Why Fashion is More Relevant than you Think
Is fashion just another confusing walkway that doesn’t make sense? Is it a lifestyle that only someone as cool as Beth Harmon from The Queen’s Gambit could concern herself with; not to forget the rich of course? We’ve all had dreams of sauntering around a city centre in Beth’s Russian outfit, Mackelmore’s coat, or some glorious garment that attracts all the mates. Yet this is just a dream, especially for those like myself with the social charisma of an orangutan. Beyond this aspiration, fashion seems to sit in the mundane mass production of the retailer, or the social connotation of fashion as a feminine interest or occupation.
No matter who we are, we all take part in it, and as we shall later see, no matter how naked we are. From the Anarchist dressed in black to Victoria Secret’s first trans model, Valentina Sampaio, fashion concerns us all.
The story does not end here however. Beyond expressing individuality or group identity, the story of fashion lies deeper. It is beyond nation, race, ethnicity, and gender. It is an ancient language of the human image. According to philosopher Winfried Menninhaus, if one conducts a close reading of Charles Darwin’s use of aesthetic language in The Descent of Man (published after his well-known book On the Origins of Species), fashion could be considered a fundamental part of human evolution. Let’s take a closer look.
Darwin uses aesthetic language and terminology frequently throughout his work. In The Descent of Man, he uses terms like “taste for the beautiful” and ‘sense of beauty”. Other examples are ornamental and capricious. These terms all have meanings which in philosophy deal with questions concerning beauty. Generally, Darwin’s use of these terms has been considered as loose and unscientific metaphors. They tend to be reduced to physical attractiveness and for this reason, deemed scientifically unclean. However, according to Menninghaus, there is a good reason why Darwin uses them. Plato applies the term “beautiful” to both natural bodies and cultural artefacts. It concerns not only what is created by humans, but humans themselves. Moreover, terms like “beauty” and “liveliness” have been active since at least the Renaissance and were later associated with the 18th-century biological language concerning “life”.
We may even consider the term autopoiesis. It means self-creation and refers to a system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself by creating its own parts. Eminent philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) used this term in defining both his ideas on aesthetic pleasure and the “feeling of life”. What matters here is that there is an overlap between language concerning biology and natural bodies, and aesthetic terms concerning the beautiful. The aesthetic terms which Darwin uses to describe biological life, overlap with philosophically rich content. We can draw from Darwin’s use of these terms semantic conclusions, i.e. philosophically rich ideas that were previously discarded as merely descriptive fluff. A particularly fascinating conclusion concerns fashion and evolution.
Consider the peacock with its flourish of tail feathers exhibiting nature’s vibrance. For all its beauty, what good is it? It seems to conflict with the physical fitness of the animal. It’s now harder for it to run, fly, chase, or whatever peacocks like to do. Darwin, therefore, suggests that whilst aesthetics hinders the general condition of life, aesthetic ornaments (peacock feathers) provide advantages in the field of sexual courtship. The ornamental (our key aesthetic term) appears to disregard the practical goals of physical fitness. It instead takes the “adaptive function” of securing a mate.
The ornament is the perfect example of aesthetic excess and disregard for the basic necessities of life. From birds of paradise to the French Rococo period, the ornamental emphasizes value, performance, and desirability, especially in the context of sexual choice. Ornamental aesthetics, whilst nothing to do with finding food or outrunning prey, is anything but “unnatural”.
When we look at cultural fashion, it is now easy to say that it is an extension and substitute for sexually selected caprices found on the natural bodies of sexual creatures. Fashion transforms the random emergence of desired characteristics into short and fleeting time periods. The transformation of the hairy ape into the naked ape took millennia in biological evolution, whereas the fashion industry shifts dramatically within a decade.
What is our ornament? Before humans started wearing clothing we must have had some sort of addition to ensure a mate. Darwin’s answer is skin. Not naked skin as the absence of clothing, but as the prime ornament of the human species. The idea is that humans, when evolving from apes, capriciously selected hairless over hairy bodies. This could have been initiated by an appreciation for hairless genital regions. This is at its core a difference in human versus ape fashion.
It also explains Edmund Burke’s conclusions that “there are a few animals which seem to have less beauty in the eyes of all mankind [than monkeys].” It is a rejection of one’s earlier fashion. Under these conclusions, we can take naked skin as a form of bodily clothing, analogous to ape fur or bird feathers. Skin becomes the uniquely flexible canvas, the prime human aesthetics. It speaks a language of pure aesthetic appreciation for one's own essentially human fashion. Any other creature that is “naked” just stands to emphasize the importance of our own naked skin.
In the art world, classicism has long defended the right to depict the nakedness of the human body. It was for them an indispensable given of Greek sculpture. The depiction of the unclothed sculpture was not just about displaying sexual features, it defined humans by their most primal aesthetic feature, naked skin. To forgo this depiction would be like displaying the peacock without its crucial ornamental tail feathers.
Overall, we see that fashion has an evolutionary basis. Our naked body and its ornamentation is a fundamentally natural aspect of the human species. So long as we are social creatures, fashion will never die. It might not look like Vogue or Prada, for the ornaments we attach to our bodies are spontaneous preferences. Yet critically, fashion is grounded in human life.
Photographer Oliviero Toscani once said that
“we should be interested in fashion because naked people never created any culture.”
On the contrary, fashion and culture are rooted in our naked skin.