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Fashion Sense
ĎὝĎÎšĎ ÎşĎὝĎĎÎľĎθιΚ ĎΚΝξáż1
âHeraclitus, Fragment B123 DK
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 âlook,â particularly for so-called philosophers? Is there a look that says, âIâm good at looking?â 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 clothesâor 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 canât judge a book by its cover. Things are not always what they seem. Caring about fashion for its own sakeâor appearance for appearanceâs sakeâis surely the greatest of all sophistry. It is superficial, shallow, vain. But isnât it strange to live a life of careful observationâyou could say, a life that treats the world with kid glovesâand 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 âphilosopherâ is almost an insultâas if you could identify the person who is busy identifying everything else. Philosophers are anonymous, their appearances out of fashion.2
But philosophers are not alone in fearing being seen with too many flounces and frills. Many people swear by fashionâs insignificance: it is too contrived, too arbitrary, too much a sign of vanity. Fashion is excess, for changeability alone does not condemn it, but a surplus of changeability beyond perceived necessity. Fashion flits about after shiny things, like a magpie or jackdaw adorning a nest. At the same time, it teeters perilously close to extremes, unsure if one more pleat wonât push it over the edge from tasteful to trendy. But this reveals another feature of fashion. Installed within its very compass is the âsenseâ that to appear too preoccupied with itself would be unfashionable. Fashion is about judgment. Its gavel comes down with bristly adjectives: looking âgood,â looking âright,â even looking âjust right.â
So strong is the impulse of sartorial morality that it is difficult in praising clothes not to use such adjectives as âright,â âgood,â âcorrect,â âunimpeachable,â or âfaultless,â which belong properly to the discussion of conduct, while in discussing moral shortcomings we tend very naturally to fall into the language of dress and speak of a personâs behaviour as being shabby, shoddy, threadbare, down at heel, botched, or slipshod.
(Bell 1948: 14)
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 âfashionâ 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 fashionâs 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.
Yet, what if, regardless of social or economic status, regardless of political or professional affiliation, regardless of cultural background, religion, or identityâwhat if something powerful lurks in the experience of taking off and putting on clothes? I do not yet mean to enter or exit Eden. I mean by âclothesâ something that may well prove evanescentâsomething more or less like an awareness of our presence in some skinâsignified, too, by body paint, piercings, tattoos, haircuts, or even simple gestures. The flourish of a pen fashions as does the tip of a finger pointing. When these flourishesâthese clothesâtouch us with even the slightest bit of excess, we are made aware of our âbodiesâ as a surface, and by extension, of the appearance of our âselves.â The self, understood as an appearance, like an ill-fitting word or split seam, comes along with an awareness of being in space and time. And so, I hesitate to say, fashion and philosophy enter the scene at the same moment. Clothes, insofar as they make us aware of our appearances, are requisite for the experience of self-examination. They are an alienated contact with the self, gained through the strange shell of fabricated ânot-usâ that gives birth to the Cartesian doubt that âweâ are other than it. But the question of this book, which will remain in between the lines for some time, is how this experience of ourselves as contingently clothed, and so necessarily present, begins.
Touch of Clothes and Sense of Self
In Aristotleâs 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 âfeelingâ 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 âgraspâ the thought of our own perception through the act of touching; âgraspâ 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 âtouchedâ by it or âtouchâ on it figuratively. For Lucretius, the seeming immediacy of touch already implies a longing to âseeâ 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 âtouchâ of ourselves. Perhaps this is as simple as putting on a bathrobe or brushing your teethâdressing and addressing yourself in even a minimal way so as to make yourself feel as if you are âinâ 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?
Still, we put our faces on, then forget we did. We want to be and to look âcomfortable.â In American fashion, âcomfortâ indicates not only feeling that clothes do not constrain, bind, or provoke us, but also not seeing clothes as manifestly constraining, binding, or provoking. And if to feel is in some way to see, it will be difficult to separate how we experience ourselves in clothes and how we experience others experiencing ourselves in clothes. Beauty is associated with vanity and pain, even in the form of an imagined empathy for a person whose clothes look uncomfortable. Comfort must be executed properly, lest it make others around you squirm. American comfort looks elegant only to a point, stopping short of attractiveness: athleisure and sweatpants perhaps, or soft, flowing garments.8 Comfort is a non-triggering safe space in which to enter freely into an experience of other clothed selvesânot appearing to have been chained by those antiquated legislators of girdles and corsets (or more recently, Spanx), which sell the look of control. We comfortable people let go of the need for control. Yet the constraints on comfortâs visage tell onlookers that even this novel freedom is governed by Draconian laws, defined as what appears appropriate or comfortable to others.
This uniform is designed to telegraph to others what to see so that they will not be made uncomfortable and probably hostile by being forced to look on another human being. The uniform must suggest a certain setting and it must dictate a certain air and it must also convey, however subtly, a dormant aggressiveness, like the power of a sleeping lion. It is necessary to make anyone on the streets think twice before attempting to vent his despair on you.
(Baldwin 1964/2008: 57)
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, donât look. âDormant aggressivenessâ 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.
The appearance of comfort, of course, varies, and a new dialect of comfort must be learned in different settings in order to continually go unnoticed. Working from both the outside in and the inside out, the ultimate goal is a state in which clothes no longer seem to exert their impression on you. Because the more effortlessly you can forget the âfeelingâ of clothes, the more you can cast away the outer image of yourself grating on you. Thanks to clothes, you can then be free not to care about clothes. We enter the comfort zone, wrapped in a security blanket of ineffectual clothing. The lure of this zone seems to be the meshing of clothes with persons. Clothing functions almost as if a second skin, and in the absence of other information, it leads to assumptions about who people are on the basis of how they look.
