Style

If we accept that style is man himself, according to Buffon’s famous saying, we must understand man in the individual sense, because man as a species is even more marked by archetypes, and man as a social being by modernity. The question is therefore: how can we move from one meaning to the other? Style poses the same kind of problems on an individual scale as modernity does on a social scale. How can archetypal impulses, which transcend the individual, be manifested and realised in the creation of a personal style? Indeed, although we also speak of style in relation to collective norms or codes, I will refer here mainly to the individual meaning of the term.