Fashion Sense: On Philosophy and Fashion

Fashion Sense is designed to explode ＂fashion,＂ and with it, the stigma in philosophy against fashion’s superficiality. Fashion appears to be altogether differently occupied, disingenuous and insubstantial, even sophistic in its pretense to peddle surfaces as if they were something deep. But is fashion’s apparent beguilement more philosophical than it seems? And is philosophy’s longing for exposed depth concealing fashion in its anti-fashion stance?

Using primarily ancient Greek texts, peppered with allusions to their echoes across the history of philosophy and contemporary fashion and pop culture, Gwenda-lin Grewal not only examines the rift between fashion and philosophy, but also challenges the claim that fashion is modern. Indeed, fashion’s quarrel with philosophy may be at least as ancient as that infamous quarrel between philosophy and poetry alluded to in Plato’s Republic. And the quest for fashion’s origins, as if a quest for a neutrally-outfitted self, stripped of the self-awareness that comes with thinking, prompts questions about human agency and our immersion in time. The touch of reality’s fabric bristles in our relationship to our looks, not simply through the structure of clothes but in the plot of our wearing them.

Meanwhile, the fashion of our words sharpens our meaning like a cutting silhouette. Grewal’s own writing is playfully and daringly self-conscious, aware of its style and the entrapment it arouses from the very first line. The reactions provoked by fashion’s flair, not only among the philosophical set but also among those who would never deck themselves out in the title, ＂philosopher,＂ show it forth as perhaps philosophy’s most important and underestimated doppelgänger.

Gwenda-lin Grewal is Onassis Lecturer in Ancient Greek Thought at The New School for Social Research, USA. She has held fellowships and teaching positions at Yale, Vassar, Sarah Lawrence, and the University of Dallas and been a Visiting Scholar at Harvard, the Center for Hellenic Studies, and the American Academy in Rome. Her work includes a translation of Plato’s Phaedo (Center for Hellenic Studies, 2018)