always be blasé – cool.
p.12 – Modernity creates fragmentation, dislocation.
The fear of depersonalization haunts our culture. ‘Chic’, from this perspective is then merely the uniform of the rich, chilling, anti-human and rigid. Yet modernity has also created the individual in a new way – another paradox that fashion well expresses. Modern individualism is an exaggerated yet fragile sense of self – a raw, painful condition.
Fashion, then is essential to the world of modernity, the world of spectacle and mass-communication. It is a kind of connective tissue of our cultural organism.
p.15 – Fashion is one of the most accessible and one of the most flexible means by which we express these ambiguities. Fashion is modernist irony.
Chapter 3 – Explaining It Away
p.57 – Alison Lurie sees clothes as expressive of hidden and largely unconscious aspects of individual and group psyche, as forms of usually unintentional non-verbal communication, a sign language. […] Her use of the metaphor of language (for it is only a metaphor), far from explaining the ‘irrationality’ of dress, merely reinforces the view that it is irrational.
Roland Barthes uses linguistics and semiology (the science of signs) in a more sophisticated way, but equally takes it for granted that fashion is irrational. In fact his theory of fashion is based entirely on the idea of irrationality, since for him the sign, like language, is a system of arbitrarily defined differences. He suggests that language works in the following way: the words used to name objects (dog/ chien and so on) are arbitrary, but the objects named have significance only in terms of their differences from other objects – ultimately our conception of a dog is based on its difference from a cat or a cow. Barthes argues that all sign systems work in this way, and like language, fashion is for Barthes an enclosed and arbitrary system, the meanings it generates entirely relative. His exhaustive analysis of the ‘rhetoric of fashion’ (captions and copy in fashion magazines) places fashion in a vacuum. Fashion has no history and no material function; it is a system of signs devoted to ‘naturalizing the arbitrary’. Its purpose if to make the absurd and meaningless changes that constitute fashion appear natural.
Chapter 4 – The Fashion Industry
p.67 – “It is a curious fact that the production of precisely those articles which serve the personal adornment of the ladies of the bourgeoisie involves the saddest consequences for the health of the workers.” (Friedrich Engels, The Conditions of the Working Class in England)
p.74 – In 1851 Singer patented the sewing machine.
p.76 – It was during the period from 1890 to 1910 that the mass-produced clothing industry really took off, both in Britain and in America. The expansion of clothing factories, however, did not mean the demise of the sweatshops or the disappearance of outworkers. Rather, the factory system perpetuated outwork. Since the clothing trade was seasonal it was cheaper for many of the bigger manufacturer to off-load work at peak periods rather than have spare capacity in their factories for the rest of the year. The unhealthy and often dangerous small workshops were notorious, and one of the worst evils of the system was the middleman who subcontracted work at the lowest possible cost.
At the turn of the century sweating was causing public as well as trade union concerns, and a full-scale campaign against it was begun in London. Feminists had been active since the 1890s in campaigns to discover and expose the conditions under which women worked, and in 1909 the campaign against sweating and for a minimum wage in the industry met with success: The Trade Boards Act was passed. This empowered the Board of Trade to set up boards to regulate wages in any branch of a trade where pay was exceptionally low. By 1913 when rates were finally established some of the worst evils of sweating do seem to have diminished; and the First World War strengthened the Trade Boards movement and improved conditions of work.
p.86 – In the midst of mass production, the exclusive remains an ideal. Polyester Road may seem a million miles away form the Rue de Rivoli, but in both the exploitation of workers goes hand in hand with the creation of a fashionable image.
p.90 – Yet however much the fashion industry and fashion design have changed, its dual nature has remained curiously unchanging: a glamorous façade continues to conceal a life of corrosive toil for the workers hidden from sight. The glamorous seems almost inseparable from the exploitation. The glamour, none the less, continues to entice, and in turning to aspects of fashion specifically associated with the glamorous, we find, perhaps less the exploitation of the workers than the exploitation of consumers.
Chapter 5 – Fashion and Eroticism
p.94 – J.C. Flugel attempted a psychoanalytic explanation of the relationship of sex to dress. He argued that fashion is a self-renewing compromise between modesty and eroticism; overt sexuality has been necessarily largely repressed in ‘civilized’ society, and it must therefore express itself in furtive or oblique ways, always fighting the ‘reaction formation’ of modesty and shame.
p.100 – Simone de Beauvoir explored the idea of ‘elegance as bondage’ in The Second Sex, published in France in 1949, and this negative judgment on elegance has become the ‘orthodox’ view within feminism. It may be significant that Simone de Beauvoir was writing at a time when fashions, with Dior’s New Look, had become unusually nostalgic, backward-looking and shackling.
Chapter 6 – Gender and Identity
p.122 – Modern fashion plays endlessly with the distinction between masculinity and femininity. With it we express our shifting ideas about what masculinity and femininity are. Fashion permits us to flirt with transvestism, precisely to divest it of all its danger and power.
