Slade Toby. Japanese Fashion. A Cultural History

Berg, 2009. — 228 p. — ISBN 978 1 84788 253 0The central intellectual concerns of this book are twofold: fi rstly the importance and meaning of sartorial modernity in Japan, and secondly what this particular geo-graphically limited experience of modernity implies for our understanding of fashion in general. Far from being a hit-and-miss sideshow in the great circus of human thought, clothing fashions operate in such a way as to echo the larger mechanisms of aesthetic change and are indeed central to the processes and legacy of modernity.
This book hopes to demonstrate that there are other modernities, and different fash-ion histories beyond the canon of European and American dress narratives, which dominate nearly all interpretations of the practices, styles, institutions and herme-neutic structures of clothing in the modern age. The question of whether the aesthetic needs of modern life are grown out of one cultural tradition or whether they are found by all cultural traditions under certain circumstances of developmental con-sciousness is still open, and whatever hierarchies can be concluded from the answer are still of social importance. Even the questions raised by a notion of developmental consciousness—that certain technological, intellectual and social conditions com-bine to engender a fundamentally different state of consciousness in modernity than had existed before—are not settled questions.1 The question of social relations onto-logically preceding individual consciousness is repeated within fashion theory and is especially important to questions of clothing fashions in a period of great changes in social relations such as modernity.2 To look seriously at art objects of the everyday, such as clothes—their discourse and practices, their meaning-bearing forms and their codes of internal and exter-nal interpretation—is an essential, and often neglected, component of any study of modern aesthetics. Insofar as clothing and the processes by which tastes, styles and connotations of it transform—that is to say fashion—can serve as representations of modernity, and indeed as a model for how the dynamics of a modern consciousness operate, then any humble conclusions about clothing fashion may have wider appli-cation. The Japanese example is examined here for the particular reason that it runs contrary to traditional fashion theory explanations of the sequence and causality of sartorial modernity. And the accuracy of those explanations of modernity is vital for any representation of a condition of postmodernity and necessary to test, for better or for worse, the validity of our current theories of postmodern fashion.