It is time to come out of the closet. This is not an academic book in the traditional sense. It is written by an academic who is interested in the question: is there an academic “look,” particularly for so-called philosophers? Is there a look that says, “I’m good at looking?” And is it the only look with which one can address the truth? The question is partly motivated by another question: Why do most philosophers hate clothes—or rather, hate fashion? The majority rule seems to be to treat the outer surface with either ritual formality or complete derision, as if the less you comb your hair the closer you are to truth. For a philosopher in search of reality, any sort of keeping up appearances looks laced with madness. Those who appear interested in making fashion statements run the risk of being accused of wasting time on shallow things, and so, being slipshod thinkers. Smart people know you can’t judge a book by its cover. Things are not always what they seem. Caring about fashion for its own sake—or appearance for appearance’s sake—is surely the greatest of all sophistry. It is superficial, shallow, vain. But isn’t it strange to live a life of careful observation—you could say, a life that treats the world with kid gloves—and yet, to have no care for what you wear? Maybe it is simply that, in their longing not to be particular about being, philosophers hate putting themselves together. The very word “philosopher” is almost an insult—as if you could identify the person who is busy identifying everything else. Philosophers are anonymous, their appearances out of fashion.²

Fashion operates according to weather and essence. It speaks of seasons, occasions, essentials, and basics, as if the cogent wearer would be a master of contingency or a conqueror of fortune.³ Still, if the variety or number of clothes in excess is all we mean when we utter the word “fashion” in its profane sense, why do we persist in keeping our options open when we dress ourselves? Are philosophers, in their scorn for the endless permutations that fashion represents, resistant to freedom? Or is it the specific sort of freedom that fashion’s excessive options signify, over and against the tasteful refinement of the literary elite? Is fashion too vulgar, too demotic for the thoughtful? But again, fashion itself is compelled not to transgress certain unwritten limits. Firstly, everything cannot be worn at once. In the distinction between fast fashion and haute couture or runway and ready-to-wear lies the equivalent of those distinctions in philosophy between philosophy and political philosophy or metaphysics and physics.

In Aristotle’s De Anima, flesh emerges as the medium through which the sense of touch produces its effect.⁴ Touch is in a way the most confused of the senses, and so, emblematic of the source of “feeling” which is present in them all. Aristotle immediately encounters the difficulty of wresting the medium of touch from the sense of touch. When we touch an object, we not only seem to touch it, but we also feel the touch of ourselves touching.⁵ The object presses back on us at the same time as the feeling of the otherness of our own touch touching us, as if from the outside. We “grasp” the thought of our own perception through the act of touching; “grasp” is as ambiguous in English as it is in Greek.⁶ In a similar account in De Rerum Natura, Lucretius describes a link between touch and sight. For touch, he uses the Latin word tangere, which has the double sense of physical and psychical contact: you can touch something literally or be “touched” by it or “touch” on it figuratively. For Lucretius, the seeming immediacy of touch already implies a longing to “see” inside an object, and so a desire to know. He uses as an example reaching out to touch something even in the dark, where we imagine we are peering into its interior.⁷ So, too, we touch the pages of a book to go beyond just feeling their outer edges. In touching the pages, we feel both the pages themselves and our own curiosity about their insides. The analogue to clothes might be that when they are on us and when they touch us, we experience the “touch” of ourselves. Perhaps this is as simple as putting on a bathrobe or brushing your teeth—dressing and addressing yourself in even a minimal way so as to make yourself feel as if you are “in” the world. Does this ritual illustrate the whimsy or the tyranny of clothes as convention? Or in confronting the image of the self, do we confront a reflection on its absence from the image, and so, the thought of its presence?

The uniform of which James Baldwin speaks is being able to pass among others by being perceived to be one of them, and so subtly suggesting to the same others, don’t look. “Dormant aggressiveness” seems to lurk in clothing by default, while behind it glimmers the possibility of getting personal, as if clothes were at once the image of a window to the soul, like the eyes, and also a set of drapes to prevent unwanted peeping.

Levi is stripped and redefined. This is the first meaning of “extermination,” as the privation of life’s signifiers. In having his clothes taken away and replaced is the thought of his life being taken away and his lot recast. Clothes seem capable of both expressing the freedom to define who you are and also compromising agency, when they cease to give you the “room” to be who you are, and so, constrain you by explicit or implicit compulsion. The complexity of comfortable fashion is already in the term itself, for fashion is not just about an abundance of surface but the fitting surface. In this, the life of the individual is at stake.