Clothes

John Harvey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317488712
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

Clothes protect our vulnerable skin and they keep us warm or cool. They help us show that we are young or old, rich or poor, at work or play, and whether we may be good to know. But though they are basic, much as food and shelter are - and also may be beautiful - they have long had a bad press in serious, moral and philosophical writing. The main reason for this is that they are external to us, a cover we may hide behind, and one on which some people spend too much money, perfecting a pompous plumage of vanity: also they, and the fashions for them, may not last long. Nonetheless, when we choose our own clothes, we know the choice is a sensitive matter and far from being merely superficial. John Harvey considers the overlapping values that clothes have for us. Clothes both cover and advertise the bodies within them. They help make us the men and women we are, and help us to attract each other. They enroll us in groups, from our own circle to our generation worldwide; and they show just how, as individuals, we want to be noticed. Clothes, like their wearers, may compete in claiming power. They may also, on and off the catwalk, compete to claim the spotlight. In sum they show how we think we matter - and they can matter themselves in ways that may be intimate and even crucial to us. At all times clothes have demanded attention, even when they have been castigated for their vanity, and contemporary opinion is still divided. Are clothes the most frivolous of consumer disposables - or are they, however extravagant, art? Though we wear and see them every day, the value that they have for us is multiple and fugitive and hard to catch exactly. "Clothes" attempts to sort the many-coloured wardrobe which marks off mankind from other creatures.

1. Why can't we trust our clothes?

They had flown the strange plane to its destination, and when they reached the city the two pilots were told they would be taken to meet the president. But the headquarters within the embassy had changed, and now resembled the upper floor of a department store, with moveable racks of men’s suits. This should have been helpful, since their own clothes had shrunk to shapes of fabric joined by a lattice of threads. The pilots knew, however, that the first necessity was for each of them to ring his lawyer, who would provide his own suit to meet their needs. The first pilot’s lawyer was quick to oblige. And when my turn came to ring, the phone gave a mellow whistle, which meant that my lawyer would send his suit also. But then the note changed.

At this point I was woken by the crying of a child in the house, so I never got to meet the president of the United States – who in daylight hours was the opposite of a hero for me – while the design of our extraordinary vehicle had already faded. What most interests me, however, is the role of the lawyers. Why did I need to bring them in? The night-mind partly works by puns, and presumably zigzagged from men’s suits to lawsuits. But the lawyers must also have come in because they need, for their profession, to be smartly suited: not cheaply, or we might doubt their success, and not too richly, or we would fear their fees. In style they must not look like fashion victims, nor like fashion exiles. Because of the role clothes play in the world, a lawyer’s suit for an important case may give us a reliable model to fall back on – if we are suddenly stripped naked on the eve of an important meeting.

At all events the dream was much about clothes – losing them and getting them – and this perhaps reflects the way that clothes matter to us. We may think of them as an outer surface, a husk or soft armour, but our dreams show that our clothes are inside us as well. In our dreams, indeed, they may destroy us, for instance if they suddenly vanish. In life too we may depend on them. They cover our shyness about our bodies, and our shyness about who we are. They can spring bad surprises on us, if we are suddenly made to feel in company – by a tactless remark or, even worse, a tactful one – that some item we are wearing is absolutely wrong both for us and for the occasion. Then for some moments our worth hangs on a “surface” mistake we have made, as bad as a wrong act or as a cruelly wrong thing said. Bad clothes do not, as bad words may, slip quickly into the past. They haunt us in the sight of everyone until we can get out of them. The mistake we made in choosing them is not itself a garment that we can take off; it has revealed a flaw in us.

Clothes, in other words, can be treacherous companions, perhaps the more so because they touch us closely, because they touch our skin. Their betrayal of us is like betrayal by a sibling, and siblings too can be treacherous companions. And if one looks at large through history – at the way clothes have been represented by thinkers, poets, even artists – one finds a recurring mistrust. I want to examine this mistrust, because it seems to me there must be a further reason for it, beyond the faults that clothes commit. Since clothes are such an ambiguous quantity, it seems better to approach them from a distance, warily, rather than to start inside the wardrobe and then walk slowly from it.

