A Comparative Study On Consumption Fashion From Modernity To Postmodernity

Consumption in today's society is not only an economic phenomenon but also a spectacle of culture. The close contact between consumption and culture, as the thesis tries to prove, is one of the consequences caused by innovation of fashion industry and direction of the mass media.Studies on fashion are generally boiled down to interpretation of concrete fashion phenomena. Georg Simmel, the German philosopher and sociologist, in his brochure the Philosophy of Fashion takes fashion as a whole of both objective and subjective manifestations of popular culture to explore the totality of fashion from sociological perspective and helps us to shift our gaze away from the search for independent fashion phenomena to cultural nature of fashion as a whole. Simmel's analysis reveals fashion as a cultural form of consumption and expression of modernity.Compared to his other works, the short book the Philosophy of Fashion catches less attention among those who study Simmel. His study on fashion is, however, by no means out of date today, but as timely as it was written and serves like a guidebook in fashion studies. Contemporary theories directly or indirectly share some similarities with Simmel on the theme of fashion. In postmodern culture, which takes consumption culture and the mass media as its dominant features in today's western society, Simmel's argument begins to show its insufficiency and inadequacy ininterpreting some new developments in fashion.That comes up as the starting point of this thesis: to attempt to search through the development of consumption culture theories; to assure that Simmel's study is not out dated yet; to do a comparative study between Simmel's fashion of modernity and postmodern studies on fashion and consumption by theorists like Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard and Mike Featherstone, for the purposes of supplementing Simmel's study on fashion of modernity and exploring fashion once again as a whole being in postmodern conditions.The thesis includes an introduction, three chapters and an epilogue. Chapter one attempts to clarify the concept of fashion, under which the thesis interprets Simmel's the Philosophy of Fashion by summarizing it in three paradoxes of fashion, and describes the chronicle development of consumption culture theories which are related to fashion from modernity to postmodernity and reaches the starting point of this thesis on fashion studies. Chapter two focuses on postmodernity as rebellion against modernity. The traits of Simmel's modernity fashion are put in comparison with fashion studies under postmodern conditions. The thesis puts great emphasis on chapter three by comparing two different research modes of fashion studies between Simmel's sociological approach and Barthes and Baudrillard's semiotic approach and doing a parallel analysis of the postmodern consumption culture theories in present western society to see how postmodern consumption study develops consumption of modernity. The final conclusion part generalizes the arguments in the previous chapters, summarizes the essence of postmodern fashion and tries to tell the importance of fashion studies in consumption culture by relating it with China, a nation on her way to develop consumption under both ideologies of modernity and postmodernity.