Sex and Suits, by Anne Hollander/The Empire of Fashion, by Gilles Lipovetsky:

...James T. Fisher "Style is com-ing back in style...

...And while Lipovetsky rehearses many of the caveats first raised by Alexis de Tocqueville (who has apparently been only recently rediscovered in his native land) concerning the dangers of mass taste in a democracy, he tends to exaggerate-like so many born-again democratic intellectuals-the salvif-ic potential of popular culture...

...In place of hit or miss coercion there is communication...

...But where Lipovetsky-a French philosopher-links the modern "reign of fashion" to "cultural values that find their apotheosis in the democratic state," Anne Hollander is primarily interested in the fabric of fashion itself, in the look and feel of clothing through time, especially the tailored men's suit, which she exalts as "relentlessly modern, in the best classic sense...

...While men would achieve harmony with the aesthetic ideal (authentic fashion in the classic sense), women were subject first to a trivializing world of "'Fashion...

...translated by Catherine Porter Princeton University Press, 24.95, 276 pp...

...Hollander and Lipovetsky could use a dose of Altaian's irreverence toward the religion of fashion.e religion of fashion...

...An obsession with fashion makes for better citizens, claims Lipovetsky, because its emphasis on novelty and change fosters "a new type of kinetic, open personality" most valued in a consumerist democracy...

...Hollander turns the look around and argues that fashion is "a force with its own will, something that the collective desire of Western people brought into existence so that it might have an independent life...

...By 1800, Hollander writes, "the rough coat of dull cloth was gradually refined into an exquisitely balanced garment that fitted smoothly without wrinkles and buttoned without strain, to clothe what appeared to be the torso of a Greek athlete...

...Gilles Lipovetsky is similarly committed to a view of fashion as a potent cultural force that demands to be analyzed apart from "the heavy artillery of social class, from the dialectic of social distinction and class pretensions...

...Lipovetsky even argues that "consummate fashion also helps detach human beings from objects" because in a culture of commodities we freely replace goods that lose their utility: far from being mere emblems of status anxiety, the products of fashion serve to fulfill those individualist personalities maturing democracies depend upon...

...Hollander's rather idiosyncratic aesthetic philosophy is rooted in an ideal of the classic male form that the modern suit-that "perfect envelope"-has actually improved upon by presenting "the impression that the nude hero was even more natural when dressed...

...Foucault thought the notion of individualism was rendered meaningless in the triumph of totalitarian bureaucracies and such instruments as advertising...

...Hollander's tone is so devoutly upper-class and Anglophilic (the nineteenth-century English country gentleman remains her paragon of fashion), she might be properly deemed a restora-tionist in matters of grooming...

...Beginning in the late 1970s such ex-leftist scholars as Warren Susman began to champion the "culture of personality" and conceded that democratic capitalism had made good on most of its promises for the masses of Americans...

...Hollander has invented a school that could perhaps be dubbed "Seventh Avenue Platonism...

...Only when "the social agreements and sexual fantasies of men and women changed their terms" in this century could women seek to emulate the classical ideal in dress...

...The first major mechanism for the consistent social production of personality on display," he writes, "fashion has aes-theticized and individualized human vanity...

...So goes the re-frain from the old Jerry Lieber-Mike Stoller tune that sets the tone for Robert Altaian's film, Ready to Wear, a comedic look at the world of Parisian haute couture...

...These "new" thinkers promoted "the effort to conceptualize the individual," which may not sound like much until one considers their immediate intellectual antecedents, including Michel Foucault, whose baleful influence continues to be felt in the U.S., if not in France...

...never originally attributed to male tyranny, even by women, but to female idiocy," and then, in the age of haute couture, to male designers who "created" women as the embodiment of men's sexual fantasies...

...How can we continue to talk about alienation," he concludes, "at a time when, far from being dispossessed by objects, individuals are dispossessing themselves of objects...

...Lipovetsky counters that "advertising does nothing of the sort...

...The classic male suit as we know it began to appear in the late seventeenth century...

...In Ready to Wear Robert Altaian (whose films, the British scholar Paul Giles argues, bear strong traces of the auteur's "residual Catholicism") has his mavens of fashion continually stepping in organic matter as a counterpoint to their enchantment with artifice...

...Sex and Suits is ultimately concerned with a free-floating erotic desire for the perfect form of clothed appearance that Hollander seems to view as some primal engine of culture...

...If Sex and Suits and The Empire of Fashion are any indication, scholarly studies of a topic long deemed frivolous are coming into style as well...

...While she might not appreciate the comparison, her argument is reminiscent of Camille Paglia' s Sexual Personae, which forcefully estranged the aesthetics of sexuality from the social and economic contexts established by generations of less lyrically minded scholars...

...Hollander waxes ecstatic in her descriptions of men's fashion, whose persistent modernism "has always made it inherently more desirable than female dress...

...Lipovetsky is one of the "new French philosophers" whose works are being introduced to American audiences with some fanfare by a Princeton University Press series that includes The Empire of Fashion...

...In contrast to Hollander, Lipovetsky argues that "modern fashion is feminine in essence...

...in place of mechanistic training there is playful entertainment...

...But he shares her conviction that the reign of fashion represents a genuine desire for personal and creative freedom that cannot simply be manipulated...

...Both Sex and Suits and The Empire of Fashion remain vulnerable to charges they elevate the trivial to the level of metaphysics...

...it has succeeded in turning the superficial into an instrument of salvation, a goal of existence...

...Anne Hollander and Gilles Lipovetsky both argue that a "fashion system" designed to encode gender distinctions emerged from the late Middle Ages...

...But where Sex and Suits is replete with minute details from the history of clothing, Lipovetsky paradoxically argues, in The Empire of Fashion, that a broadly abstract concept of "fashion" undergirds the fulfillment of democratic individualism in Western societies...

...The Empire of Fashion will not come as news to students of recent American cultural history...

...Sex and Suits diverges dramatically from that contemporary feminist criticism which locates the male "gaze" at the heart of a system of gender oppression enslaving women to "fashion...

...in place of regimented rigidity there is seduction...

...Even the dominant couturiers of the past century could only program fashion "while remaining unable to impose it...