The Modern Rag-Picker

The ambiguous nature of the relationship bet- ween art, and more so fashion and modernity was mentioned by the poet Charles Baudelaire in an 1859 essay entitled Le Peintre de la vie moderne (The modern painter). Fashion reflects the appearance of a given moment, “its morals”, its passions”, an appearance in which the observer can grasp the invariable “eternal element”, or, in other words, a poetic manner in which to manufacture the permanent from the ephemeral. Modernity goes hand in hand with the urbanisation and industrialisation that modify a number of space-time elements such as speed, mobility and communication. This paradigm shift was analysed by a number of European sociologists at the turn of the century. Emile Durkheim analysed the division of work in modern production process, Max Weber, the mechanism of disenchantment in a rationalised world, Ferdinand Tönnies, the mutation of the individual with, as a corollary, the rise in individualism.