1 Philosophy and fashion
Why, asks Hanson, do philosophers hate fashion?
I don’t know that they do, and I certainly don’t know that Hanson shows they do, so let me instead retool her question like this: In what way does fashion challenge certain traditional precepts of philosophy?
One answer is that philosophers are interested in the truth as opposed to mere appearance, and fashion is appearance. There is a certain Platonic disdain for appearances and the bodies and adornments that give rise to them that permeates the history of philosophy. See p. 109.
In philosophers’ political-philosophical utopias, citizens wear very little. Thus p. 109 green.
Interestingly, these rejections of fashion (fashion in the sense of changing dress, say) nevertheless assume there is a right way of dressing. See p. 109 blue.
The philosophical worry about fashion may also be put down to an anxiety about change, not necessarily in general, but change in standards of beauty. At stake in the very possibility of fashion is the question whether standards of beauty are eternal ones. For contrast: Baudelaire. Beauty is historical and contingent, in his view; “our natural state is neither good nor true.” See p. 111. Baudelaire rejects a certain philosophical view of beauty that sees its original in nature.
Underlying Baudelaire’s view of fashion (and of makeup), interestingly, is a disdain for the body that is Platonic also. Consider the passage highlighted on p. 112.
Fashion inevitably involves attention to the body, and perhaps this attention is what motivates philosophical scorn. See p. 113.
Hanson notes that, in its ‘complaint’ about the male gaze, certain strands of feminism adopt a posture of scorn for the body and its adornment that is traditional and perhaps not allied to the cause of women’s liberation. See pp. 113–114. Perhaps the separation of beauty from desire should render beauty a means of liberation from the male gaze. See p. 114.
Aside from distaste for fashion as a fact about seeming and appearance, philosophers may also dislike fashion for its transience and its social conformity. See p. 117 and p. 119.