Is Modest Fashion Modest?

Abstract

Fashion seems to be opening to a trend towards ethnic and multicultural content, and even to a modest fashion based on the desire to avoid attracting attention. The paper discusses the possibility that fashion has a social impact, contrasting it with Simmel’s “abstractness:” the claim that fashion has no reason and cannot have a reason – and if it does, this is not the reason why we follow it. Fashion goes by and this is its real content, beyond the forms it takes over time. The open question is whether a modest fashion can still be modest, or whether it has to give up its nature in order to be fashionable – and whether this is a price that is worth paying.

Keywords

• modest fashion
• volubility
• abstractness of fashion
• contingency
• ethnic fashion