Fashion has often been presented as a “constant change” and modernist perspectives have celebrated and criticised it as a radical shift of sensibility based on craziness, immanence and loss of memory. Craze was an up-to-date term in the fashion culture of the early 20th-century decades, used either to refer to fashion’s fast and viral spread, or to highlight its excessive, weird and exciting aspects. The paper puts the concept of craze under critical and historical scrutiny, with the aim of exploring and better understanding the relationships between fashion and what Elizabeth Wilson has called ‘modernity’s other’ – aspects extraneous to a constructive, progressive, and rational vision of modernity. Focusing on the early 20th-century tango craze, the paper questions the capacity of fashion to shape sensibilities. It suggests craze as a fruitful approach to investigate into the emotional aspects of fashion and modernism at the beginning of the 20th century and to understand its 21st-century legacy. The analysis carried out in the paper allows to reflect on how fashion specifically constructs its meanings, on the reasons why these latter are not always acknowledged, and why fashion is accused to be void of any enhancing strategies.
The Craze in the Early Twentieth Century Fashion
VACCARI, ALESSANDRA
2014-01-01
Abstract
Fashion has often been presented as a “constant change” and modernist perspectives have celebrated and criticised it as a radical shift of sensibility based on craziness, immanence and loss of memory. Craze was an up-to-date term in the fashion culture of the early 20th-century decades, used either to refer to fashion’s fast and viral spread, or to highlight its excessive, weird and exciting aspects. The paper puts the concept of craze under critical and historical scrutiny, with the aim of exploring and better understanding the relationships between fashion and what Elizabeth Wilson has called ‘modernity’s other’ – aspects extraneous to a constructive, progressive, and rational vision of modernity. Focusing on the early 20th-century tango craze, the paper questions the capacity of fashion to shape sensibilities. It suggests craze as a fruitful approach to investigate into the emotional aspects of fashion and modernism at the beginning of the 20th century and to understand its 21st-century legacy. The analysis carried out in the paper allows to reflect on how fashion specifically constructs its meanings, on the reasons why these latter are not always acknowledged, and why fashion is accused to be void of any enhancing strategies.
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