Abstract

Georg Simmel is regarded as a co-founder of fashion theory. In his treatises of vestmental culture of the fin de siècle developed in his main work on the philosophy of money, he emphasizes imitation as a social force of changes in fashion. The then active makers of clothes and couturiers such as Charles Frederick Worth were not given any attention, Simmel instead developed his basic theorems of art referring to the work of painters and sculptors including Rembrandt and Auguste Rodin. The current debate on the convergence of art and fashion proposes to connect Simmel’s philosophical analyses of culture with what were, for him, separate phenomena