Chapter 7 – Fashion and City Life
p.137 – The nineteenth-century urban bourgeoisie, anxious to preserve their distance from the omnipresent gaze in the strangely inquisitive anonymity of the crows where ‘anyone’ might see you, developed a discreet style of dress as a protection. Yet paradoxically street dress became full of expressive clues, which subverted its own anonymity, because it was still just as important, or indeed even more important, to let the world know what sort of person you were, and to be able to read off at least some clues from the clothes of other people.
New and more complicated ‘codes of dress’ developed, for in the metropolis everyone was in disguise, incognito, and yet at the same time an individual more and more was what he wore.
Part of this technique of survival was in the nineteenth-century metropolis, and still is today, the art of dissimulation and disguise. Behind the public display, whether of a fantasy or of a ‘real’ self, the secret of the self still lurks.
Moreover, in modern life the street, where almost all passers-by are strangers, has itself become a particular kind of private zone, where appearances hide secrets and tell lies.
p.138 – Georg Simmel, a German sociologist of the later nineteenth century, drew out the relationship between city life, individualism and the rapid development of fashion in the industrial era. A heightened sense of individual personality and ego developed when men and women moved in wider social circles, and the constant friction of self with a barrage of sensations and with other personalities generated he suggested, a more intense awareness of one’s own subjectivity that the old uniform and unwavering rhythm of rural and provincial life. In the city the individual constantly interacts with others who are strangers, and survives by the manipulation of self. Fashion is one adjunct to this self-presentation and manipulation.
p.140 – The post-feminist career woman of the 1980s, on the other hand, has eliminated sexuality. In the wake of bestsellers John T. Molloy’s The Women’s Dress For Success Book and Mary Fiedorek’s Executive Style, many American career women appear to have followed the advice these authors give on dressing ‘seriously’ for work. An army of New York clothes consultants are teaching business and professional women to eliminate not only sexuality but even gender.
p.142 – The ‘aerobics style’ has become a code for a certain kind of sophistication; a young woman wearing leg warmers in an advertisement, for whatever product, is an immediate signal of ‘modern-mindedness’. The style is about play, about energy, about independence. The woman on display suggests boldness and mastery of both herself and of her environment.
p.143 – Both this hysteria, and a vision of New York City as the ultimate modernist nightmare, are explored in Brian de Palma’s film, Dressed to Kill. De Palma’s Manhattan is the mythic capital of the twentieth century, and his heroine is a hooker. Male writers have described the hooker as the ultimate narcissist, the ultimate inhabitant of the modernist city, for she takes the mirror of performance and with it the cash nexus into the very heart of intimacy. Dressed to Kill is an exploitation movie, and was hated by feminists for its message that women are to be punished for their sexuality. Yet it is also a version, flawed as the culture it reflects, of a myth of New York as the nightmare megalopolis where pleasure and danger unite in death.
p.154 – Fashion always set up a radical distinction between the world of the capital city and the world of the provinces. Exclusivity and chic belonged to metropolitan life; dowdiness to the provincial backwaters – from which so many heroes and heroines of nineteenth-century literature longed to escape.
Chapter 8 – Fashion and Popular Culture
p.166 – According to David Kunzle fashion is ‘always closely lined with current dance styles,’ the dancer, the dance and the clothes invariably fused to create one unified effect.
Chapter 11 – Feminism and Fashion
p.244-245 – Theodor Adorno and other cultural critics of the Frankfurt School developed a deeply pessimistic view of consumer culture, seeing its very diversity, hedonism and inventiveness as a hidden form of uniformity. But the political implication of this was “repressive tolerance” and the idea that every aspect of consumer culture duped and doped the masses: consumer culture was a form of “false consciousness.” These critics used psychoanalysis – a theory of the unconscious, to try to explain the way Consumerism becomes a compulsive form of behaviour, over which we have little conscious control. According to this puritanical view, we are squeezed between the imperatives of the market and the urges of an unconscious whose desires are wrapped and invalidated by it then becomes one example of a mass outbreak of inauthenticity. I believe that, on the contrary, fashion is one among many forms of aesthetic creativity which make possible the exploration of alternatives. For after all, fashion is more than a game; it is an art form and a symbolic social system.
The pointlessness of fashion, what Veblen hated, is precisely what makes it valuable. It is in this marginalized area of the contingent, the decorative, the futile, that not simply a new aesthetic but a new cultural order may seed itself.
p.246 – Fashion acts as a vehicle for fantasy. The utopias of the right and left, which were themselves fantasies, implied an end to fantasy in the perfect world of the future. There will, however, never be a human world without fantasy, which expresses the unconscious unfulfillable. All art draws on unconscious fantasy; the performance that is fashion is one road from the inner to the outer world. Hence its compulsiveness, hence its ambivalence, hence the immense psychological (and material) work that goes into the production of the social self, of which clothes are an indispensable part.
In this sense, ambivalence is an appropriate response to dress.
