In a book full of playful irony and striking insights, the controversial social
philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky draws on the history of fashion to demonstrate tha
t the modern cult of appearance and superficiality actually serves the common go
od. Focusing on clothing, bodily deportment, sex roles, sexual practices, and po
litical rhetoric as forms of "fashion," Lipovetsky bounds across two thousand ye
ars of history, showing how the evolution of fashion from an upper-class privile
ge into a vehicle of popular expression closely follows the rise of democratic v
alues. Whereas Tocqueville feared that mass culture would create passive citizen
s incapable of political reasoning, Lipovetsky argues that today's mass-produced
fashion offers many choices, which in turn enable consumers to become complex i
ndividuals within a consolidated, democratically educated society.
