The German philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel (1858-1918) belongs to those who realized the return of philosophy to objects and aspects of everyday life in modernity through the plethora of themes he examined (among others, landscape, money, love, the metropolis).

According to Adorno, he managed "to be the standard for anyone who was not satisfied with the cymbals of epistemology and the history of spirit." The academic establishment rewarded him for his epistemological audacity and for the popularity of his writings and lectures, consistently pushing him to the margins, thus giving him the opportunity to remain in touch with the social reality of his time.

With his essay The Fashion, Simmel philosophically and sociologically X-rayed the phenomenon of fashion, a quintessential phenomenon of modernity, showing through the analysis of the dualism that characterizes the modern subject, the paradox of being "in fashion," even when striving to be "out of fashion."

"The essence of fashion lies in the following: it must always be adopted only by a part of a group, while the whole only tends toward its adoption. Once fashion manages to be fully accepted, that is, once what initially was done only by some is indeed adopted without exception by all, as is the case with certain elements of clothing and forms of sociability, then it is no longer characterized as fashion. Every spread of fashion also pushes it toward its end, since it negates its distinctiveness."

Georg Simmel