The first two chapters prepared the theoretical ground for the dialectic of fashion and materialism. The first looked at the way in which political economy has used fashion to explain and critique cyclical renewal as well as the relationship between production and consumption; the second explored how such a critique has been extended to structuring anew the understanding of history as written. In the present chapter I want to move on to writing fashion more particularly; to the representation of textiles as text under the auspices of an internalised and originally self-referential fashion system, in which the written word became forced by socio-economic and cultural demands to adhere to a rule of constantly changing novelties (ideas, commodities, mores). Here, materialism, as an approach to simultaneously assessing objects via their materiality and economic position, is used to explain a structure in which the artist is forced to confront the material value of her or his writing, and must consider how such a forced confrontation can be made creatively productive, either by a conspicuous following of trends, an ironic comment on the system, or by its subversion. I want to show how such acts of confrontation were self-reflexive, due to the already established parameters for artistic practice in modernity, as well as the subjective character of the chosen texts, which were carefully designed to emulate, satirise and play with visual as well as semantic styles and trends.

In this third chapter the reading becomes more literal but at the same time more abstract. On the one hand I am looking at texts, not at textiles. On the other hand, the genre and type of texts – on fashion, dress and clothing – were designed/written as objects/products that have to be understood for their cultural position and not simply for their semantic content. In this context the conceptual pairing of materialism and fashion becomes manifest in the attempts to form clothes into words, sentences and narratives, whereby the endeavours veer towards formal experiments in literature that approximate fashion as a concept: as an absolutely contemporary, constantly changing expression in close proximity to the body. Thereby the subject–object relation – the more abstract argument in this chapter – can be anchored concretely in manifestations that are current and more commonly understood.