#femalepresentation

[aheroicvisionoflife]

March 2023/8 Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit. George Santayana, The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906)

[aheroicvisionoflife]

March 2023/7

Fashion covers everything and involves everyone – if you want it or not, if you are aware of it or not. Fashion is an extensive and somehow disturbing phenomenon. It is that “Goddess of appearances” as Mallarmé later on defined it, it is a mysterious deity which, as it was said at the time, is the daughter of Saturn and of change, something that makes all of us – here I am quoting La Bruyère – makes all of us crazy and unstable.

Fashion did not always exist, and until the beginning of the 17th century there wasn’t even an expression to refer to it. (...). Later as fashion arose and the corresponding terms for fashion in the various European languages arose, and together with the terms, arose also lively debate on the interpretations and the consequences of fashion. A very serious word debate which is very different from today’s carelessness (...). For us, fashion is often considered something frivolous, something marginal, something that concerns especially women – and that’s not understood as praise in the debate – and concerning mostly clothes: when we think about fashion we think about clothes first. In the 17th century on the contrary it was very different. Fashionable people were primarily men, and fashion involved not only clothing, and not only the way to appear, but every possible object. That worried for example La Bruyère, that when fashion spreads, everything seems to be governed by fashion – clothes of course but also taste, lifestyle, health and consciousness. Fashion dictates the shape of clothes, the shape of wigs, but also what to eat, which medicines to use, what feelings to experience and to manifest, philosophical orientation, and and especially the attitude towards religion.

Elena Esposito – "In and out. Fashion and the culture of transitoriness", 2013