Author: Lehmann, Ulrich

Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 3, Number 3, August 1999 , pp. 297-321(25)

Publisher: Berg Publishers

Abstract:

The article explains why a leaping tiger can be used to distinguish fashion as the cultural object that alters our perception of history. It centres around the Tigersprung - the tiger's leap that was used as a “dialectical image” by Walter Benjamin in the late 1930s to attack the prevalent view in evaluating cultural objects from the past and the contemporary philosophy of history. Fashion was the principal fixation in Benjamin's materialist interpretation of the nineteenth century, an element also valued for its psychoanalytical connotation. Benjamin thought that the evaluation of fashion history must be concerned with activating the past by injecting the present into it.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/136270499779151379

Publication date: 1999-08-01

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