![]() ![]() The nineteenth century saw the emergence of fashion as a process (or rather, a set of processes) characterized by constant, ongoing, and rapid alterations in clothing styles or ‘fashions’ (as the items themselves also came to be called). The industrialization and increased urbanization that characterized nineteenth-century Parisian life led to changes in clothing style that outpaced the slower, more gradual shifts in style of earlier centuries. ![]() Perhaps not surprisingly, this era of rapid transition was the period that gave rise to fashion both as a material object (for example, couture) and as a process (or a cycle of change). In the Foreword of The Arcades Project, 1 Walter Benjamin’s elaborate collection of literary fragments, the translators write that one of the purposes of Benjamin’s famously unfinished work was to ‘document as concretely as possible … the scene of revolutionary change that was the nineteenth century’ ( AP, 1999, p.xii). ![]()
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