Archive | 2019
Fashion and Philosophy: An Overview
Abstract
“Why is there something rather than nothing?” asked Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1951, p. 527). In similar vein to this metaphysical inquiry, this book seeks through the philosophization of fashion to answer the question, “Why is there something new rather than nothing new?” The distinction between concept and phenomena, i.e., between newness and new fashions of different kinds, can be pronounced through philosophical discourse, illuminating the epistemological meaning of fashion as both a concept and a phenomenon. This in turn will help us grasp certain attributes of modernity in the context of philosophy. The metaphysical question as to the genesis of something new, which is inseparable from the eternal return of the same that is in operation, is closely entwined with the period called modernity, during which fashion played a significant role. Metaphysics is often criticized for its detachment from the real world. However, by investigating fashion through metaphysical concepts and principles, certain esoteric aspects of metaphysics can be broken down, assisting us in finding some fruitful links between the most abstruse branch of philosophy and our objective world. Through this interdisciplinary journey, one should be able to see the salient connections between the thought processes presented in philosophy and the modes of life experienced in the course of modern times. Indeed, metaphysics represents a major point of departure in this unusual project. It is Immanuel Kant’s schematism that renders the theoretical basis upon which fashion is anatomized as an a priori concept of the understanding and as a phenomenal a posteriori appearance. The term fashion as used in common parlance is, in point of fact, a mode or style with countless examples that are often confined within the bounds of the body. On the other hand, the pursuit of something new in the form of fashion, originating as it does in the mind, requires synthetic a priori cognition. Kant offers clarifications about our intuitions of time and space, with which the metaphysical attributes of fashion become easy to identify. With recourse to Kant’s transcendental aesthetic, the pursuance of something new, the conceptual side of fashion, can be reckoned not only as part of the metaphysical domain arrived at by a synthetic a priori judgment, but also as an incessant attempt to seek one’s subjectivity.