Fashions on a Collective Scale: Walter Benjamin and the Figures of Women in the Modern City

Abstract

This article mainly draws on the Konvolut B [Fashion] from the Book of Passages (Das Passagen-Werk) written between 1927 and 1940 and published posthumously. It reveals one of the phenomena of the infernal chain of modernity and capitalism: fashion.
Far from being a notion linked to clothing, ornament, or adornment, to woman or women, Benjamin succeeded in demystifying fashion by revealing its internal characteristics: that of being linked to the past, to tradition in order to introduce an innovation that will eventually expire in order to be reborn, like the continuum of history, in a new fashion.
If fashion is introduced through the city, what role did the city play and what links are there around the figures of women in this Konvolut? We propose to unravel this articulation that would make the German philosopher's writing a highly suggestive revelation: that of finding in fashion a barrier erected by the upper classes to distinguish themselves from the lower classes, just as Haussmann did in the city of Paris to limit the action of the barricades.