This ambivalence is that of contradictory and irreconcilable desires, inscribed in the human psyche by that very “social construction” that decrees such a long period of cultural development for the human ego. Fashion – a performance art – acts as vehicle for this ambivalence; the daring of fashion speaks dread as well as desire; the shell of chic, the aura of glamour, always hide a wound. Fashion reflects also the ambivalence of the fissured culture of modernity, is only like all modern art in expressing a flawed culture. The dilemma of fashion is the dilemma of modern art: what is its purpose and how is it to be used in the world of “mechanical reproduction?”
Chapter 12 – Changing Times / Altered States
p.249 – When Adorned in Dreams was published in 1985, women ‘dressed for success’ in the boom – as did men. The City or Wall Street Yuppie was a figure of the times, in a brash, big-cut suit and bright tie, edging towards Miami Vice, with flowing mullet hairstyles above square jackets in light colours with the cuffs inexplicably rolled back.
Punk had strangely mutated into a style fit for Thatcherism – hard lipstick, hard haircuts, high heels – and this era of power dressing with its big hair, shoulder pads and echoes of Dallas and Dynasty was associated with the right-wing politics of the Reagan/Thatcher governments.
By 1990 the mood had changed. […] Now Grunge emerged as an appropriate response to the recession of the early nineties. Grunge had originated with Settle West Coast bands such as Nirvana, but was soon taken up by a group of British fashion journalists operating in New York.
p.250 – By the mid 1990s grunge evolved – or declined – into ‘boho chic’. This was promoted by, among others, the London shop, Voyage, who designed luxury garments often from recycled and exotic materials. The bohemian fin de siècle reworked the hippy idiom at great expense to create a fey, disordered appearance.
p.251 – In other words retro was an act of sartorial disavowal, a way of simultaneously following fashion and not following it. A decade later the feminist academic Kaja Silverman saw it as rather more radical than that, ‘as a sartorial strategy that works to denaturalize its wearer’s specular identity, and one which is fundamentally irreconcilable with fashion.’
David Brooks wittily described the origins of the casual style in Silicon Valley and its spread to ‘Latte Towns’ all over the United States. Latte Towns, h explained, were communities, often associated with a university, where formerly bohemian modes of life had fused with bourgeois wealth, work ethic and aspirations, and the bourgeois-bohemian lifestyle extended to dress: ‘the local businessmen gather for breakfast each morning, wearing timberlands, no socks, collarless shirts and jeans.’
p.252 – Whereas the 1980s yuppies liked ‘smooth surface – matt black furniture, polished lacquer floors and sleek faux-marbleised walls’ today the educated elites ‘prefer to build environments full of natural irregularities… roughness connotes authenticity and virtue.’ This rule extends to clothes so that Bobos (short for bourgeois bohemians) must wear flannel shirts, not silk, relaxed, not starched collars, linen slacks with marbled blouse, Peruvian folk knits, a hemp baseball cap, and sisal underwear.
Luxury materials have combined with minimalist design to create exclusivity. The designer Marc Jacobs summed it up when he said: ‘I decided that status would be done my way, which is to say, invisibly.’
p.267 – Yet alongside these changes, haute couture has moved closer to the art world as its fashion leadership has waned. In the 1980s Diana Vreeland, former editor of American Vogue and American Harper’s Bazaar, found a new role in creating and curating a series of fashion exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
p.3 – Fashion is dress in which the key feature is rapid and continual changing of styles. Fashion, in a sense is change, and in modern western societies no clothes are outside fashion.
p.5 – Constantly changing, fashion produces only conformity, as the outrage of the never-before-seen modulates into the good manners of the faultlessly and self-effacingly correct. To dress fashionably is both to stand out and to merge with the crowd, to lay claim to the exclusive and to follow the herd.
p.6 – Yet despite its apparent irrationality, fashion cements social solidarity and imposes group norms, while deviations in dress are usually experienced as shocking and disturbing.
p.9 – Fashion, in fact, originates in the first crucible of this contradiction: in the early capitalist city. Fashion ‘links beauty, success and the city.’ (Franco Moretti, “Homo Palpitans: Balzac’s Novels and Urban Personality,” in Signs Taken for Wonders, London: Verso, 1983, p.113). It was always urban (urbane), became metropolitan and is now cosmopolitan, boiling all national and regional difference down into the distilled moment of glassy sophistication. The urbanity of fashion masks all emotions, save that of triumph; the demeanour of the fashionable person must always be blasé – cool.
p.12 – Modernity creates fragmentation, dislocation.
The fear of depersonalization haunts our culture. ‘Chic’, from this perspective is then merely the uniform of the rich, chilling, anti-human and rigid. Yet modernity has also created the individual in a new way – another paradox that fashion well expresses. Modern individualism is an exaggerated yet fragile sense of self – a raw, painful condition.
Fashion, then is essential to the world of modernity, the world of spectacle and mass-communication. It is a kind of connective tissue of our cultural organism.
p.15 – Fashion is one of the most accessible and one of the most flexible means by which we express these ambiguities. Fashion is modernist irony.
