GEORG SIMMEL’S FASHION ANALYSIS

MARCH 10, 2015 ELLENCHARLWOOD LEAVE A COMMENT

Simmel, Georg. (1957). Fashion. The American Journal of Sociology, 62,(6). 541-558. http://www.jstor.org
Summary- Georg Simmel’s journal on Fashion suggest that there is dualism within everybody. This dualism
starts with our soul and is prominent in every aspect of life including fashion. There are two tendencies in
society generalization and specialization. Everyone wants to adopt into society but be individualized from
its demands. The generalization tendency is upheld by those who imitate. Imitation is a way for people to
pass the responsibility of creativity off. They can fit into the society and social situations without having to
worry about making choices. The other side of the spectrum people specialize and want to be an individual
because to a certain standard imitation is frowned upon in society. Fashion relates to this dualism because
it gives people the opportunity to both imitate and differentiate. Fashion has always separated the social
classes based off of this struggle to imitate and differentiate. Those of certain classes unionize through
fashion, but also differentiate themselves completely from other groups. We can see this in the upper and
middle classes through the trickledown theory. Simmel discusses how once a fashion has reached the
masses, the lower class, the upper class will completely turn away from that fashion and adopt something
new. The differentiation of social classes also happens within social groups that are closely linked, but
refuse to be considered the same. They use fashion to promote these differences. Another dual part of
fashion that is essential for its production is the need to unionize and the need for isolation. These two
factors can be seen and expressed through the isolation and unionizing of different social, religious, and
cultural groups throughout history. Another two ideas that represent fashion imitation is the either
obedience of a fashion or complete rejection of the fashion. Both are an imitation of a certain group
however the complete rejection also satisfies the need to individualize and be different that Simmel
originally explains. In the article Simmel discusses many factors of how fashion relates to the inner and
outer struggles that people have. The most important being the struggle to balance fitting in with standing
out. Fashion either helps or hurts this struggle, and revolves around it in itself. Without the need for
satisfying both desires there would be no fashion.
Claim- “fashion represents nothing more than one of the many forms of life by the aid of which we seek to
combine in uniform spheres of activity the tendency towards social equalization with the desire for
individual differentiation and change”
“fashion is merely a product of social demands”
Fashion comes about because of social needs and wants. In Simmel’s article he discusses how we want
fashion so that we can differentiate classes and social standings. If we didn’t have this need for social
differentiation then we would have no need for fashion.
“attempts to combine the interest in duration, unity, and similarity with that in change, specialization, and
peculiarity.”
This relates to the claim in stating how fashion attempts to make everyone similar. People want fashion so
that they can differentiate from other groups so that they fit in with their own social group or class.
“fashion, is a product of class distinction…the double function of which consists in revolving within a given
circle and at the same time emphasizing it as separate from others”
Again this sentence summarizes how Simmel thinks that we use fashion to make ourselves different from
one another so that we can be the same as certain people.
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Georg Simmel
By Ulrich Lehmann

The German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel was born in Berlin on 1 March
1858 to assimilated Jewish parents. Between 1876 and 1881 Simmel studied history and
philosophy in Berlin. His doctoral thesis (1881) and post-doctoral dissertation (1885) both
dealt with Immanual Kant. His rhetorical gift proved to be successful with academic and
nonacademic audiences alike, and his lectures became social events. In 1890 he married
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the writer Gertrud Kinel. A year later they had their only son, Hans. In 1894 he published
the essay "The Problem of Sociology," which inaugurated a separate social science.
Simmel and his wife were at the center of cultural circles in Berlin; their friends included
the poets Rainer Maria Rilke and Stefan George as well as the sculptor Auguste Rodin. In
1903 his essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life" constituted an early study of urban
modernity. Latent anti-Semitism, reservations about the academic validity of sociological
studies, and envy of Simmel's social popularity hindered his professional progress in
Berlin, and in 1914 he accepted a call to the university in Strasbourg, where he died on 26
September 1918.
Simmel's discussion of fashion, significant for its early date within academic discourse, its conceptual rigor, as
well as its metaphysical breadth are defined by his simultaneous adherence to philosophical tradition and the
formation of a sociological methodology. Accordingly, he viewed fashion both as an abstract concept that
generates and influences cultural perception and as a defining factor in social and interpersonal relations.
Simmel's beginnings as a neo-Kantian philosopher prepared his view of cognition as a biological process of
adaptation by human beings to their environment, a view which is not only situated in a scientific (neo-
Darwinian) discourse but also extended to culture-intellectual as well as sensory- within a contemporary (modern
and urban) environment. Simmel defined the truth within expressions of reality pragmatically through its
appropriateness for living practice. This led him to the emerging discipline of sociology, which developed the
ground for direct application of such concepts to sociopolitical existence. His precursors herein were Auguste
Comte, Herbert Spencer, and Gabriel Tarde, and among his contemporaries were Ferdinand Tönnies, Werner
Sombart, Émile Durkheim, and Marcel Mauss.

