What follows is a guest post by Laura T. Di Summa (William Paterson University). Perhaps we can agree on the fact that philosophers have not, for the most part, taken fashion very seriously. There seems to be something wrong, specifically, about being fashionable – about trafficking in the world of glossy magazines, runways, and looks and styles that change, frequently, and at a price. There seems to be something wrong about wearing the very clothes we find in those magazines, about buying them, and about investing energy (and money) in keeping up with them. More formally, the philosophical antipathy toward fashion appears to target two ideas related to it. The first is an understanding of fashion as the quintessential fuel, the culprit, of our overtly consumerist culture. Fashion is fabric, it is material, and somehow it is also a symbol of materialism. Fashion is an object that is there, at best, … Continue reading →