Chapter 3 – Explaining It Away
p.57 – Alison Lurie sees clothes as expressive of hidden and largely unconscious aspects of individual and group psyche, as forms of usually unintentional non-verbal communication, a sign language. […] Her use of the metaphor of language (for it is only a metaphor), far from explaining the ‘irrationality’ of dress, merely reinforces the view that it is irrational.
Roland Barthes uses linguistics and semiology (the science of signs) in a more sophisticated way, but equally takes it for granted that fashion is irrational. In fact his theory of fashion is based entirely on the idea of irrationality, since for him the sign, like language, is a system of arbitrarily defined differences. He suggests that language works in the following way: the words used to name objects (dog/ chien and so on) are arbitrary, but the objects named have significance only in terms of their differences from other objects – ultimately our conception of a dog is based on its difference from a cat or a cow. Barthes argues that all sign systems work in this way, and like language, fashion is for Barthes an enclosed and arbitrary system, the meanings it generates entirely relative. His exhaustive analysis of the ‘rhetoric of fashion’ (captions and copy in fashion magazines) places fashion in a vacuum. Fashion has no history and no material function; it is a system of signs devoted to ‘naturalizing the arbitrary’. Its purpose if to make the absurd and meaningless changes that constitute fashion appear natural.
Chapter 4 – The Fashion Industry
p.67 – “It is a curious fact that the production of precisely those articles which serve the personal adornment of the ladies of the bourgeoisie involves the saddest consequences for the health of the workers.” (Friedrich Engels, The Conditions of the Working Class in England)
p.74 – In 1851 Singer patented the sewing machine.
p.76 – It was during the period from 1890 to 1910 that the mass-produced clothing industry really took off, both in Britain and in America. The expansion of clothing factories, however, did not mean the demise of the sweatshops or the disappearance of outworkers. Rather, the factory system perpetuated outwork. Since the clothing trade was seasonal it was cheaper for many of the bigger manufacturer to off-load work at peak periods rather than have spare capacity in their factories for the rest of the year. The unhealthy and often dangerous small workshops were notorious, and one of the worst evils of the system was the middleman who subcontracted work at the lowest possible cost.
At the turn of the century sweating was causing public as well as trade union concerns, and a full-scale campaign against it was begun in London. Feminists had been active since the 1890s in campaigns to discover and expose the conditions under which women worked, and in 1909 the campaign against sweating and for a minimum wage in the industry met with success: The Trade Boards Act was passed. This empowered the Board of Trade to set up boards to regulate wages in any branch of a trade where pay was exceptionally low. By 1913 when rates were finally established some of the worst evils of sweating do seem to have diminished; and the First World War strengthened the Trade Boards movement and improved conditions of work.
p.86 – In the midst of mass production, the exclusive remains an ideal. Polyester Road may seem a million miles away form the Rue de Rivoli, but in both the exploitation of workers goes hand in hand with the creation of a fashionable image.
p.90 – Yet however much the fashion industry and fashion design have changed, its dual nature has remained curiously unchanging: a glamorous façade continues to conceal a life of corrosive toil for the workers hidden from sight. The glamorous seems almost inseparable from the exploitation. The glamour, none the less, continues to entice, and in turning to aspects of fashion specifically associated with the glamorous, we find, perhaps less the exploitation of the workers than the exploitation of consumers.
Chapter 5 – Fashion and Eroticism
p.94 – J.C. Flugel attempted a psychoanalytic explanation of the relationship of sex to dress. He argued that fashion is a self-renewing compromise between modesty and eroticism; overt sexuality has been necessarily largely repressed in ‘civilized’ society, and it must therefore express itself in furtive or oblique ways, always fighting the ‘reaction formation’ of modesty and shame.
p.100 – Simone de Beauvoir explored the idea of ‘elegance as bondage’ in The Second Sex, published in France in 1949, and this negative judgment on elegance has become the ‘orthodox’ view within feminism. It may be significant that Simone de Beauvoir was writing at a time when fashions, with Dior’s New Look, had become unusually nostalgic, backward-looking and shackling.
Chapter 6 – Gender and Identity
p.122 – Modern fashion plays endlessly with the distinction between masculinity and femininity. With it we express our shifting ideas about what masculinity and femininity are. Fashion permits us to flirt with transvestism, precisely to divest it of all its danger and power.
Chapter 7 – Fashion and City Life
p.137 – The nineteenth-century urban bourgeoisie, anxious to preserve their distance from the omnipresent gaze in the strangely inquisitive anonymity of the crows where ‘anyone’ might see you, developed a discreet style of dress as a protection. Yet paradoxically street dress became full of expressive clues, which subverted its own anonymity, because it was still just as important, or indeed even more important, to let the world know what sort of person you were, and to be able to read off at least some clues from the clothes of other people.
New and more complicated ‘codes of dress’ developed, for in the metropolis everyone was in disguise, incognito, and yet at the same time an individual more and more was what he wore.
Part of this technique of survival was in the nineteenth-century metropolis, and still is today, the art of dissimulation and disguise. Behind the public display, whether of a fantasy or of a ‘real’ self, the secret of the self still lurks.
Moreover, in modern life the street, where almost all passers-by are strangers, has itself become a particular kind of private zone, where appearances hide secrets and tell lies.
p.138 – Georg Simmel, a German sociologist of the later nineteenth century, drew out the relationship between city life, individualism and the rapid development of fashion in the industrial era. A heightened sense of individual personality and ego developed when men and women moved in wider social circles, and the constant friction of self with a barrage of sensations and with other personalities generated he suggested, a more intense awareness of one’s own subjectivity that the old uniform and unwavering rhythm of rural and provincial life. In the city the individual constantly interacts with others who are strangers, and survives by the manipulation of self. Fashion is one adjunct to this self-presentation and manipulation.
p.140 – The post-feminist career woman of the 1980s, on the other hand, has eliminated sexuality. In the wake of bestsellers John T. Molloy’s The Women’s Dress For Success Book and Mary Fiedorek’s Executive Style, many American career women appear to have followed the advice these authors give on dressing ‘seriously’ for work. An army of New York clothes consultants are teaching business and professional women to eliminate not only sexuality but even gender.
p.142 – The ‘aerobics style’ has become a code for a certain kind of sophistication; a young woman wearing leg warmers in an advertisement, for whatever product, is an immediate signal of ‘modern-mindedness’. The style is about play, about energy, about independence. The woman on display suggests boldness and mastery of both herself and of her environment.
p.143 – Both this hysteria, and a vision of New York City as the ultimate modernist nightmare, are explored in Brian de Palma’s film, Dressed to Kill. De Palma’s Manhattan is the mythic capital of the twentieth century, and his heroine is a hooker. Male writers have described the hooker as the ultimate narcissist, the ultimate inhabitant of the modernist city, for she takes the mirror of performance and with it the cash nexus into the very heart of intimacy. Dressed to Kill is an exploitation movie, and was hated by feminists for its message that women are to be punished for their sexuality. Yet it is also a version, flawed as the culture it reflects, of a myth of New York as the nightmare megalopolis where pleasure and danger unite in death.
p.154 – Fashion always set up a radical distinction between the world of the capital city and the world of the provinces. Exclusivity and chic belonged to metropolitan life; dowdiness to the provincial backwaters – from which so many heroes and heroines of nineteenth-century literature longed to escape.
Chapter 8 – Fashion and Popular Culture
p.166 – According to David Kunzle fashion is ‘always closely lined with current dance styles,’ the dancer, the dance and the clothes invariably fused to create one unified effect.
Chapter 11 – Feminism and Fashion
p.244-245 – Theodor Adorno and other cultural critics of the Frankfurt School developed a deeply pessimistic view of consumer culture, seeing its very diversity, hedonism and inventiveness as a hidden form of uniformity. But the political implication of this was “repressive tolerance” and the idea that every aspect of consumer culture duped and doped the masses: consumer culture was a form of “false consciousness.” These critics used psychoanalysis – a theory of the unconscious, to try to explain the way Consumerism becomes a compulsive form of behaviour, over which we have little conscious control. According to this puritanical view, we are squeezed between the imperatives of the market and the urges of an unconscious whose desires are wrapped and invalidated by it then becomes one example of a mass outbreak of inauthenticity. I believe that, on the contrary, fashion is one among many forms of aesthetic creativity which make possible the exploration of alternatives. For after all, fashion is more than a game; it is an art form and a symbolic social system.
The pointlessness of fashion, what Veblen hated, is precisely what makes it valuable. It is in this marginalized area of the contingent, the decorative, the futile, that not simply a new aesthetic but a new cultural order may seed itself.
p.246 – Fashion acts as a vehicle for fantasy. The utopias of the right and left, which were themselves fantasies, implied an end to fantasy in the perfect world of the future. There will, however, never be a human world without fantasy, which expresses the unconscious unfulfillable. All art draws on unconscious fantasy; the performance that is fashion is one road from the inner to the outer world. Hence its compulsiveness, hence its ambivalence, hence the immense psychological (and material) work that goes into the production of the social self, of which clothes are an indispensable part.
In this sense, ambivalence is an appropriate response to dress.
This ambivalence is that of contradictory and irreconcilable desires, inscribed in the human psyche by that very “social construction” that decrees such a long period of cultural development for the human ego. Fashion – a performance art – acts as vehicle for this ambivalence; the daring of fashion speaks dread as well as desire; the shell of chic, the aura of glamour, always hide a wound. Fashion reflects also the ambivalence of the fissured culture of modernity, is only like all modern art in expressing a flawed culture. The dilemma of fashion is the dilemma of modern art: what is its purpose and how is it to be used in the world of “mechanical reproduction?”
Chapter 12 – Changing Times / Altered States
p.249 – When Adorned in Dreams was published in 1985, women ‘dressed for success’ in the boom – as did men. The City or Wall Street Yuppie was a figure of the times, in a brash, big-cut suit and bright tie, edging towards Miami Vice, with flowing mullet hairstyles above square jackets in light colours with the cuffs inexplicably rolled back.
Punk had strangely mutated into a style fit for Thatcherism – hard lipstick, hard haircuts, high heels – and this era of power dressing with its big hair, shoulder pads and echoes of Dallas and Dynasty was associated with the right-wing politics of the Reagan/Thatcher governments.
By 1990 the mood had changed. […] Now Grunge emerged as an appropriate response to the recession of the early nineties. Grunge had originated with Settle West Coast bands such as Nirvana, but was soon taken up by a group of British fashion journalists operating in New York.
p.250 – By the mid 1990s grunge evolved – or declined – into ‘boho chic’. This was promoted by, among others, the London shop, Voyage, who designed luxury garments often from recycled and exotic materials. The bohemian fin de siècle reworked the hippy idiom at great expense to create a fey, disordered appearance.
p.251 – In other words retro was an act of sartorial disavowal, a way of simultaneously following fashion and not following it. A decade later the feminist academic Kaja Silverman saw it as rather more radical than that, ‘as a sartorial strategy that works to denaturalize its wearer’s specular identity, and one which is fundamentally irreconcilable with fashion.’
David Brooks wittily described the origins of the casual style in Silicon Valley and its spread to ‘Latte Towns’ all over the United States. Latte Towns, h explained, were communities, often associated with a university, where formerly bohemian modes of life had fused with bourgeois wealth, work ethic and aspirations, and the bourgeois-bohemian lifestyle extended to dress: ‘the local businessmen gather for breakfast each morning, wearing timberlands, no socks, collarless shirts and jeans.’
p.252 – Whereas the 1980s yuppies liked ‘smooth surface – matt black furniture, polished lacquer floors and sleek faux-marbleised walls’ today the educated elites ‘prefer to build environments full of natural irregularities… roughness connotes authenticity and virtue.’ This rule extends to clothes so that Bobos (short for bourgeois bohemians) must wear flannel shirts, not silk, relaxed, not starched collars, linen slacks with marbled blouse, Peruvian folk knits, a hemp baseball cap, and sisal underwear.
Luxury materials have combined with minimalist design to create exclusivity. The designer Marc Jacobs summed it up when he said: ‘I decided that status would be done my way, which is to say, invisibly.’
p.267 – Yet alongside these changes, haute couture has moved closer to the art world as its fashion leadership has waned. In the 1980s Diana Vreeland, former editor of American Vogue and American Harper’s Bazaar, found a new role in creating and curating a series of fashion exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
July 2, 2020
This is a challenging book for me to rate but one that I have many thoughts on. After just finishing the book, I feel like I could start it again and finally get some clarity that I was missing on the first read through. It's a brainteaser just to read, from the first page to the last. I do think I had the wrong mindset going in. What I thought I'd be getting was a history of fashion. Granted, that's inherently intertwined. What "Adorned" truly is is a book of fashion theory, and so reading it requires a mindset for philosophy, not history. I would also argue it is not an introductory tome, and a reader should have a prior knowledge of the fashion timeline before going in, because the actual garments are illusioned to but not explained. A field so dominated by image too, you'd think the book would have more images in it. All this compounds with the fact that, like any work of abstract/theory/philosophy I've encountered, it's impossibly dense and difficult to read. Now, I don't claim to be a scholar but I would humbly consider myself to be intellectual, and also I am college-educated. Yet I found myself reading the same passages and run-on sentences over and over, sometimes just giving up completely on fully grasping their meaning. The last third I endeavored to keep a pencil for marking pages and summarizing in the margins as if I had a report to write later, because otherwise I could not have told you what I had just read.
Where I criticise the prose, I do have to give credit to the content. From what I could parse, and in the context of the time of publication, Wilson makes valuable arguments first in the defense of fashion as a thing of worth. With the field established, she lays comprehensive groundwork for the analysis of fashion through time and society, certainly giving me revelations and putting ideas into words I had not considered or thought of before.
What has occured to me just now is that "Adorned in Dreams" would be best presented (and reformatted) as a textbook rather than a paperback. With the nearly 40 pages of references/bibliography, it's done the legwork to qualify itself as an academic work. Certainly the content is of enough cultural significance to warrant the format. The sections could be more clearly broken down and demarcated with subheaders. There'd be more allowance for supporting images and footnotes. Comprehension and discussion questions at the back of each chapter. This format would just give it the visage that puts the student in the proper mindset for reading it, and then best comprehending it.
A necessary read for anyone with a vested interest in fashion as a field.
Where I criticise the prose, I do have to give credit to the content. From what I could parse, and in the context of the time of publication, Wilson makes valuable arguments first in the defense of fashion as a thing of worth. With the field established, she lays comprehensive groundwork for the analysis of fashion through time and society, certainly giving me revelations and putting ideas into words I had not considered or thought of before.
What has occured to me just now is that "Adorned in Dreams" would be best presented (and reformatted) as a textbook rather than a paperback. With the nearly 40 pages of references/bibliography, it's done the legwork to qualify itself as an academic work. Certainly the content is of enough cultural significance to warrant the format. The sections could be more clearly broken down and demarcated with subheaders. There'd be more allowance for supporting images and footnotes. Comprehension and discussion questions at the back of each chapter. This format would just give it the visage that puts the student in the proper mindset for reading it, and then best comprehending it.
A necessary read for anyone with a vested interest in fashion as a field.
July 28, 2019
(The English review is placed beneath Russian one)
Я хочу сразу предупредить тех, кто, как и я, не является профессионалом в этой области, кто мало или вообще ничего не читал про моду, что данная книга, с высокой долей вероятности, им также ничего не прояснит.
Я читал много совершенно разных книг и часто сталкивался с книгами, в которых, что называется, слова знакомые, а когда выстраиваешь из них предложение, то, тем не менее, ничего не понятно. Такое редко, но можно встретить в книгах по бизнесу и возможно, в книгах по психологии (хотя, я тут не эксперт). Заумь - беда многих неудавшихся книг по данным направлениям. Однако подходя к книгам по моде, я даже и предположить не мог что встречу старого друга и здесь. Да, книга невероятно заумна и это зауми практически полностью опустошила как книгу, так и то, что я прочитал в ней. Я мало что могу вспомнить по прочтении. Однако попробую.
Во-первых, как правильно заметил один рецензент данной книги, первая часть (где-то до 60 страницы), невероятно скучна и непонятна. Автор полез в такие дебри философии, что пробраться за ним следом оказалось, для меня, просто невозможным. Так что, первые 60 страниц автор писал…о чём-то очень заумном.
Далее, когда мы дойдём где-то до середины книги, автор станет писать более простым и понятным языком, однако, разумеется, не весь текст. Где-то половина всего текста также будет содержать такие предложения и даже абзацы, в которых разобраться – что хотел сказать автор – будет крайне трудно, если вообще возможно. Так что – зебра.
Второй момент, это то, что, по моему мнению, это не книга, а сборник статей. Я не нашёл крепкой связки между главами. В принципе можно их читать как несвязанные друг с другом статьи из журнала.
Третий момент, автор мало что рассказала по истории моды. Всё кружилось вокруг – помимо философствований автора с цитатами из Бовуар, Сарта и пр. – нескольких тем, а именно: тяжёлый труд женщин работающих на фабриках, психоанализ Фрейда, феминизм или диалог с феминизмом/феминистками. Да, несколько тем были интересными, как то «Оппозиционные стили», мода в городе. Однако язык автора и количество идей не позволяют, по крайне мере мне, насладится раскрытием данных вопросов – уж слишком всё усложнено.
И как итог: тема интересная, но исполнение – никакое. Возможно, данная книга будет интересна профессионалам. Что касается обычных читателей, то думаю, нужно искать более простые, понятные и легкие книги.
В принципе, уже заранее можно было предположить, что данная книга, что называется, не для каждого. Рейтинг книги на Западе крайне низкий, т.е. количество читателей крайне низкое, а это главный сигнал того, что книга не ориентирована на широкого читателя и с большой долей вероятности содержит сложный, неудобоваримый язык.
I want to warn those who, like me, are not professionals in this field, who have read little or nothing about fashion, that this book will not clarify anything in this matter.
I've read a lot of different books and I've often come across books in which words are familiar, but when you build a sentence out of them, it's not clear. It's rare, but you can find it in books on business and perhaps in books on psychology (although I'm not an expert here). Zaum is the problem of many failed books in these areas. However, approaching books by fashion, I could not even imagine that I would meet an "old friend" here. Yes, the book is incredibly sophisticated and it is zaum almost completely devastated both the book and what I read in it. I can't remember much from reading. However, I will try.
First of all, as one reviewer of this book correctly pointed out, the first part (about 60 pages) is incredibly boring and incomprehensible. The author was useful in such a maze of philosophy that it was simply impossible for me to follow him. So, the author wrote the first 60 pages...about something very sophisticated.
Further, when we reach the middle of the book, the author will write in a simpler and more comprehensible language, but, of course, not the entire text. Somewhere in half of the text will contain such sentences and even paragraphs in which to understand - what the author wanted to say - will be extremely difficult, if not impossible. So it is "zebra".
The second point is that, in my opinion, this is not a book, but a collection of articles. I have not found a strong link between the chapters. In principle, you can read them as unrelated articles from a magazine.
The third point is that the author did not say much about fashion history. Everything was spinning around - apart from the author's philosophies with quotations from Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, etc. - several topics, namely: the hard work of women working in factories, Freud's psychoanalysis, feminism or dialogue with feminism/feminists. Yes, several topics were interesting, such as "Opposition Styles", fashion in the city. However, the author's language and the number of ideas do not allow enjoying the disclosure of these issues because everything is too complicated.
And as a result: the theme is interesting, but the performance is terrible. Perhaps, this book will be of interest to professionals. As for ordinary readers, I think we need to look for simpler, clearer and easier books.
