Fashion is usually understood as either the system of (producing, promoting, selling) clothes, as an up-to-date subcategory of clothes (a fleeting attribution), or as a general change in taste (“for change’s sake“, Entwistle 2015, 45) that since the onset of modernity is affecting most of cultural (even: aesthetic?) goods. All these conceptualizations denote fashion as an aspect of the daily and ordinary clothing practice that can be circumvented (in this stream of thought, you can not care about fashion and still clothe), which apparently reveals fashion as ephemeral (Lipovetsky 2002, 139; Corner 2014, 39) also for academic discussion. However, in a philosophically aesthetic vein, the present lecture shall rethink the concept of ‘fashion’, from something (almost plainly, boringly, see Esposito 2013) extraordinary to precisely the extraordinary in the (all, every) ordinary, and thus from partial to essential concern in the clothing.

Probably not in its nominal, but indeed in its gerundial form, hence not as ‘a fashion’, but crucially as ‘fashioning’, the widely used term can be taken to account for the becoming which is immanent to the clothing practice. An inclination, a readiness to become can be witnessed on several levels in the clothing: A textile is another, dependent on how it not ‘was’, but crucially ‘is’, exists as circularly washed, ironed, folded, dressed, worn, undressed, and washed. Change one piece in an outfit, and the entire cloth-cloth constellation is aesthetically changed (a switch from heels to sneakers entails e.g. a shift from chic to casual). And also a human/cloth conglomerate (as which realistically we all exist most of the time) is always only temporarily determined by the interplay of taking/allowing actions.

If we thus regard the fashioning, the playfulness of the clothing itself as aesthetic, its opposite would not precisely be the ugly, but rather the uniform. Also the concept of the uniform shall, for a moment, be extracted from its ordinary usage, and taken to denote not one particular kind of cloth (worn in official contexts), but rather a situation every cloth can enter, namely the one of scarcity. As soon as there is no other option, no possibility to decide, a cloth is becoming a uniform, if you like: is ‘uniforming’, is tunneling a clothing, and thus limiting its aesthetic potentialities. Having just one festive dress, when intending to frequent the opera, this dress becomes a uniform. Owning just one pair of rubber boots, these boots become a uniform as soon as it rains and you seek to go out.

Eventually returning to the ordinary usage of both terms, the fact that the fashion industry has a long tradition of engaging especially and explicitly with uniforms (such as military uniforms, business or boiler suits, or COVID-masks) shows its readiness if not to aestheticize, then at least to boldly confront and engage in a play with the unaesthetic.

Bibliography

Corner, Frances. 2014. Why Fashion Matters. London: Thames & Hudson.

Entwistle, Joanne. 2015. The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress & Modern Social Theory. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Esposito, Elena. 2013. “In and out: Fashion and the Culture of Transitoriness.“ Lecture presented at the III. Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture. Accessible on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9loww3vyj90&t=493s.

Lipovetsky, Gilles. 2002. The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy. Trans. by Catherine Porter. New Jersey/ Oxfordshire: Princeton University Press.