Captain Outrageous, Habermas

So here's the honest truth: I don't get it.

This is the first time in my life I've ever read something and couldn't even break it down a little bit. I mean there's little bits of little bits but, I'm lost.

I'll discuss one quote since that's about all I got.

" ' Fashion has a scent for what is current, whenever this moves within the thicket of what was once ' "

First of all, don't judge me for only fully comprehending the fashion part.

Second of all, it makes a lot of sense (I think) when it comes to the ideas of transitions in art, culture, the relations between past and present and modernity and all this nonsense. Fashion essentially never does anything new. The ideas of what is 'new' in Fashion are merely improvements or interpretations of what is 'old' or what was once 'new'. Habermas is using Benjamin in this, discussing how modernity relates to history in a "post historicist attitude" and it makes sense. Most movements throughout history are based off the same concept- they're improvements or interpretations of the past. Even when they are complete abandonments, they are still improvements. You can't really have a post-modern without there having been a modern and the modern had to be a post-something else anyway. That's pretty much true with Fashion then. You can't have a dress without it somewhere down the line relating to the potato sacks from the beginning of dresses- and as I write that I am thinking how a lot of dresses (they are called shifts now) look like potato sacks, and some dresses have stamps so that they really look like potato sacks! And if you asked the designers they might tell you its a post-modern thing, trying to reinvent its meaning through its literal meaning or something like that. What it comes down to is that the equation is inseparable.