By understanding imitation as a characteristic of fashion among many others, we learn that it requires a certain kind of social system for imitation to occur or for imitation to be ‘allowed’ to occur. Imitation is something that must be permitted by authority, which in turn implies the thrust toward equality that characterizes a modern democratic social system (Spencer 1966[1896]).
In medieval and early modern Europe, sumptuary laws prohibited people in the subordinate ranks from living or dressing like those above them. However, as industrialism in a less hierarchical society made wealth and ranks more flexible, people became wealthy enough to compete in style of living with those above them in rank.
This development signifies that fashion both requires a certain degree of mobility and fluidity within a society and promotes a more egalitarian society and erases class boundaries. Fashion phenomena occur only in a particular social context that allows social mobility. Immobility in the distribution of vestimentary signs always corresponds to immobility in social structures (Perrot 1994).
Prior to the sixteenth century, there was minimal mobility in Europe where social roles and statuses were rigidly fixed, often by law and certainly by custom. Thus fashion did not emerge in society. According to Tarde, Spencer, Simmel and Toennies, fashion functions as an equalizing mechanism because imitation is one of the means to reducing the inequality, suppressing caste, class and national barriers.
The lower strata gradually rise, step by step to the highest ranks. Through assimilation and imitation, inequality is no longer aristocratic but democratic inequality (Tarde 1903). Thus social superiority is no longer hereditary but individual. Therefore, the origins of fashion lie in the origins of modernity with the growth of industrial capitalism. Koenig’s discussion of modernity and the link between the emergence of fashion and democratization is compelling.
Certainly, the radical difference between the old upper class and the lower classes has disappeared. But this does not mean that the minor differences need also disappear. On the contrary . . . minor differences can be felt far more strongly when general equality has won the day. It could be said that in the modern mass civilization of the advanced industrial societies it is not the great contrasts, but the delicate differences that are effective; the delicate difference is the most perfect expression of the increasing democratization of society. This applies not only to politics but also to fashion consumption.
Thus fashion plays a significant role in the manifestation of subtle differences. The class boundary has become blurry, and people wish to make subtle distinctions in order to differentiate themselves from others. This is what fashion in the modern world has become.
Because there are more opportunities for everyone, the competition is more democratic and the right to participate in the competition is prevalent; at the same time, fashion as a concept and clothing-fashion as a phenomenon and practice emerge in many societies.
As Simmel points out: People like fashion from outside and such foreign fashions assume greater values within the circle, simply because they did not originate there. The exotic origin of fashions seems strongly to favor the exclusiveness of the groups which adopt them . . . This motive for foreignness which fashion employs in its socializing endeavors, is restricted to higher civilization. (1957[1904]: 545–6)
The newness which, as noted earlier, is the essence of fashion is the typical condition of modernity and postmodernity. The desire for change is characteristic of cultural life in industrial capitalism, which fashion expresses so well (Wilson 1985), but at the same time postmodern society is a society driven to create, not only novelty, but a perpetual desire for need and for endless difference (Barnard 1996).
Whether analyzing modernity or postmodernity, one thing that analysts all tend to agree on is that it is fashion, and not dress or clothing, that is the topic under consideration. The same characteristics of fashion are being used to exemplify both modernity and postmodernity.
Furthermore, modern and postmodern societies are both societies in which mobility is possible and desirable, and as Baudrillard (1981, 1993[1976]) explains, fashion appears only in socially mobile societies, although not all the mobile, open-class societies have fashion.
Baudrillard emphasizes fashion as a modern phenomenon: ‘Fashion only exists in the framework of modernity . . . In politics, in technology, in art, in culture, modernity defines itself by the rate of change tolerated by the system without really changing anything in the essential order . . . Modernity is a code and fashion is its emblem.’
Furthermore, he states: The formal logic of fashion imposes an increased mobility on all the distinctive social signs. Does this formal mobility of signs correspond to a real mobility in social structures (professional, political, cultural)? Certainly not. Fashion – and more broadly, consumption, which is inseparable from fashion – masks a profound social inertia. It itself is a factor of social inertia, insofar as the demand for real social mobility frolics and loses itself in fashion, in the sudden and often cyclical changes of objects, clothes and ideas.
And to the illusion of change is added the illusion of democracy. (1981: 78) For Baudrillard, fashion is one of those institutions that best restores cultural inequality and social discrimination, establishing them under the pretense of abolishing them. Fashion is governed by the social strategy of class.