L’Empire de l’éphémère. La mode et son destin dans les sociétés modernes

Author:  Gilles Lipovetsky

Publishing House: Folio Essais

Publication House: September 6, 1991

Description :How to understand the appearance of fashion in the West at the end of the Middle Ages? How can we explain the versatility of elegance that is not found in any other civilization? What are the great historical moments, the great structures that determined the social organization of appearances? It is to these questions that this book tries to answer, the logic of social distinction appearing far from being the all-purpose key to frivolous inconstancy.But fashion, today, is no longer an aesthetic and peripheral luxury of collective life, it has become a general process at work in the social whole that controls the production and consumption of objects, advertising, culture, the media, ideological and social changes. We entered a second phase of the secular life of the democracies organized more and more by the seduction, the ephemeral, the marginal differentiation. Beyond the worries that makes raise a society dedicated to the obsolescence of the things and the sense, the “finished fashion” appears, paradoxically and not without ambiguity, as an instrument of consolidation of the liberal societies, unedited vehicle of the Enlightenment and the modernizing dynamics.