Why it’s fashionable to quote Walter Benjamin

What do you imagine might be on the moodboard for the average high-fashion brand? Probably something like a Mugatu-esque mix of images including J cloths, Jane Birkin with a basket and Bella Hadid’s midriff, right? Now, images are making way for reams of text with statements such as: “Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past.”

Walter Benjamin, the Marxist German-Jewish philosopher and theorist, is behind those and many other erudite words. Benjamin, who killed himself in September 1940 when an attempt to flee Nazi Germany was thwarted, is the unlikely fashion reference being flashed around from Christian Dior to Gucci.

Maria Grazia Chiuri, the new designer at Dior, is a dab hand at slogans. It was her work that saw Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s words ‘“We should all be feminists” on a T-shirt make the Dior catwalk in September. Benjamin is namechecked in the press release for the house’s autumn/winter collection. Talking about Paris in the 19th century, it references the “artists and intellectuals described by Charles Baudelaire and later Walter Benjamin, that clothing for the first time became an essential component in the manifestation of one’s personality”. Perhaps, but Benjamin could be savage in his writing about fashion, once saying it was “never anything other than the parody of the motley cadaver”. Ouch.

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Such vitriol doesn’t stop designers, of course. For his AW16/17 menswear show, Gucci artistic director Alessandro Michele referenced Benjamin in the show notes, in particular his idea of the “constellation”: what happens as the past is brought together with “the now”. For Benjamin, the argument was about understanding history as not just some continuous past time but as something produced in the present. And it is a great trope for Michele – the kind of designer who might reference four – minimum – eras in one look. In this menswear collection, an average outfit could include a 50s printed blazer with an 80s bobble hat, a 60s blouse and 70s Scooby-Doo glasses.

Maybe as bedtime reading Michele is taking on the more than 1,000 pages of Benjamin’s posthumously published tome The Arcades Project, full of fragments of the philosopher’s notebooks. Actually, he might be better served by a much shorter essay: 1936’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In it, Benjamin discusses how art could keep its authenticity in a world where photography and cinema means that it can be replicated. Speaking of the “estrangement felt before one’s own image in the mirror”, he says, “the reflected image has become separable, transportable. And where is it transported? Before the public.” It sounds eerily prescient in the era of the social media – the selfie could be the logical conclusion of that reflection. No wonder his name speaks to this generation of creatives. A #walterbenjamin hashtag on a Kim Kardashian post is only a matter of time.