History and Memory

There is a special relationship between clothing and our bodies: a relationship marked by time. This relationship has been overlooked by studies on the psychological and social relationships which regulate the uses and the practices of clothing. These studies mainly consider the protective, practical, aesthetic and ritual aspects of the sign-garment, and those relating to status and gender. When they consider time, they do so under the categories of seasonal clothing and fashion. However, they leave unexplored the fascinating territory of ‘synesthetic’ time, which involves the relationship of mutual interconnection between the senses. They also neglect considerations on historical time, which the (lived and social) body experiences. This chapter aims to consider both these aspects. However, instead of doing so in an exhaustive way, it will trace a trajectory made of meaningful clues that characterise fashion as the history and memory of the body.

The starting point for this consideration is a vision of the relationship between fashion and time, presented by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892– 1940) in some of his writings. In particular, the first quote derives from his notes on nineteenth-century Paris, which have been gathered in the Passagenwerk:

Walter Benjamin uses these words in his notes on nineteenth-century Paris to sketch the image of time upon which he founds his conception of history, understood as a discontinuous relationship between past and present. With the term Aktualität, Benjamin defines a mode of the present within which the past is newly meaningful. What takes place is an act of ‘presentification’, an appreciation of seemingly lost motifs through which it becomes possible to ‘ignite’ what lived as ‘explosive material’ in the past.