A Study on Walter Benjamin's Thoughts on Fashion Phenomenon

This study is focused on Walter Benjamin’si belief about one of the consequences of modernity: the phenomenon of fashion. After the industrial revolution, which took place in the 18th and 19th centuries, fashion appeared in the second half of the 19th century, in Paris, as it can be seen in Impressionist paintings. In the beginning, it was considered as a mere covering style, but in the early 20th century, especially after World War II, while women’s social and commercial activities decreased, it started to play an important role as an important kind of art in all of the fields related to modern life, such as power policies, sexism and even protestant movements. Walter Benjamin, one of the most renowned philosophers, art theorists and literary cultural critics of the 20th century, who was also among the famous thinkers of Frankfurt School, called Paris “the capital of the 19th century.” Charles Baudelaireii, a lyric poet in the era of high Capitalism, in his unfinished luminous work The Arcades Project. In some sections of this book, Benjamin criticized the modern period as the age of technological reproduction, and also studied the fashion issue. Moreover, regarding the works of Surrealist painters, he studied the collection of The Devil in Paris of Grandvilleiii, as an urban organism. The purpose of this research is to study Benjamin's thoughts on the phenomenon of fashion and its relationship with the industrial communities in Europe. The main questions are: According to Benjamin, what factors caused the birth of fashion phenomenon? an‎d how did it become one of the most important forms of modern art. My approach in this study was descriptive-analytic method, in order to explain the ideas of Benjamin in the field of fashion