(Thames & Hudson 2025)
In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (1936) Walter Benjamin asserts that the literary work of art is less subject to “a decay of the aura” than fine or decorative art. For, he says, “What, then, is the aura? A strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be”. Authenticity is precisely what is lost when technical means allow the materiality of the artistic object to be reproduced. What vanishes is what in the object remains untamed and irreducible to reproduction: its relationship to distance, which is exactly what Benjamin calls its aura. “The whole sphere of authenticity eludes technological — and of course not only technological—reproduction.”
Benjamin’s thesis on this question is well known: “It might be stated as a general formula that the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition. By replicating the work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence.” The process of mass reproduction deprives the work of the hic et nunc that constitutes its essence. It reproduces only its inessential content, to put it in the terms used in The Task of the Translator (1923).
But that is to forget that the power of the fetish has no essence and is pure appearance — it has no meaning for it is pure form. This is a direct reference to Marx’s consideration on “The Fetishism of commodities and the secret thereof”. It entails a realization that what Benjamin calls elsewhere the aura of a work of art bears a structural analogy to the fetish quality of the merchandise that generates the added value that makes the difference between use-value and exchange value.
The museum effect of Universal Exhibitions was a historical moment of revelation of precisely this “secret” that commodities, especially when they have a high level of design, like works of fashion, possess an aura that is comparable to that of other works of art. However, the aura of fashion works is not destroyed by their technological reproduction, any more than the aura of works of literature or cinema is destroyed either by the multiplication of copies or by their translation into other languages. On the contrary, the aura of fashion works is directly proportional to their transcultural reproducibility, that is to say their capacity to be into the visual and social codes of multiple cultures without losing their prestige.
Numerous contemporary fashion exhibitions confirm this realization of the artistic aura of fashion productions. For example, one could mention the permanent exhibition at the Dior Gallery at 30 Avenue Montaigne, and also the Vivienne Westwood & Jewellery — A Celebratory Exhibition (see my post on her wedding dresses), now touring worldwide, which debuted in Asia last July in China at the Shanghai Taikoo Li Qiantan retail and wellness center, and Dolce & Gabbana’s traveling exhibition Dalle mani al cuore in Paris, Milan, Rome and soon Miami (ICA Miami, from February 6th – June 14th 2026). It is immediately obvious that the Dalle mani al cuore exhibition functions precisely as a dispositive that prevents the loss of the aura that Benjamin speaks of.