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Fashion is not exactly considered the most profound of cultural expressions. That image is gradually changing, however, thanks to the advent of fashion studies. Critical reflection on fashion is growing. Other arts could take a lesson from this. Contrary to the usual evaluation of cultural objects it appears thatart merely ‘dresses’ society or history with claims of absolute understanding, while fashion in its incompleteness represents underlying principles in modernity.– Ulrich Lehmann, Tigersprung, 2002It is remarkable how many studies on fashion start out with an excuse or a defence of why the author is examining a discipline such as fashion. They begin by noting how little is written about fashion and then present their arguments about why it is in fact an interesting research subject. Those studying fashion apparently still have to explain themselves to their readers.Until recently, from a theoretical perspective, fashion was indeed fallow ground, but in the last three decades, numerous serious studies have been published and, in London, New York and Sweden, universities have even set up departments of theoretical fashion studies. In the museums as well, fashion is no longer perceived as a successive series of historic styles, but as a vital cultural phenomenon, which can be thematically presented and explained. Nonetheless, all of these initiatives have to date done little to change general opinion. In wider circles, fashion is still seen as a superficial medium where only the exterior surface counts. Many people cannot imagine what insights a study of fashion could possibly produce. What more can it be than the length of a skirt, or who gets to sit in the front row in Paris?This disparaging approach has to do with the fact that until recently, fashion was the exclusive domain of women’s magazines. It was even invented for them. Few are aware today that in the 19th century, it was in precisely these publications that such writers as Charles Baudelaire and Stephane Mallarmé published their serious essays. As a result, fashion is seen as a hobby or avocation for women who have nothing to do with their time and have no serious substance to their lives. Fashion is for idle souls and those victims of fashion who chase after the latest trends and take their identity from the fact that they are ‘in style’ and up to date on the latest vogue.It is precisely this phenomenon that is such a fundamental, existential characteristic of our society. Having taste – knowing how to clothe yourself – is a vital factor in our modern visual culture, in which class and status are no longer by definition determined by background, but are continually being redefined in a perpetually shifting, changing system of fashion symbols. According to the philosopher, Gilles Lipovetsky, this is what makes fashion so interesting. Fashion is the ultimate expression of what we have come to perceive as our modern culture and society. Fashion plays an essential role in our development into modern and flexible citizens, able to adapt quickly. Modern fashion has even produced a new individual: the modern person with no deep bonds, a mobile being with a fluctuating personality and tastes that are able to adapt to anything they encounter. Here, the fashion individual is in fact the reincarnation of the modernity that taught humankind to be psychologically flexible. We use clothing to rewrite our bodies. We give them new form and expression. Every day, clothing and fashion help us in the performance of ‘me’, our self-constructed identity. In this sense in our lives, fashion functions as an ideal. It is an important contribution to self-fulfilment. Fashion and our clothing culture are a reflection of essential social processes in our civilization. Fashion clearly has elements in common with other applied disciplines, such as architecture and design. Like design, fashion is a part of consumer society and industry, but unlike design and architecture, for example, fashion is always directly associated with the human body. We wear clothing on our skin. Without it, we do not even have a visible identity. Much of what makes us original individuals is in our clothing. We are highly sensitive to what we and others wear. It is intimate. By identifying and analyzing our behaviour in how we dress ourselves, we reveal ourselves, and this is precisely why people are so predisposed to deny the importance of clothing and fashion.We also have trouble dealing with the irrational aspects of fashion – referred to by Ulrich Lehmann as the incomplete and the fragmented. Where modernity is all about the rationalism and functionality of the product, in fashion, it seems to be exclusively about ‘changing itself’. Fashion seems to focus solely on the new and to recognize only an internal logic of its own: short skirts follow long skirts and vice versa. Attempts to make fashion a part of modernist functionality or part of a total concept, the way that several early 20th-century architects tried to do with dresses adapted to their building interiors have to date always failed. Even the rational, functional logic that the Russian avant-garde, such as Liubov Popova and Varvana Stepanova, tried to incorporate in their work in the early 1920s never managed to get off the ground. Nonetheless, since the 1980s, with such designers as Comme des Garçons and Martin Margiela, there is no doubt that fashion is more than able to deal with ideas and concepts. Theorists have demonstrated that fashion functions as a cultural reflection of society. In Sex and Suits, Anne Hollander convincingly describes how men’s suits flawlessly reflected the cultural and social changes of the 19th century. In The Empire of Fashion, Gilles Lipovetsky illustrates how fashion is fundamentally bound to democracy and shows how fashion manages to visualize various processes of democratization. In Tigersprung, Ulrich Lehmann reveals how fashion expresses the underlying principles of modernity. More recently, sociologist Sophie Woodward, in Why Women Wear What They Wear, demonstrated how contemporary street fashion has become an inseparable part of the fashion industry and has nothing at all in common with the anti-fashion of the youth of the 1960s. Otto van Busch, finally, in his thesis, Abstract Hactivism, makes it clear that avant-garde culture and fashion have today become a do-it-yourself hacking and recycling of the major brand names. Instead of being superficial, fashion is perhaps the most complex of all possible academic research subjects. It is a discipline whose fleeting, changing character makes it appear to escape all identification and meaning, but at the same time, it directly reflects all of society’s cultural changes. For this reason, fashion deserves an interdisciplinary approach, preferably by way of multiple methodologies. Only by seeing it in its full complexity will we learn to understand fashion as a major cultural phenomenon. José Teunissen is lecturer in design at ArtEZ, the Netherlands, and Visiting Professor at the University of the Arts in London. This article is an edited version of a lecture presented on January 14, 2010, at a New Year’s reception for the Vrije Universiteit/Stichting Premsela, Amsterdam.