Baroque Fashion Quotes

In a flurry of sharp brocade coattails and gossamer gowns cut in the Neo-Baroque fashion, the crowd turns back to their conversations, the perfect epitome of what all Aristocrats are like—bored and quickly dissatisfied with the latest trends.

Benjamin’s aesthetic is dissectional, drawing on Baroque poetry, Baudelaire’s writing and fashion histories. The female body becomes ornament, and in such fetishistic fragmentation, body parts are likened to alabaster, snow, jewels, minerals, and the body can, of course, be made equivalent to – that is, bought for – the metal of exchange: money.

A study of advertising found that the average person in Shanghai saw three times as many advertisements in a typical day as a consumer in London. The market was flooded with new brands seeking to distinguish themselves, and Chinese consumers were relatively comfortable with bold efforts to get their attention. Ads were so abundant that fashion magazines ran up against physical constraints: editors of the Chinese edition of Cosmopolitan once had to split an issue into two volumes because a single magazine was too thick to handle. My cell phone was barraged by spam offering a vast range of consumption choices. “Attention aspiring horseback riders,” read a message from Beijing’s “largest indoor equestrian arena.” In a single morning, I received word of a “giant hundred-year-old building made with English craftsmanship” and a “palace-level baroque villa with fifty-four thousand square meters of private gardens.” Most of the messages sold counterfeit receipts to help people file false expense reports. I liked to imagine the archetypal Chinese man of the moment, waking each morning in a giant English building and mounting his horse to cross his private garden, on the way to buy some fake receipts.

Concentration of the limbs is characteristic of classic plastics: the tout ensemble is absolutely governed from within, the spirit and the feeling of life governing the whole embrace uniformly every single part, because of the perceptible unity of the object. [...] It is due exclusively to the concentration of the object, which concentration permits no part to bear any relation to any extraneous powers and fortunes and thereby incites the feeling that this formation is exempt from the changing influences of general life. In contrast to this everything odd, extreme and unusual will be drawn to fashion from within [...] The widely projecting limbs in baroque statues seem to be in perpetual danger of being broken off, the inner life of the figure does not exercise complete control over them, but turns them over a prey to the chance influences of external life. Baroque forms in themselves lack repose, they seem ruled by chance and subjected to the momentary impulse, which fashion expresses as a form of social life.

It is the court which gives the great, commanding style of art its guiding principles; here is formed that "grande manière" which invests reality with an idea, resplendent, festive, and solemn character, and which set the standard for the style of official art in the whole Europe. To be sure, the French court attains the international recognition of its manners, fashion and art at the expense of the national character of French culture. The French, like the ancient Romans, look upon themselves as the citizens of the world, and nothing more typical of their cosmopolitan outlook than the fact that in all the tragedies of Racine, as has been noted, not a single Frenchmen appears.

Joseph Haydn was a revolutionary. Those who used the nickname 'Papa Haydn' in the eighteenth century were ascribing to him a genuine fatherhood, not drawing a 'caricature' of a 'bewigged and old-fashioned' court officer, the image (to use Jens Peter Larsen's language) that the nineteenth century saw in its rearview mirror. Rising out of Baroque roots, Haydn spend his lifetime forging from his creative imagination the style that has come to be called 'Classical,' and he did so largely in geographic isolation.