"Dress of an Invisible Body": The Fashion in T. W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory

Abstract

Since the middle of the 19th century, intellectuals like Charles Baudelaire, in his essay “The Artist of Modern Life" and Georg Simmel, in his Philosophy of Fashion took fashion as a subject of their theoretical reflections on culture and society. In the decade of 1930 Walter Benjamin, mainly in his project of Paris’ passages, focused quite fruitfully on the role fashion played in the culture of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, pointing to the aspects both of alienating fetishism and of anti-ideological proximity of art. More than thirty years later, in his Aesthetic Theory, Theodor Adorno, taking into account the contributions of Baudelaire and Benjamin, approached the topic of fashion, considering, on one hand, its submission to the dictation of culture industry and, on the other hand, the possibility of what he calls “innervation" between fashion and the authentic art, through which this one takes advantage of being always up to date, avoiding nonetheless fashion's subservient attitude towards the culture industry.