Early Investigations
The methodological mix of metaphysics, economics, and social theory generated for Simmel an interest in
fashion, which he viewed as a theoretical and material field of investigation that offered space for emphatic,
almost literary, evocations of clothing but also for a formal description of (dress) codes as visual and structural
primers for social groups and settings. He began to investigate the topic in an 1895 essay titled "Zur Psychologie
der Mode" (On the psychology of fashion). In this essay, Kantian heritage accounts for a philosophical focus on
the subject-object relation. Simmel asks where cognition is founded, in the objects of cognition or in the cognitive
subject itself. He applies the question to fashion: Is cognition founded in the clothes we choose to wear, or is it the
human mind that chooses the clothes? In this, his first essay about fashion, cognition and self-awareness are
regarded as creative achievements of the subject, aided by guidelines extracted from the conglomerate of
experience.
Philosophy of Money

In his book The Philosophy of Money, Simmel returned to the progressive division of subject and object in
modernity, this time applying socioeconomic criteria. In this work Simmel devotes a telling passage to fashion,
describing how "the radical opposition between subject and object has been reconciled in theory by making the
object part of the subject's perception," partly through a practice that produces the object by a single subject for a
single subject. In modernity, mass production-with its division of labor-renders such reconciliation impossible.
The analogy that Simmel draws here is "the difference … between the modern clothing store, geared towards
utmost specialisation, and the work of the tailor whom one used to invite into one's home" (Simmel, p. 457). The
example is indicative of Simmel's approach. Not only does the object of fashion-more than any other object of
consumption that must remain at a distance from the body- allow for an introduction of sensuality and haptic
experience within theory, but it also applies abstract concepts directly to corporeality. In discussing the
production and consumption of fashion, Simmel leads the reader directly back to his or her own experience as a
wearer of clothes and as a modern consumer, thus generating an important link to personal experience that coined
contemporary philosophy (Simmel's subsequent term Lebensphilosophie [metaphysics of existence] would follow
French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson's élan vital, or nature's creative impulse).

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In 1904-1905 two extended essays by Simmel were published-one in English under the simple heading "Fashion"
and one in German titled "Philosophie der Mode" (Philosophy of fashion). They share a similar structure, but the
former set an empiricist or rationalist tone that would determine Simmel's reception in Anglo-Saxon social
sciences as a formal sociologist and precursor to the Chicago school of empiricist, urban sociology.

Akin to set theory, Simmel describes in his sociology the developmental process of social differentiation as a
confluence of the homogeneous segments of heterogeneous circles. In modern (especially urban) culture both
psychological and social differentiation are geared to minimizing physical friction and channeling the energy of
personal collisions into dynamic movement as an economic principle (e.g., competition). Fashion exemplifies this
process acutely. The complex mix within modern dressing between invention and imitation, between socially
sanctioned conformity for societal survival and necessary independence for personal gratification and the
formation of the self (even cognition), is found in all clothing rituals and codification. The abstract and
generalized tone with which fashion is debated makes Simmel's analyses still pertinent in the twenty-first century,
because he eschewed historicity, romanticism, or concreteness vis-à-vis sartorial styles.

Key Observations About Fashion

The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms

Two sets of his observations, in particular, render fashion a generic model both for the recognition of societal
procedures and a phenomenology of modernity itself. The first is the import of fashion by strangers from out-side
a given set or circle. Here the term "role-playing," which would become so significant for modern sociology, is
prefigured. In his essays Simmel analyzes how a style or appearance of dress undergoes a developmental process
of rejection to acceptance. "Because of their external origin," he wrote in 1904, "these imported fashions create a
special and significant form of socialization, which arises through mutual relation to a point without the circle. It
sometimes appears as though social elements, just like the axes of vision, converge best at a point that is not too
near.… Paris modes are frequently created with the sole intention of setting a fashion elsewhere" (Simmel; 1904,
p. 136). The methodological move from anthropology to economics here is characteristic for the formation of
early social theory. Also, the strong interest in temporal structures (partly influenced through Bergson's durée, the
natural milieu of a person's "deep self, or the true foundation of one's spiritual identity") and accelerated rhythm
of modernity leads Simmel to a contemplation of sartorial transitoriness.

In the last of his four essays on fashion, "Die Mode" (Fashion, 1911), he explains how wider acceptance and
distribution of a fashion herald its demise, since a widely accepted dress code no longer poses to the individual a
challenge that is associated with the constitutive process of fractious assimilation. Accordingly, a novel form or
style of clothing needs to be introduced to generate anew the dualities of innovation and imitation, social
separation and inclusion. As soon as fashion manages to determine the totality of a group's appearance-which has
to be its ultimate creative and economic aim-fashion will, owing to the logical contradiction inherent in its
characteristics, die and become replaced. And the more subjective and individualized a style of clothing is, the
quicker it perishes. For Simmel, this transitory character of fashion remains its essence and elevates its material
objects to transhistorical significance. "The question of fashion is not 'to be or not to be'," he concluded in 1911,
"… but it always stands on the watershed between past and future" (Simmel: 1911, p. 41).

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