This is one way in which we find clothes uncomfortable: they are connected to biases and stereotypes. Such fraudulent signals are not felt or sensed to belong on the person. We say: we are so much more than our looks. We are not solely aesthetic objects. And yet, the desire for comfortable clothes suggests that the experience of the binding of the body in clothes is a metaphor for how we experience the feeling of our âselvesâ more generally. We forget the question of ourselves in comfortable clothes, as we do in comfortable patterns of thought. Is it the mere presence of clothes that discomforts us? To imagine a time when there was no thought of fashion would be like a time in which time ceases to exert a visible effect. Perhaps a desire to distance yourself from fashionâto be comfortableâis also a longing to stop the clock?
But what if assumptionsâreally, prejudicesâhave to be worn in order to be overturned? The democratic ideal within the Western fashion stereotype hopes for a liberation from such authoritarian constraints. The plethora of options is a new nudity, in which we are apparently now able to express ourselves without needing to do so as an act of defense. Comfort seems to be the illusion ofâthe desire forânatureâs clothes. This may be the dream implicit in all clothing. But its fruition would be a world of phantoms. On one level, having freedom in fashion seems to mean having a diversity of options from a diversity of designers, where there is no conventional backdrop against which âstandardâ persons are defined. Yet the image for this is a line-up of designs and individuals that once depicted can only become stereotypesâletâs call them âmodels.â9 How does one liberate oneself not just from the assumptions of clothes but from their inability to sufficiently express our individuality? Is the only route to display the self to build into clothes our very imperfection: a frayed hem, a sweep of blush, âdistressedâ fabric?
In Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man), Primo Levi describes his experience in Auschwitz during the Second World War. His clothes are stripped, his body shaved, and all of his possessions are taken away. The meaning is clear: Leviâs freedom and identity have been removed. His clothes are then replaced with dehumanizing clothes: a striped uniform (for the Jewish people, sewn with a yellow Star of David) and a pair of wooden shoes. âDeath begins with the shoes,â writes Levi, for they become instruments of torture in the camp (1947/2008: 24). They are designed not to fit the foot, so as to more quickly cause injury, and with it, infection, which is left untreated and leads to death. The shoes predict and deliver Leviâs fate. The Nazis used this dress code to divide prisoners into those who would live and those who would die.
Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself. He will be a man whose life or death can be lightly decided with no sense of human affinity, in the most fortunate of cases, on the basis of a pure judgment of utility. It is in this way that one can understand the double sense of the term âextermination camp,â and it is now clear what we seek to express with the phrase: âto lie on the bottom.â
(15â6)
Levi is stripped and redefined. This is the first meaning of âextermination,â as the privation of lifeâs 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 âroomâ 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.
If we throw our clothes aside and say, this is not me, we again notice our discomfort in and with clothes. This seems to be the thing we must take for granted the more comfortable we are; that is, we cease to recall the presence of ourselves in distinction from the way we are outfitted. And if comfort is not merely some belated reaction to rib-crushing corsets, it may be the mere presence of clothes that seems to rub us the wrong way. After a long day, the body rebels against material limits. Now increasingly uncomfortable, we gravitate toward a less literal comfort: a trusty shirt that feels or looks good to us, or a favorite pair of slippers, which, though worn, seem familiar, as if an afterlife of a more comfortable self. Our skin too, unwillingly worn, seems an outfit in which we can feel more or less at ease, so that even in the thinnest cloth, if we begin to focus on the touch of the fabric on the body, we begin to feel estranged.
What shroud is this within which I am ensconced? By comparison to me, clothes seem profoundly surface level, and yet, through them it is possible to experience the depth of the self, whether in its rejection or liberation. Is the body, too, a shroud? Nudity seems insufficient after experiencing the touch of clothes. You would have to be flayed to experience the skin from all sidesâthe âsupernudityâ10 that reveals the body as somehow not quite what we thought body was, because touch blurs the lines between self and other. We launder the surface of our skin as if it were fabric, as if personal hygiene were an outfit needed for admission into the world. On entering into a jacket by Sonia Rykiel, HĂŠlène Cixous remarks, âI go inside, eyes closed. With my hands, with my eyes in my hands, with my eyes groping like hands, I seeâtouch the body hidden in the bodyâ (1994: 96).
Do we only know of bodyâs estrangement because of our estrangement in clothes? What if what we feel when we experience the touch of ourselves by way of clothes is really something like our own act of becoming aware of ourselves? Through clothes we experience blind self-reflection, for the touch of clothes allows us to experience their fabrication, and this is connected to our feeling of a ârealityâ beyond them.11 We long to be ourselves in clothes (as if to approximate a perfectly naked selfhood, or at least not to have to worry so much about the surface self), and yet we sense ourselves in clothes precisely because our clothes are not us.
The reader may object here. Couldnât one sense the âselfâ in a similar fashion, and maybe more powerfully, through another humanâs touch, as one sees recognition in anotherâs eyes?12 But clothes touch us the whole day. If we live naked, our skin folds on itself as if a garment; if we sleep naked, the fabric of sheets touches us at night. Gravity makes it impossible for us not to be touching the surface of a ground. And clothes embellish that experienceâthey enrobe us, and cause us to feel our existing in a world all the more potently. It is not that we must be aware of our literal clothes to be aware of ourselves; it is more that the âinevitabilityâ of clothes alre...