Iam writing in response to Sabina Lovibond’s article ‘Feminism and Postmodernism’, in New Left Review Number 178, in which I am pigeonholed as an apologist for or advocate of anti-Enlightenment philosophy. I now believe that the case I tried to state in favour of adornment in dress in Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity could have been more clearly put, and that it was unfortunate that I had almost finished writing the book before I became aware of the debate on postmodernism. As someone who still finds Marxism highly relevant in the present world, I absolutely reject, however, any attempt to align me with the likes of Rorty et al.

In Adorned in Dreams I tried to develop a critique of ‘rational dress’, in part by suggesting that some of its premisses were actually irrational, my particular objections being to its biologism and utilitarianism. I was critical of contemporary feminist attitudes to adornment, not because of their attempt to challenge sexist stereotypes of woman-hood, but because the implicit beliefs upon which they were based seemed to me to subscribe, in part at least, to mistaken views about the cultural significance of dress. It is as if some feminists felt that you could escape fashion (changing styles) and style itself, and that to care about your appearance was necessarily to be cast into a fallen state of false consciousness. (Paradoxically, of course, feminists who advocated particular forms of clothing themselves cared deeply about their appearance.) My view, by contrast, was that dress transmits a variety of complex cultural meanings and that it is therefore impossible simply to opt out, as some feminists seem to have hoped to do. There were also very strong moralistic prescriptions in the way in which some feminists in the 1970s discussed dress; for example, for some it was always an indication of ‘incorrect attitudes’ to dress in a ‘sexual’ way. With the reaction against such attitudes in full swing in the 1980s, they perhaps seem less oppressive than they did in the 1970s, but I feel that Sabina Lovibond seriously understates the problem when she speaks of the ‘occasional moralism or “moral elitism” of radical movements’ as ‘a vice of excess’. To read Boris Kagarlitsky on ‘The Soviet Crisis’ in the same issue of New Left Review immediately after ‘Feminism and Postmodernism’ is to be made aware of just where these ‘vices of excess’ can lead.

Sabina Lovibond castigates me for aligning adornment with pleasure. She misrepresents me, however, if she believes that I was simply arguing for a ‘celebration’ of fashion hedonism. Like many others, I was suggesting that it is useful to investigate the sources of pleasure rather than merely condemning them. The question of pleasure has important ideological implications, and is surely a legitimate focus of investigation, which feminists have studied in many different areas, perhaps most importantly using psychoanalytic theory. To attempt to excavate the sources of pleasure in popular culture is not necessarily either to endorse or condemn. In any case, the aesthetic and moral value of various kinds of popular cultural product surely diverges considerably.