It is not surprising, of course, if new fashions cause dismay. They certainly mean to cause a stir. And fashion may exaggerate to make its point. There was naturally some mockery in the late-sixteenth century when the “cartwheel” ruff became so wide that people’s heads looked like puddings on plates. Nor is it surprising if public moralists have denounced sudden plunges of the neckline, high-rises of false hair or beauty-spots scattered like an epidemic. What is surprising is that clothes in general, clothes of all sorts, have provoked mistrust in the wisest of men. In philosophy, for instance, clothes have a negative value. We wear them but they are not us: the important “us” is hidden by them. Wittgenstein said that language disguises thought as clothes disguise the body. Less severely, Kierkegaard said that as one takes offone’s clothes in order to swim, so one must strip oneself mentally naked in order to know the truth. This may be true, and Kierkegaard sees clothes more as an impediment than as a disguise, but still his attitude to dress is negative. Schopenhauer said that attending too much to the thoughts of others was like wanting to wear someone else’s old clothes. He has little to say about new clothes, or about his own clothes. And if one turns from what philosophy has said about clothes in general, to what philosophy has said about fashion, the severity is extreme indeed. Thoreau famously said, “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes”, and Kant had said “fashion belongs under the heading of vanity … and also under the heading of folly”. When Kant says this, of course, he sounds remarkably similar to the popular moral critics of fashion whom I mentioned before, perhaps illustrating what the philosopher F. H. Bradley said: that philosophy is common sense in a dress suit.

Western philosophy has long had a derogatory take on clothes, to the effect that since Truth is naked, clothes are likely to be lying. The idea perhaps goes back to Plato, for whom all appearances were a false front hiding an unseen truth. It is not that good things have never been said. Erasmus said that clothes were “the body’s body”, and the thought is full of suggestive subtlety, if the various relations between clothes and the body are compared with the relations between body and soul. A later philosopher, Martin Heidegger, was not always happy in his own use of clothes: through the 1930s he increasingly dressed like a Bavarian peasant in a way that chimed with his National Socialist sympathies. But he also recalled that, when he discussed the translation of ideas between German and Japanese, his friend Count Shuzo Kuki sometimes “brought his wife along who then wore festive Japanese garments. They made the Eastasian world more luminously present, and the danger of our dialogues became more clearly visible” (Heidegger [1959] 1971: 4). The clothes showed, as words could not, the reach of the differences that exist between cultures, because not merely Countess Kuki but “the Eastasian world” was “luminously present” in her clothes.

There is perhaps no surprise that moralists in the Christian era have been suspicious of clothes, since, in the perspective of the Bible, clothing was implicated in the fall of man. According to Genesis, Adam and Eve lived naked in their garden of plenty until they ate the fruit they had been told not to eat, and became ashamed to see their bodies. From the leaves of the trees they made themselves aprons, or breeches – in different translations – to hide the parts they should not show. They hid themselves away, too, from the voice that came after them, and when they shyly emerged their clothes of sewn leaves were the proof and sign of their guilt and shame. But one cannot un-fall. They were packed out of paradise, and God himself, taking pity, gave them animal skins to wear, in addition to the leaves that doubtless were as perishable as many later fashions.

God’s decision to clothe them in the raw form of leather – protective and durable in the fallen world – shows that the divine view of clothing was not one-sided. And if one travels to the other end of time, dress values are reversed. Revelation makes clear that at the second coming the blessed and the saved will be robed – like the angels and the risen Christ – in white. In hell, on the other hand, according to the images of Western art, the damned, writhing in pits of sulphur, will be as naked as Adam and Eve had been in paradise. So too may be the demons – although they are likely to have scales – and so too may be Satan. It is easy to see why the damned should be naked: so as to be both exposed, and denied all protection. And as to the style of dress in heaven, there should perhaps be no comparison between those pure and presumably never changing robes and the short-lived fopperies of human fashion. The robes of heaven conform to an ancient dream that an ideal being would be both radiant and clothed in light. The white clothes of heaven are presumably woollens – whiter than any fuller could whiten them, we are told in Mark’s account of the Transfiguration. The cleanest, finest, whitest of wools had been for some millennia among the most precious and luxurious forms of human clothing: it is fitly worn in the domain of the Lamb.

The position of the Bible on dress is, in other words, more complex than the simple association of clothes with the Fall. And if one moves from pictures of hell to the happier visions of Western art, it is clear that painting differs from philosophy in having a more divided attitude to clothing. The masters of the Renaissance loved to render the lustre of ample, deep-coloured satins and velvets. And in terms simply of square inches of canvas, the ravishing painting of quality clothing has been a significant part of Western art. This is again not surprising, seeing that a part of Western art has been an icon-factory for the rich. And painters themselves have shown some suspicion of dress, and especially of luxurious dress. When he painted Sacred and Profane Love, Titian represented sacred love by the beautiful bare body of an active-looking young woman, while profane love wears a fashionable dress, and has a stolid indoor look. In any case one might expect a visual artist to prefer a lovely naked body to a body that is wearing robes, however sumptuous they may be.

