Fashion as spatial disorder: German conservatism and the reordering of dress

From the Renaissance onward, German conservatism has defended space, a locus of stability, against the temporalization associated with Western European modernity. Attempts to map nations and occupations onto an atlas of changeless types were ultimately thwarted by social and technical change, and because it so easily spreads across classes and territories, fashion most readily registered this temporal erosion. But fashion simultaneously undermines and affirms timeless identities: the appeal of each individual trend – whether Georgian banyans, Impressionist kimonos or Victorian smoking fez – springs precisely from its origin beyond the reach of fashion and of modern temporality. The Romantic imaginings of German nationalists recognized fashion's paradoxical dependence on timeless identities, and sought to redirect this modern longing for the exotic timeless, towards an eternal German essence projected onto a changeless but spatially differentiated vernacular.