Is Fashion Universal? Towards a Sociology of Proto-Fashion

There is today a widely held view that prior attempts to define fashion, to locate its historical origins, and to discern its presence in different societies around the world, have been marred by limited Eurocentric visions. Some have claimed that ‘fashion’ is a socio-cultural universal, that may be found in any and every society throughout time and space, if only we look for it in such locations. But claims as to the presence of fashion in pre-modern societies may infer too much from limited data about specific phenomena, and they may not fully contextualise the specific phenomena within the wider social context, in the manner that a historical-sociological analysis would. Such data could, however, possibly point not to fully-fledged fashion systems, but to something more limited, namely an incipient, embryonic, limited set of proto-fashion phenomena, which perhaps may be institutionalised in a proto-fashion system. Using this analytical orientation, we analyse three pre-modern empires, the Roman, Byzantine and Aztec. We find evidence mostly not of ‘fashion’ per se in them, but we do find elements of proto-fashion. We use these three cases to identify the means by which a social order may involve proto-fashion phenomena, and possibly also a proto-fashion system, but not a full fashion system. We find that at least some pre-modern societies tend to have proto-fashion rather than fashion, but a pre-modern fashion system is not impossible, either by definition or empirically speaking.