FETISHISM

What is fetishism? Discuss in terms of clothing, Explain the high fashion and fetishism of the designer?

What is fetishism? Discuss in terms of clothing, Explain the high fashion and fetishism of the designer?

Introduction

A few terms can clearly evoke, at a time, such dispersed conceptions, atmospheres and practices, in time and space. Images of ancient cults, first industrialization landscapes, epistemic stirrings, personal perversions, subcultural ritualisms, pornographic fruitions, evangelizations of

consumption, and in the end the triumph of a planetary aestheticism supported by the major fashion brands. That is what fetishism is about, but it deals with a semantic verbosity which outdoes the cognitive skills of individuals who have to appeal to a stereotypical form in order to reduce the complexity of the phenomenon. Even science, which usually transforms words of common use in functioning concepts, had to deal with this problematic issue, banishing it to the sphere of perversion, in terms of a value of “normality” both indefinite and relative. This was the situation until a corpus of cultural studies started to consider it as a spread phenomenon,

emancipated from its preceding pathological and sectorial classification. That is why we need an Italian translation of a deep, serious, but also clear and immediate study, which can shed a light on such a versatile term and fully analyze its inmost meanings in order to shatter the pall formed by the stereotypes that surrounds this issue.

Background

The theories which have contributed to demonize this concept are the starting point of Valerie Steele's analysis. According to Steele, Marxism and psycho-analysis - and we could add Positivism as well - have strengthen, in many different ways, a negative idea of fetishism in public general perception. Formulating a standard of sciences' classification, inscribed in

the famous law of the three stages, Comte claimed that fetishism was the oldest practice of the latest stage; basically a repugnance which needed to mark out the West supremacy on the native cultures. Moreover, the term derives from the word “feiticos” (Volli, 1997), which was used during the fifteenth century by the Portguese colonizers to indicate the practices of

Guinea populations hinged around the use of inanimate objects such as tufts of hair, fragments of bones, dried bodies, etc.

But it was only with the publication of De Brosses' book (1760) that the term finally entered the vocabulary of the European scientific reflection. Afterwards, in order to stigmatize what was considered to be the most innovative phenomenon of the industrial modernity, Marx's reading has put aside the ethnographic ideal rooted in this concept: the “commodity

fetishism” is the marker of a bad class conscience that does not recognize itself and therefore yields to the seductive power of commodities, in order to turn into a structured public through the regulation of spaces of consumption .

By contrary, Freud indicated fetishism as determined by an opposite movement, by an act of symbolization which shielded from the castration threat, a sort of amulet, inheritance of childish fantasies on women penis in men's mind. When we come to give a modern definition ...