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Abstract

What is the essence of fashion? Gilles Lipovetsky claims that fashion as the original institution of history should not be left in the dark. In an attempt to capture its mechanism, he raises the following questions: how the fashion institution structured by the ephemeral and aesthetic fancy took place in the history; why the concept of fashion came into being chiefly and mostly in the West; how the age of reason and technicality came to be filled with unreason; and how we can explain the evolution of fashion developing into an almost perpetual system. Answering to these questions, Lipovetsky concludes that modern cultural values, the propensity for novelty and individualism among the rest, have played an important role in the history of fashion. I believe in the relevance and appropriateness of his analysis. Capitalizing on his theory of the birth and evolution of fashion, and applying the systems of fashion to various fields, I analyze the pragmatic concepts of fashion in terms of polyphony and irony. After a brief look at the conceptual rudiments of polyphony, I examine the theory of polyphony proposed by Ducrot, who defined it as a coexistence of the different voices of the enunciators. I then go into the theories of irony advanced by Ducrot and Kerbat-Orecchioni. While Ducrot thinks of irony as voices of opposition between the enunciators, Kerbat-Orecchioni considers it to be a discrepancy between the sentence meaning and its context. Applying the amalgamated concepts of irony and polyphony to the analysis of Lipovetzky's The Empire of the Ephemeral, I try to demonstrate how fashion represents various voices of modern values, stressing that the fashion institution and other disciplines can be best analyzed in light of the concept of irony characterizing the oppositions and the contradictions between the different voices.