Fashion and Philosophy

“Fashion and Philosophy” implies that each term might evaluate itself according to the other — and while it is certainly “fashion” and not “philosophy” that sets the agenda in this relationship, the very conjunction of these terms eschews the precarity of their relationship.

What could philosophy, a mode of study and knowledge production, possibly have in common with fashion, one of the most prolific and commercial representatives of popular culture? Anxieties around the sustainability of the conjunction, fashion and philosophy, are both expressed in and obscured by the inescapable and apparently self-evident obviousness of the difference in kind that this conjunction indicates.

There is a reason why a course titled “Fashion and Philosophy” should end in catastrophe. Indeed, instead of assuming that the comparatively few attempts to combine these topics within the university context is a sign of the novelty of that combination, we proceed from the assumption that it is rather a sign of the problematicity of a combinatorial approach.

It follows that students who wish to test their interest in this course should not begin by asking themselves if they are interested in fashion and interested in philosophy. Rather, they should ask themselves if they are interested in pursuing a protocol of reading that we will outline and operationalize across two quarters.

Instead of trying to popularize philosophy through an undoubtedly popular object — and instead of trying to “elevate” fashion by applying philosophical concepts to it, this course hopes to test and prove a methodology and its underlying axiom: that we can in fact unearth theory through the rigorous close-reading and analysis of fashion’s techniques and practices.