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P. 242
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tural constructedness, a history of clothing and dressing up, and not only
or simply or not at all, a natural necessity, a primordial basis or a perennial
character. Unsurprisingly in an author also interested in researching the
opera, this culturalist problem is vividly illustrated drawing on Mozart’s
18th-century operas as instances of exemplary comedy of disguises in all
its incredible, transformative stage realism. The point of disguises taken
on by Mozart’s stage characters is not a simple exhibition of differences in
class, status, gender, body etc. in society in the Baroque, Rococo, or Clas-
sicist periods, differences already imprinted onto ‘appropriate dress,’ that
is, in the social constitution and construction of clothing as an authentic
copy or the source of a person’s appearance, but rather the fact that dis-
guise has the power to establish the social criteria of clothing. With this
subversive insight, a new ideological dimension becomes visible in the an-
thropomorphistic fashion imperative in the vein of ‘clothing making the
man:’ a Biblical dimension of ‘paradisiac fashion’ involving the relation-
ships between fashion and body, clothing and dress-up, face and mask,
person and style. Indeed, there is a brief analytic detour to Adam and Eve
in their Biblical paradise to show that the first prehistoric people to wear
clothes, in investing effort in covering their bodily surfaces, did not do so
only, or at all, to fulfil their ‘natural needs,’ but merely to communicate,
that is, to fulfil a symbolic wish to perform themselves in relation to others,
with communication always already a key inherent attribute of the cloth-
ing constitution of the human being. Allegorically speaking, not only were
human beings in paradise obliged to dress, they were already obliged to
dress up in order to communicate with the divine instance. Furthermore,
by starting to communicate via clothing, they also created the conditions
and the need for continually dressing up. This was the symbolic birth of
fashion as a rapidly-changing system of changing clothes and dressing up.
In short: not only does the Biblical ‘fashion’ advice already prescribe the
logic of fashion as a discontinuous continuity; it also serves up the very
first fashion transgression (Adam and Eve being obliged not only to dress,
but also, already, to dress up). From the Biblical paradise, the text leaps
forward to socialist fashion, to show how paradisiac and socialist fashion
share the same mythological problem: both stem from a particular kind
of ahistorical denial or rejection of previous fashion. In other words, both
are specific ideological constructs, based on ex nihilo creationism. In the
Bible, paradisiac fashion emerges as a fashion unaware of any history of
human clothing, while socialist fashion emerges by means of a complete
break in continuity between pre-socialist and socialist fashion. Through
242
tural constructedness, a history of clothing and dressing up, and not only
or simply or not at all, a natural necessity, a primordial basis or a perennial
character. Unsurprisingly in an author also interested in researching the
opera, this culturalist problem is vividly illustrated drawing on Mozart’s
18th-century operas as instances of exemplary comedy of disguises in all
its incredible, transformative stage realism. The point of disguises taken
on by Mozart’s stage characters is not a simple exhibition of differences in
class, status, gender, body etc. in society in the Baroque, Rococo, or Clas-
sicist periods, differences already imprinted onto ‘appropriate dress,’ that
is, in the social constitution and construction of clothing as an authentic
copy or the source of a person’s appearance, but rather the fact that dis-
guise has the power to establish the social criteria of clothing. With this
subversive insight, a new ideological dimension becomes visible in the an-
thropomorphistic fashion imperative in the vein of ‘clothing making the
man:’ a Biblical dimension of ‘paradisiac fashion’ involving the relation-
ships between fashion and body, clothing and dress-up, face and mask,
person and style. Indeed, there is a brief analytic detour to Adam and Eve
in their Biblical paradise to show that the first prehistoric people to wear
clothes, in investing effort in covering their bodily surfaces, did not do so
only, or at all, to fulfil their ‘natural needs,’ but merely to communicate,
that is, to fulfil a symbolic wish to perform themselves in relation to others,
with communication always already a key inherent attribute of the cloth-
ing constitution of the human being. Allegorically speaking, not only were
human beings in paradise obliged to dress, they were already obliged to
dress up in order to communicate with the divine instance. Furthermore,
by starting to communicate via clothing, they also created the conditions
and the need for continually dressing up. This was the symbolic birth of
fashion as a rapidly-changing system of changing clothes and dressing up.
In short: not only does the Biblical ‘fashion’ advice already prescribe the
logic of fashion as a discontinuous continuity; it also serves up the very
first fashion transgression (Adam and Eve being obliged not only to dress,
but also, already, to dress up). From the Biblical paradise, the text leaps
forward to socialist fashion, to show how paradisiac and socialist fashion
share the same mythological problem: both stem from a particular kind
of ahistorical denial or rejection of previous fashion. In other words, both
are specific ideological constructs, based on ex nihilo creationism. In the
Bible, paradisiac fashion emerges as a fashion unaware of any history of
human clothing, while socialist fashion emerges by means of a complete
break in continuity between pre-socialist and socialist fashion. Through
242
