Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-dnltx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-20T01:08:08.343Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Dressing Down Dressing Up—The Philosophic Fear of Fashion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Karen Hanson
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

There is, to all appearances, a philosophic hostility to fashionable dress. Studying this contempt, this paper examines likely sources in philosophy's suspicion of change; anxiety about surfaces and the inessential; failures in the face of death; and the philosophic disdain for, denial of, the human body and human passivity. If there are feminist concerns about fashion, they should be radically different from those of traditional philosophy. Whatever our ineluctable worries about desire and death, whatever our appropriate anger and impatience with the merely superficial, whatever our genuine need to mark off the serious from the trivial, feminism may be a corrective therapy for philosophy's bad humor and self-deception, as these manifest themselves when the subject turns to beautiful clothes.

Type
Research Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 5 , Issue 2: Special Issue: Feminism and Aesthetics , Summer 1990 , pp. 107 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Baudelaire, Charles. 1964. The painter of modem life & other essays. Mayne, Jonathan, trans. & ed. London: Phaidon Press.Google Scholar
Bell, Clive. 1947. On human finery. London: The Hogarth Press.Google Scholar
De Maupassant, Guy. 1908. L'Inconnue. Oevres complètes, v.mo. Paris: L. Conard. (Also in The novels and tales of Guy de Maupassant. 1928. London: Alfred A. Knopf.)Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. 1959. On transience. Vol. 5 of Collected papers. Strachey, James, ed. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Hanson, Karen. 1987. Being doubted, being assured. In Images in our souh. Vol. 10 of Psychiatry and the Humanities. Smith, Joseph and Kerrigan, William, eds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Molière, Jean. 1965. The misanthrope. Wilbur, Richard, trans. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.Google Scholar
More, Thomas. 1975. Utopia. Adams, Robert M., trans. New York: W.W. Norton.Google Scholar
Plato, . 1963. Phaedo. In The collected dialogues. Tredennick, Hugh, trans. Hamilton, Edith & Cairns, Huntington, eds. New York: Bollingen.Google Scholar
Plato, . 1963. Republic. In The collected dialogues. Shorey, Paul, trans. Hamilton, Edith and Cairns, Huntington, eds. New York: Bollingen.Google Scholar
Santayana, George. 1961. The sense of beauty. New York: Collier Books.Google Scholar
Sartre, Jean‐Paul. 1972. The psychology of imagination. London: Methuen.Google Scholar
Senchuk, Dennis M. 1985. Innocence and education. Philosophical Studies in Education: 6–24.Google Scholar
Thoreau, Henry David. 1966. Waiden and civil disobedience. Thomas, Owen, ed. New York: W.W. Norton.Google Scholar
Veblen, Thorstein. 1899. The theory of the leisure class. New York: Macmillan Company.Google Scholar
Wilson, Elizabeth. 1985. Adorned in dreams. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar