Philosophy, fashion and ethics

Shahidha Bari, Professor of Fashion Cultures and Histories at the London College of Fashion, discusses thinking philosophically about fashion.

Shahidha Bari

Professor of Fashion

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Shahidha Bari

Professor of Fashion

18 Sept 2021

Key Points

Clothes, despite or maybe because of their everyday and ubiquitous nature, warrant deeper inspection.
Phenomenology may help us understand value through our clothes and belongings; ethics may help us see how we care for one another in caring for our clothes.
Maybe we worry that an interest in dress might be narcissistic – but maybe we should rethink narcissism.

All of us dress

I think people might be surprised to learn that a philosopher, or someone trained in philosophy like me, could be interested in something like fashion, because philosophy sounds deep, and fashion sounds superficial or everyday – but that’s precisely why I think they’re interesting together. The everydayness of clothes, the fact that all of us dress every day and that we see other people who are dressed, means that it’s a crucial part of our existence and it warrants deeper inspection; the kind of thinking that philosophy allows it.

Giving clothes dignity

Photo by Sk Hasan Ali

There’s a long tradition of thinking about the everyday. The person I think most of is Karl Marx in the 19th century. Marx is famously a radical thinker of revolution and the redistribution of wealth, but he is also what we call a materialist thinker. He brings about the materialist turn in philosophy. He finds the very abstract thinking of philosophy, the theoretical apprehensions of philosophy, too detached from reality. Marx’s account of the redistribution of wealth and the inequality of people’s existence is based on a material analysis of their everyday lives and, often, their working conditions.

When he writes his great work Capital, in 1867, he mentions Mary Anne Walkley, a 20-year-old seamstress, who died of overwork. She had worked 17 to 20 hours a day without respite. She became this enormous story in mid-19th century England. I’m fascinated that Marx, one of our most important philosophers, would care about a garment worker. That’s one of the things I’m trying to do, too: to think about how we can care about the people who make our clothes and the conditions in which they make them. One of the ways we can do that is by learning to care about our clothes and giving them the dignity that philosophy often allows, giving them profundity, understanding their place in our world and what they mean to us, because once we can care about our clothes, we might care about the people who make them, too. It’s worth thinking philosophically about dress.

Questions about our clothes

There are two philosophical traditions that I’m particularly interested in, which follow after Marx. The first is phenomenology, which is an understanding or consideration of our experience. That emerges in the 20th century with French thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gaston Bachelard, who writes a book in 1957 called The Poetics of Space – an exploration of how we inhabit our homes and buildings. He asks what might seem strange, but perfectly correct, questions such as: how do we use stairs and what do stairs mean to us? Why do we use attics?

I ask similar questions about our clothes. I’m trying to think about the phenomenology of our clothes. What does it mean to feel cotton against our sleeve on a cold day? Why do we carry bags? What do we keep in our bags? And what does that tell us about the ways that we think that we are prepared or unprepared for the day? What do we put in our bags that we think are precious and important to us? What does it mean to have possessions? Shoes also seem rather ordinary, but what do they enable us to do? What do we learn about human beings and their capacities in the ways that shoes are designed?

So, thinking about objects and the way we use them might be a way to understand how human beings work and how they live – and that might tell us something about our nature.

Responding to one another by our dress

The other philosophical tradition that helps us think about dress is ethics: the way that one human being relates to another. I’m interested in the fact that we dress for ourselves and in relation to one another. When you walk down the street, you will see someone in a blue shirt or in a winter coat. We show our alertness and respond to one another in our dress. We’re susceptible to the colours and textures that we wear. So, there is an ethical relationship through our thinking about dress.

One of the thinkers that helps me to consider this most is Audre Lorde, an African-American feminist, lesbian poet and critic. In her 1988 essay A Burst of Light, Lorde writes about being in the South of France with a group of South African women from Soweto. She records how they are in this garden, and she notices how they are hanging their clothes on the washing line and combing one another’s hair. It’s a deeply profound moment where she realises there’s a solidarity that emerges from the relationship of these women, in their acts of self-care, caring for one another and their maintenance of their clothes.

Philosophy helps us to think about how our clothes allow us to forge ethical relationships with one another.

Freud, narcissism and what we wear

Photo by Unique Vision

When we dress, we might think that we know how we are presenting ourselves and the things that we are telling the world about ourselves. What I’m trying to think about is the way that dress is not just about the things that we know about ourselves, but those that we don’t know. We are constantly revealing things about ourselves that we don’t have any apprehension or control of. Psychoanalysis is the discipline or the field of study that encourages us to think about that: the unconscious and the conscious ways in which we operate. Freud is really important for me, partly because he thinks about narcissism – I think many worry that being interested in dress is narcissistic. One of my projects is to think about narcissism more seriously.

Freud tells us that we all have an element of narcissism. In fact, narcissism is an essential part of our infantile development. It is the way in which we see ourselves in all things: in our toys and our trinkets and in our mothers. Narcissism is about a fundamental relatedness to the world. With adulthood, we outgrow narcissism: we understand the limits of our self. But that original infantile narcissism, rather than rebuke it, we might think about the ways that it tethers us to the world.

Narcissus and the self

I want to rethink narcissism. If you go back to the original Greek story, Narcissus is the foolish Greek youth who falls in love with his own reflection in a woodland pool. It strikes me that the problem is not that Narcissus is vain, but that he is stupid. He’s unable to recognise his reflection as himself.

That challenge of being able to recognise yourself as yourself, to see yourself outside of yourself, is one of the challenges of philosophy. Philosophy encourages us to develop self-consciousness, so there is a way in which we can think of narcissism as something quite close to the self-consciousness that philosophy strives for.

When we dress, we often think about what we look like from the outside. When we do that, we’re not always kind. We’re often troubled by exacting beauty ideals. We’re often self-deprecating or critical. Yet, this idea of being able to see yourself outside of yourself – an astral projection, as it were – is also a way of having a sense of yourself, your parameters and the measure of who you are.

I often think about the relationship that women have with their clothes, the inspection that they’re subject to in a world where they’re often objectified. However, I also think that it grants women a capacity to see themselves outside of themselves; you know, that moment before they leave the house and they tug down their skirt to make sure it’s the right length and ensure they’ve got the right jacket or that their hair is in place. Those kinds of self-monitoring encourage vigilance. There is something extremely powerful in being able to see yourself outside of yourself – and the language and logic of fashion encourages you to do that. We might mistake that as a bad form of narcissism, but perhaps it is self-consciousness – and philosophy prizes self-consciousness. It’s a really powerful way of knowing yourself.

Suspicious of appearance

Photo by AS photostudio

Conventionally, the discipline of philosophy has been very suspicious of ideas around appearance, because philosophy is a discipline that venerates concepts of clarity, transparency and lucidity. This is a tradition that goes back to Plato’s analogy of the Cave of Shadows. We are always seeking to remove the disguises and the masquerades to be able to see things as they really are. So, a suspicion of appearances might account for some of the resistance to thinking about clothes. One of the things I’m suggesting is that maybe we are the things that we wear.

Susan Sontag, a great American 20th century thinker, thinks about style as substance, rather than revering substance over style. Perhaps style is the way we really are. Perhaps there is something meaningful to be understood about the ways that we present ourselves. I’m interested in returning to that idea and trying to recover the significance of what we wear and to counter the idea that dress and appearance is merely a superficial concern of vanity. In fact, when we think about it, and we think about our current moment, some of our most critical and urgent concerns circle around issues of dress.