What Did the Victorian Man Say about Kanye

At the 2014 Yahoo Festival, Kanye West brought to the stage a Maison Margiela diamond-encrusted mask. It was a spectacular show of fashion. However, imagine what a Victorian man would say to this display. What would he think?

This question is not meant to criticize Kanye. Rather, it’s intended to hook you into the real question I want to present: What marks the nature of the difference between Victorian fashion and our modern fashion?

One obvious person with a well-reasoned answer would be Jean Baudrillard. Think of old Victorian furniture—a chair with leather cushions, a curvy frame, extravagant decorations. It was an object of pure decoration. Now compare it to one of our modern chairs, like those you see in study rooms or coffee houses, with cushions engineered for comfort, often featuring rigid or minimalist frames and minimal decoration. The answer practically shouts at you: past designs focused on superficiality, while current designs emphasize functionality.

True, but that would be the superficial way of understanding it, as Baudrillard might argue. I think the real questions to ask are: What about function? What is the TRUE difference between a decorated chair and a "functional" chair?

If you look closely, our current "functional" design isn’t that functional. After all, why do we need something like a chair to sit comfortably? Why do we need to sit when we can lie down?

Thus, our need for functionality must not come from actual practicality; something more superficial and abstract must be at play. This "something" is what Baudrillard calls atmosphere.

Atmosphere, in short, is the sentiment that a group of symbols (in our case, objects of fashion) reflects. Think of the combination of a hearth and a comfortable sofa: it evokes a feeling of coziness. It’s not that the place is inherently cozy—it appears cozy, but only in the sense that we recognize it as such. Modern fashion, then, is the game where we manufacture such environments with fashion objects—clothes, furniture, and more. Furthermore, because we create our atmosphere, what constitutes it and what it reflects is entirely up to our agency. There’s a layer of freedom in it.

By contrast, past fashion followed a specific set of rules—taste. Taste, in short, refers to how the placement of objects fits within a specific rule, a moral rule of how to assemble a panache.

So, the difference between modern and past fashion lies in liberty: the old fashion of taste was dictated by power, while modern fashion is liberalized by individual choice. This explains the sharp contrast between past and current fashion: old rules regarding how one dressed according to gender (men with sharper silhouettes, women with softer ones, for example) and social status (upper-class men wearing softer materials like silk, and lower-class men wearing harder materials like denim) have withered away, replaced by a new dynamic.

Yet, it’s not the process of how fashion developed that sparks my interest. The deeper question is: Is this liberation true liberation?