"Fashion can be defined as the introduction into time of a peculiar discontinuity that divides it according to its relevance or irrelevance, its being-in-fashion or no-Ionger-being in-fashion. This caesura, as subtle as it may be, is remarkable in the sense that those who need to make note of it do so infallibly; and in so doing they attest to their own being in fashion. But if we try to objectify and fix this caesura with in chronological time, it reveals itself as ungraspable. In the first place, the “now” of fashion, the instant in which it comes into being, is not identifiable via any kind of chronometer. Is this “now” perhaps the moment in which the fashion designer conceives of the general concept, the nuance that will define the new style of the clothes? Or is it the moment when the fashion designer conveys the concept to his assistants, and then to the tailor who will sew the prototype? Or rather, is it the moment of the fashion show, when the clothes are worn by the only people who are always and only in fashion, the mannequins, or models; those who nonetheless, precisely for this reason, are never truly in fashion? Because in this last instance, the being in fashion of the “style” will depend on the fact that the people of flesh and blood, rather than the mannequins (those sacrificial victims of a faceless god), will recognize it as such and choose that style for their own wardrobe."
Giorgio Agamben, What Is The Contemporary?