The Dharma of Fashion (introduction) (original) (raw)

Thinking Through Fashion: Introduction

Introduction to Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists. Edited by Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik Learning how to think through fashion is both exciting and challenging, being dependent on one's ability to critically engage with an array of theories and concepts. This is the first book designed to accompany readers through the process of thinking through fashion. It aims to help them grasp both the relevance of social and cultural theory to fashion, dress, and material culture and, conversely, the relevance of those fields to social and cultural theory. It does so by offering a guide through the work of selected major thinkers, introducing their concepts and ideas. Each chapter is written by an expert contributor and is devoted to a key thinker, capturing the significance of their thought to the understanding of the field of fashion, while also assessing the importance of this field for a critical engagement with these thinkers' ideas.This is a guide and reference for students and scholars in the fields of fashion, dress and material culture, the creative industries, sociology, cultural history, design and cultural studies.

Dressing as an Ordinary Aesthetic Practice

Everydayness. Contemporary Aesthetic Approaches, 2021

The purpose of this paper is to briefly present a new perspective on fashion as an ordinary aesthetics, based on Wittgenstein's later aesthetic conception. In order to analyse the ordinary dimension of fashion, I will start from Giovanni Matteucci's account of fashion as an aesthetic phenomenon as presented in his Philosophical Perspectives on Fashion (2017). There, Matteucci introduces the idea of juxtaposing the Wittgensteinian concept of "form of life" to fashion. Accordingly, my aim in this paper is to show the resemblances between the Wittgensteinian concept of "form of life" and the ordinary practice of dressing, and to characterize thereby the aesthetic connotations of the practice of fashion. I will claim that the act of dressing everyday structurally employs a kind of language which can be defined as aesthetic − according to Wittgenstein's aesthetic account as presented during his Lectures in Cambridge in 1933 and 1938. Conclusively, I argue that in fashion (intended as everyday dressing) there is an interrelation between the grammar of language and socially encoded aesthetic responses: fashion sets new rules that define the meaning of dresses; these rules, in turn, are not eternal since they follow fashion's cyclical seasonality and personal good taste. Thus, anyone who daily commits to the practices of clothing can acquire sensitivity to the rules and train within the same "grammar of dressing."