Я хочу сразу предупредить тех, кто, как и я, не является профессионалом в этой области, кто мало или вообще ничего не читал про моду, что данная книга, с высокой долей вероятности, им также ничего не прояснит.
Я читал много совершенно разных книг и часто сталкивался с книгами, в которых, что называется, слова знакомые, а когда выстраиваешь из них предложение, то, тем не менее, ничего не понятно. Такое редко, но можно встретить в книгах по бизнесу и возможно, в книгах по психологии (хотя, я тут не эксперт). Заумь - беда многих неудавшихся книг по данным направлениям. Однако подходя к книгам по моде, я даже и предположить не мог что встречу старого друга и здесь. Да, книга невероятно заумна и это зауми практически полностью опустошила как книгу, так и то, что я прочитал в ней. Я мало что могу вспомнить по прочтении. Однако попробую.
Во-первых, как правильно заметил один рецензент данной книги, первая часть (где-то до 60 страницы), невероятно скучна и непонятна. Автор полез в такие дебри философии, что пробраться за ним следом оказалось, для меня, просто невозможным. Так что, первые 60 страниц автор писал…о чём-то очень заумном.
Далее, когда мы дойдём где-то до середины книги, автор станет писать более простым и понятным языком, однако, разумеется, не весь текст. Где-то половина всего текста также будет содержать такие предложения и даже абзацы, в которых разобраться – что хотел сказать автор – будет крайне трудно, если вообще возможно. Так что – зебра.
Второй момент, это то, что, по моему мнению, это не книга, а сборник статей. Я не нашёл крепкой связки между главами. В принципе можно их читать как несвязанные друг с другом статьи из журнала.
Третий момент, автор мало что рассказала по истории моды. Всё кружилось вокруг – помимо философствований автора с цитатами из Бовуар, Сарта и пр. – нескольких тем, а именно: тяжёлый труд женщин работающих на фабриках, психоанализ Фрейда, феминизм или диалог с феминизмом/феминистками. Да, несколько тем были интересными, как то «Оппозиционные стили», мода в городе. Однако язык автора и количество идей не позволяют, по крайне мере мне, насладится раскрытием данных вопросов – уж слишком всё усложнено.
И как итог: тема интересная, но исполнение – никакое. Возможно, данная книга будет интересна профессионалам. Что касается обычных читателей, то думаю, нужно искать более простые, понятные и легкие книги.
В принципе, уже заранее можно было предположить, что данная книга, что называется, не для каждого. Рейтинг книги на Западе крайне низкий, т.е. количество читателей крайне низкое, а это главный сигнал того, что книга не ориентирована на широкого читателя и с большой долей вероятности содержит сложный, неудобоваримый язык.
I want to warn those who, like me, are not professionals in this field, who have read little or nothing about fashion, that this book will not clarify anything in this matter.
I've read a lot of different books and I've often come across books in which words are familiar, but when you build a sentence out of them, it's not clear. It's rare, but you can find it in books on business and perhaps in books on psychology (although I'm not an expert here). Zaum is the problem of many failed books in these areas. However, approaching books by fashion, I could not even imagine that I would meet an "old friend" here. Yes, the book is incredibly sophisticated and it is zaum almost completely devastated both the book and what I read in it. I can't remember much from reading. However, I will try.
First of all, as one reviewer of this book correctly pointed out, the first part (about 60 pages) is incredibly boring and incomprehensible. The author was useful in such a maze of philosophy that it was simply impossible for me to follow him. So, the author wrote the first 60 pages...about something very sophisticated.
Further, when we reach the middle of the book, the author will write in a simpler and more comprehensible language, but, of course, not the entire text. Somewhere in half of the text will contain such sentences and even paragraphs in which to understand - what the author wanted to say - will be extremely difficult, if not impossible. So it is "zebra".
The second point is that, in my opinion, this is not a book, but a collection of articles. I have not found a strong link between the chapters. In principle, you can read them as unrelated articles from a magazine.
The third point is that the author did not say much about fashion history. Everything was spinning around - apart from the author's philosophies with quotations from Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, etc. - several topics, namely: the hard work of women working in factories, Freud's psychoanalysis, feminism or dialogue with feminism/feminists. Yes, several topics were interesting, such as "Opposition Styles", fashion in the city. However, the author's language and the number of ideas do not allow enjoying the disclosure of these issues because everything is too complicated.
And as a result: the theme is interesting, but the performance is terrible. Perhaps, this book will be of interest to professionals. As for ordinary readers, I think we need to look for simpler, clearer and easier books.
December 21, 2025
once again not really sure if this is a fair review as i picked through this for a historiography. regardless, i really enjoyed this outside of the context of my essay and would like to reread when i have more time/less stress concerning fashion and fashion theory
August 18, 2024
This might just be the best, most complex (in the best way) and entertaining book on fashion that you’ll ever read.
June 24, 2025
one of the ones it makes sense people cite all the time. loved.
July 14, 2015
"Romanticism created its own fashions..."
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews