Cultural Criticism Of Fashion

Fashion, in its modern sense of self-perpetuating and frivolous pursuit of an irrational crowd of women, first developed as a construct around the turn of the eighteenth century, coinciding with the rise of credit and capitalism in Western Europe. As one critic, Erin Mackie, points out, it was clearly a feminine construct. Fashion and finance were assigned the feminine attributes of irrationality, capriciousness, coquettishness, and mystery. Fashion also became interchangeable with dress at this time due to the clothing trade 's unsurpassed growth in England. Corresponding with this growth was a large increase in the rate of changes in dress fashions which prompted a great deal of commentary from critics. In the Tatler and the Spectator, Addison and Steele continually criticized fashions in dress as ridiculous and one that encouraged sexual indiscretions. Although some critics do approve of the feminine consumption of luxuries like fashionable dress, along with Addison and Steele they simultaneously judge women as "vile" and full of "deceit," participating in the distrustful discourse on women and fashion in the early eighteenth century. Because the cultural criticism of fashion entered into the male discourse of finance and social reform, fashion did not simply signify a frivolous female sphere of consumption; it also represented ambivalence and anxiety about femininity and commerce, particularly about the effects of consumption on women. A trait shared by fashion,