This book posits fashion as a centre around which to explore positions of materialism. Fashion is understood first as a system that promotes the constant renewal of commodities and secondly, more specifically, as an industry that produces textiles and garments. Materialism is a focus on concrete, physical phenomena and on objects that are produced by subjects. It therefore incorporates a concentration on materiality, on the physical properties of things and how they are represented and perceived by the acting subject. The material world, that is, the world outside of consciousness, serves to found and determine thought. Materialism is understood further as a socio-economic philosophy that is concerned with social conditions of production and in particular with the relationship between labour and capital. These two understandings of materialism are epistemologically, in terms of the origin of knowledge, and historically contingent. In the initial rejection of any metaphysical entity (world spirit, God, etc.), mechanistic materialism, in particular during the eighteenth century in France, had determined human development through an interaction of physical forces, yet it had already applied this concept to social interaction and political emancipation, albeit in theory not in practice. An important feature of mechanistic materialism was change, exemplified by an understanding of the material world as particles of matter that are in constant interaction. This suggested already the usefulness of a dialectical method – reasoning by dynamically incorporating contradictions and negation – for understanding the distinction between static principles and movement, which would animate dialectical and subsequently historical materialism.

From this historical point of origin and potentised in the political impact of the French Revolution, the materialism of the start of the nineteenth century aimed at understanding things concretely in all their movements: social, political and economic, as well as in the changing conditions of production, with elements of change and interconnection determining the way in which people worked and lived.