Turn of the Century Bobos

Mike Featherstone, expounding on the “aestheticitization of everyday life” that he claims is characteristic of the postmodern ethos, notes that similar motifs are evident in the early development of the fashion industry: “The intensified place of fashion increases our time-consciousness, and our simultaneous pleasure in newness and oldness gives us a strong sense of presentness. Changing fashions and world exhibitions point to the bewildering plurality of styles in modern life. For the middle classes the retreat to the interior of the household offered little refuge from style, for at the turn of the century when Simmel was writing, the contemporary Jugendstil movement (in Britain there was the parallel movement known as Aestheticism) sought to stylize ‘every pot and pan.’ The stylization of the interior was a paradoxical attempt to provide a toning down and relatively stable background to the subjectivism of modernity.”