Fashion Sense

<i>Fashion Sense</i>is designed to<i></i>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?<br/><br/> 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 <i>Republic</i>. 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.<br/><br/>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.