Representations of Fashion: The Metropolis and Mediological Reflection between the Nineteenth and the Twentieth Centuries

Representations of Fashion is a study of the ephemeral, conceived of as a structure of the self, and as a dominant feature of experience. The metropolis and photography, television and the web transform existence into a succession of isolated and disconnected moments, of worlds that, once experienced, remain fragile and provisional. As the individual builds an image of these worlds, the ephemeral surfaces as their recurrent motif; it becomes the matrix informing the feelings, actions, and reflections of everyday life. The ephemeral levels the differences between experiences, reducing their movement to a single, infinitely extensible repetition of self-reproduction: illusion and disillusion, birth and death. The double temporality of Fashion becomes an anthropological constant, which confers a highly symbolic value on existence