If one moves again, from visual art to literature, one finds still a mistrust of clothes, although with a different emphasis. Time and again Shakespeare and his contemporaries will contrast fair but false appearances – gorgeous clothes, in other words – not with hidden truth, but with the hidden corruption of the wearer. “Robes and furred gowns hide all”, cries King Lear. Earlier, like Kierkegaard, he has begun to take his clothes off, since he too wants to gain the truth. He shouts at his clothes, “Off, off you lendings”. It is true that King Lear also pities “poor naked wretches”: he sees that the naked do need to have clothes.

Human dress, in the traditional wisdom, seems often to be caught in some bad act. Clothes cannot win: either they show what should not be shown, or they hide vice or they hide the truth. Actually it is not clear why Truth needs to be naked. If we were not so prejudiced against clothes, we would not need to emphasize that Truth does not wear them, any more than we need to emphasize that Truth is not whistling, or not driving a car. There may be, in the prejudice, a gender twist. Poets, painters and philosophers used mostly to be men, and it is well known that women have been much concerned with dress. When Socrates recommends either no clothes, or the simplest clothes, in Plato’s Republic, his annoyance with current styles is directed especially at articles “that have to do with women’s adornment”. Even novels by women novelists, such as Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell, will mock women in general for their tittle-tattle about the latest bonnets and ribbons, and both in novels and in life a dandified man is often thought effeminate. More recently, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche has said, “Comparing man and woman in general one may say: woman would not have the genius for finery in general if she did not have the instinct for a secondary role” ([1886] 2003: 102). A similar attitude informs some neo-Freudian thought in the idea of the masquerade, according to which the performance of womanly identity, including the priority given to clothes, is conditioned by anxiety about the absence of a phallus. So, to reassure both men and women, the glamour show is mounted.

Since women in many cultures are interested in adornment it is fair to look for fundamental causes, but still it is risky to equate adornment and showy dressing with femininity (and with the status of a real or metaphorical phallus). One odd corollary of doing so would be the idea that ruling classes are feminine. So, if we time-travelled to the French eighteenth century, and stood a peasant beside an aristocrat, we could think the active, loud-voiced peasant in his big trousers the male phallus in person, while Monsieur le duc, with his powder and beauty-spots, skipping to a minuet in a wide-skirted coat of flower-patterned satin damask (with matching satin “culottes”) must be the lady. Monsieur le duc does, however, wear something further: that traditional dress-accessory of menswear, a sword. Not a symbolic or phallic sword but a real blade, possibly blooded from duelling. And when not bowing with grace on the parquet of Versailles, he might at some point lead a cavalry charge against a cannonade, where his gold braid would make him a conspicuous target. Then he might seem the man while the peasant in his big smock, fenced in by domesticity, bent to his loom in the front room of the cottage when not milking goats in the field behind it, would seem the housewife. To answer Nietzsche, then, it seems odd to argue that the peacock aristocracies of the world, who undoubtedly had “the genius for finery”, also had “the instinct for a secondary role”.

As to the taste for adornment and “finery”, it clearly belongs to the social theatre, and flourishes in lifestyles of enforced idleness. A similar premium on appearances has operated in some periods for lords and ladies, and at other times for the leisured wives – but also for the leisured sons – of the rich. But in all such discussions, what is also interesting – whether we are Socrates or Kant or Nietzsche, or other people again entirely – is that when we talk about clothes in a general way, we tend to push them away from us, into the realm of the suspect or the realm of the feminine. It is as if we felt crowded by the clothes we wear, or had become claustrophobic being cooped up inside them, and yearned to have an envelope of clear space around us, to stand between our naked bodies and cloth.

Not all important thinkers, it must be said, have been brief and disparaging on the subject of dress. On the contrary, in the past two centuries some important writings have been addressed to clothes: works by the historian Thomas Carlyle, the economist Thorstein Veblen, the sociologist Georg Simmel and the semiologist Roland Barthes. But even in these works the attitude to clothing may be nearly as critical as that of the philosophers, although more subtle, certainly. I shall mention these arguments because they do make a small tradition of clothes philosophy. It is, to say the least, a sceptical tradition.

The Sartor Resartus of Carlyle, for instance, has a real feeling for the weave and the fibre, as it were, both of fabrics and of fashions. But still his main point about clothing is both metaphysical and negative. He argues principally that the existing forms of church and state are sorts of old clothes of the soul, and should be thrown out for life to advance. His interest, not unnaturally, is rather in the new life of church and state than in any new style of clothing as such.

Veblen argued, in The Theory of the Leisure Class, that the principal purpose of those who bought expensive clothes was to show off their wealth by wasting it. This task was delegated especially to the idle wives of the rich. And how better could a man display his success than by flaunting a trophy wife, with a beautiful, willowy, strengthless body, idle and shimmering like a jeweller’s window? Beautiful clothes come off badly here, and Veblen reinforced his argument by buying his own clothes by mail order from a Sears and Roebuck catalogue: clothes of stiff, honest, canvas-like stuff, which, his friends said, stood up by themselves whether or not he was in them.

