Fashion | Sense

"Deeply erudite but also playful and full of wit." Salman Rushdie Fashion | Sense is designed to explode fashion, and with it, the stigma in philosophy against fashions 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 fashions apparent beguilement more philosophical than it seems? And is philosophys longing for exposed depth concealing fashion in its anti-fashion stance? 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, fashions quarrel with philosophy may be at least as ancient as that infamous quarrel between philosophy and poetry alluded to in Platos Republic. And the quest for fashions 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 realitys fabric bristles in our relationship to our looks, not simply through the structure of clothes but in the plot of our wearing them. Meanwhile, the fashion of our words sharpens our meaning like a cutting silhouette. Grewals 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 fashions 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 philosophys most important and underestimated doppelgnger.