"put on our clothes and even examine what we threw away. Everything that had no apparent importance, or at least for the intellectual class of the time, was held up as a mirror. Through fashion, mass consumption, aesthetics and leisure, the philosopher and sociologist drew a precise, entertaining and vibrant portrait of our time. Or, rather, of what he calls hypermodernity, an era marked by aesthetics, consumption and excess."
"On the shelves of the living room, he has stacks of DVDs and books and some apparently useless mementos. The thinker has always managed to turn phenomena that intellectuals despised into valuable devices with which to measure the contemporary. Lipovetsky not only describes social transformations, he interprets them, assigns them a name and, in doing so, designs tools to dissect them. And he does so, almost always, in that poetic tone that runs through his books, and that elevates them to literature."
Everyday objects, discarded items, clothing, records and household details can function as diagnostic tools for social change. Hypermodernity centers aesthetics, consumption and excess, reshaping values, leisure and everyday life. Kitsch moves from marginal cultural defect to a central, revealing portal into how people live, consume and conceive beauty. Fashion, mass consumption and popular tastes serve as precise indicators of broader social transformations. A poetic, literary tone can elevate sociological observation into nuanced cultural interpretation. Examining domestic spaces and trivial artifacts offers concrete measures of contemporary civilization’s tendencies toward spectacle, excess and changing aesthetic hierarchies.
Read at english.elpais.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]