Furukawa tomo talking about fashion and Christian Louboutin shoes

furukawa tomo (furukawatomo) - Identi.ca

　　Furukawa tomo talking about fashion and Christian Louboutin shoes

　　Modernity liberated us from tradition, but it made us slaves of a new imperative, one precisely formulated by Arthur Rimbaud towards the end of Une saison en enfer: ‘We have to be utterly modern.’6 The idea of ‘the new’ is relatively new Christian Louboutin shoes. Medieval people, for example, did not think in such terms. Some clarification is perhaps called for at this point. Naturally, people have always been aware of certain things being newer than others, and there are examples of the use of the Latin expression moder nus (‘new’ or ‘recent’, the basis of the concept ‘modernity’) all the way back to the sixth century, when it was used to distin guish between a heathen age and a new Christian era. It was, however, not until much later that the distinction between ‘new’ and ‘old’ attained widespread use.

　　An indication that a new understanding of time and history was emerging is that people became aware of the fact that anachronisms existed. In paintings from the Middle Ages we see Christian Louboutin shoes, for example, biblical figures being depicted in medieval attire. The Holy Family could be depicted wearing clothes that would have suited an Italian merchant’s family. There does not seem to have been any clear awareness of the fact that the figures depicted had used ‘old’ clothes, while they had been depicted with ‘new’ clothes. The conception of ‘the new’ did not become widespread until the advent of the Enlightenment during the eighteenth century. The philosopher Gianni Vattimo points out that modernity is an era in which being modern becomes a value in itself or, rather, where being modern becomes the fundamental value to which all others are referred.7 More precisely, being ‘modern’ becomes synonymous with being ‘new’. Modern man has a ‘pro-neo’ turn of mind. Practically all fashion theorists about Christian Louboutin shoes stress ‘the new’ – with a steady stream of ‘new’ objects replacing those that were ‘new’ but have now become ‘old’ – as a basic characteristic of fashion. I am aware of only one writer who claims the opposite, the architect Adolf Loos.

　　Paradoxically enough, Loos considers something really modern only if Christian Louboutin shoes has duration: only objects that are fashionable over a lengthy period of time deserve the term ‘fashion’.8 If something goes out of fashion after just one season, it has, according to Loos, only pretended to be modern, without actually being so. Loos also believes that objects without decoration would be far more aesthetically durable than those that are richly ornamented, and that men’s fashion ought therefore to replace women’s fashion.9 He inscribes fashion in a concept of progress seen as an approach towards an increasingly pure form of expression, and fashion becomes complete when it has done away with all ornamentation and change. Christian Louboutin shoes also claims that the person who differs least from everyone else will be the most fashionable.10 Loos’s understanding of the concept of fashion, however, is so idiosyncratic that I do not intend to take further account of it. Kant is perhaps the first fashion theorist of any real stature to emphasize the new as an essential characteristic of fashion: ‘Novelty makes fashion alluring.’11 While earlier theorists had linked fashion to beauty, Kant emphasizes that it does not have to have anything to do with beauty at all but that, on the contrary, it ‘degenerate(s) into something fantastic and even detestable’, since it is more a question of competition than a matter of taste.