Simmel, the German sociologist, was different: he was a charismatic public speaker noted for his elegance. His essay “The Philosophy of Fashion” is filled with subtle insight, although he is clear that fashion is “a playground for dependent natures”. For Simmel, clothes are evanescent weapons within the class war. Those rising will try to mimic the dress of the rich, who in turn will change style to avoid their imitators. So you get fashion, and the changes of fashion. Simmel’s argument, like Veblen’s, must have had much truth, although it covers less ground in our world, where trends are set not by old money but by new celebrities, who do not mind if their high-price designer outfits are mimicked in affordable high street versions.

Oddly enough, Barthes, in his fullest study, The Fashion System, is not strongly interested in reading clothes for their political meaning. He shows how garments, photographs and snatches of prose cooperate to make a fashion language. But fashion he treats as a wild card, descending on some items and not on others in an arbitrary and fortuitous way. His view sorts rather easily with Kant’s view that fashion is vanity and folly.

With friends such as these in the serious intelligentsia, clothes scarcely need enemies. And these critical readings have force: clothes, for all their softness and give, will undoubtedly reflect the cruel politics of wealth. But that is not all that may be said of clothes, and what is missing from the accounts given by philosophers, moralists and theologians, and also by the accredited large thinkers on clothing, is an adequate description of the way in which our own clothes are helpful to us in the daily business of life when we are not flaunting wealth and class. Also largely missing from the authorities I have mentioned – except for the painters – is due recognition of the art of dress: of the fact that, whether they are expensive or bought for a bargain price, clothes can be attractive, a true find, a delight to wear and see.

It is not that the important thinkers allow no visual charm to clothes. But they give the “aesthetic” dimension such a subsidiary recognition that the value of it seems close to nil. Simmel places clothing in the “applied arts” like interior decoration. He himself dressed elegantly, but his own clothing choices are scarcely mentioned. That may be his modesty. But there is a curious effect that often occurs when an author begins to write about clothes: he comes to speak of clothes as though always they are worn by other people. Of course, when we look at the clothes that other people wear – and when we look at the “other” people who wear them – then it is not hard to see the vanity, the showy waste, the social mimicry. And those things are real. But still, caught up in their impassioned critique, the clothes authors will hide their own clothing habits as they would their nakedness. Or rather they write about clothes as though they themselves neither wore clothes nor went naked. They place themselves in the unimaginable. Viewed in this light, the widespread mistrust of clothing becomes, I think, more interesting. It is as if it were important to us to show our independence: our independence from clothes, and from our own clothes. But this denial would only have such importance if after all our dependence were great: if the denial touched, or covered – or clothed – the most sensitive part of us.

***

I want to go on, in the following chapters, to look at ways in which clothes are important to us. But before doing that I had better allow that, yes, there are reasons why one might take against clothes. Clothes may be a disguise, or a form of hypocrisy – if one dresses like a scrupulous public servant, say, while secretly one is on various forms of take. Also fashions, especially extravagant fashions, may be ridiculous, and vain and foolish. There is also the whole question of social status, and the work that clothes do as status symbols, which is not in itself attractive. Clothes may use their expensiveness like a weapon. Clothes perhaps converse between themselves, in the accents of an exclusive society. The smartness of smart clothes says, “Respect me”. But if clothes assert, they flatter too, and the smartness of smart clothes also says, “Look, I show my respect for you by taking the trouble to dress so well”. The offer is reciprocal: clothes show respect but also seek respect. Clothes may be metaphors for our own feelings, but also they may be wishful metaphors for the feelings we want other people to have for us. This is natural enough, but it may also be done with pompous solemnity. Very smart clothes may have their own way of holding coldly aloof from us.

Again, a problem may arise for smart clothes if they meet casual clothes en route for the same occasion. At once they converse, even if the wearers say nothing. For the casual clothes ask, “Why have you taken so much trouble? Why so up-tight? Who is it you are anxious to impress?” To which the smart clothes may disdain to reply. Clothes have various ways of manifesting social competitiveness, and the show clothes of the idle rich – and even more of their spoilt children, drunkenly falling out of sharp cars in Kensington – can be hard to take. For clothes can be truculent, and cooperate with the wearer in performing an indifferent scoff at everyone. Then perhaps one says, “We’re in Europe now – let’s have the guillotine over here”. And if wearing goth style can bring on murder, it may very well be that in the French Revolution the iridescent silks of the ancien régime did help to whet the blade that hung above their plump pink powdered lace-frilled necks.

In other words, if clothes are signs that cry “status”, they also work like targets for those deprived of status. And perhaps in the whole critique of clothes, it is the status t...