時尚的縐摺

The Fold of Fashion

在當代哲學思考中，「縐摺」乃是理論化歷史生成與世界流變的重要關鍵，不論是班雅明談論十九世紀物質文化的《拱廊街計畫》，或是法國哲學家德勒茲談論十七世紀歐洲巴洛克文化的《摺子》，皆以「縐摺」作為探討歷史哲學與主體化的基本概念。而如何通過此兩位理論家建構「歷史摺學」的概念，並以「時尚」作為此概念操作演練的核心，便是本篇論文最主要的企圖所在。本文將以1940 年代殖民地台灣《本島婦人服の改善》計畫中「旗袍縐摺成洋裝」之歷史案例為理論思考出發點，嘗試鋪展「歷史摺學」與「時尚」的連結。全文由三個主要部份構成。第一部份為「歷史摺學」的理論建構，將從班雅明與德勒茲的縐摺理論出發，探討如何在「開摺形式」之差異區分（差分）中，尋覓「合摺行勢」之差異化微分運動（微分），以讓歷史成為「合摺，開摺，重摺」的縐摺運動本身。第二部份則嘗試爬梳20 年代上海平直旗袍與巴黎直筒洋裝，如何在性別現代性作為縐摺之力的褶曲運動中，產生極大化身體速度與極小化性別差異的拓樸連結。第三部份則企圖以本文所開展出的時尚歷史摺學概念，與當前的中西服飾比較史與殖民現代性研究展開對話，進行後設性的反思與批判，並嘗試提出「中西合襞」的縐摺概念，以取代殖民現代性時尚論述中最為常見「中西合璧」的封閉套式，以期積極凸顯當代時尚研究以「拓樸思考」取代「類型思考」在美學、政治與理論上的迫切必要性。

The fold has become one of the key concepts in theorizing the mutability and contingency of history as marvelously demonstrated in Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project and Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold. This paper attempts to connect the fold (or pleats) in clothing with the fold in philosophy to map out a creative assemblage that helps to shed new light on both contemporary critical theory and fashion studies. It takes the historical case of dress reform in colonial Taiwan in which the modern Chinese-style cheongsam (qipao) was demanded by the colonial authority to be “folded” into a Western-style dress as a point of departure to theorize history itself as a folding process. The paper is divided into three major parts. Part I tries to negotiate a conceptual connectivity of the fold between Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze to foreground how the “folding forces” of differentiation traverse the “unfolded forms” of differenciation and also how history itself is disclosed as an incessant process of “folding, unfolding, refolding.” Part II argues that the “cheongsamdress (Western one-piece)” in the 1920s was linked topologically as having always already been folded and unfolded in history by the force of modernity as maximizing the moving speed and minimizing the gender difference. Part III attempts to displace the “integration of the Chinese and the Western” model long promulgated in the (post)colonial sartorial analysis with a different conceptualization of the “folding of the Chinese and the Western” in which a topological thinking of fashion can substitute successfully for the typological thinking of the historical costume studies.