A comprehensive and interdisciplinary study of fashion in the modern age of media, spectacle, globalization and identity crisis starts from the basic premise: fashion today determines the creative freedom of the body in an experiment with one's own identity. The author introduces three paradigms of fashion into his theoretical discussion: (1) the modern one, which begins in the 1800s and ends in the 1960s; (2) postmodernism, which begins with the emergence of countercultures and subcultures in the 1960s in Europe and the USA, and its end is in sight in 1989; (3) modernity defined by the 1990s in the global order of media, technology and information. Dealing in detail with all the most important fashion theorists from the sociologist Veblen, Simmel to Bourdieu and Lipovetski, psychoanalysis and anthropology in the postcolonial context of ideas, this study radically emphasizes that neither society nor culture determines the identity of contemporary fashion anymore. The conceptual and experimental fashion of McQueen, Galliano, Chalayan and other fashion designers moves into the space of the performative event of the body meeting a new way of creating identity. In two parts of the book, the author tries to show how fashion theory today, from the semiotics of Barthes to the visual studies of Mitchell, is a sign of epistemological disputes about the reality and symbolic value of the image of clothing in contemporary society.