The one true philosophy of clothes, by Simon Critchley “America is here or nowhere” – Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1834)
What is the human being? Twenty five centuries ago, Plato gave a lecture in the Academy in Athens where he defined the human being as an animal, a biped and featherless. He was warmly applauded. Upon hearing this definition, Diogenes the Cynic – once described as a ‘Socrates gone mad’ – left the lecture room, found a chicken, plucked it clean and brought it back into the lecture theatre, declaring ‘Here is Plato’s man’.
Here’s another, better definition of the human being from the great 18th century satirist, Jonathan Swift. In A Tale of a Tub, he writes ‘What is Man himself, but a Micro-Coat or rather a compleat Suit of Cloths with all its trimmings (sic)’. Without clothes, human beings are hideous. We’re simply forked animals with bandy legs. Thus, clothes are necessary. But I’d like to go further and argue that clothes are essential and we might learn much from pondering their meaning.
Ask yourself: what is the human being but a garment and what is the world but the living garment of God? If language is the expressive garment of thought, then clothes are the expressive garment of the body. Nature and life itself are but one garment woven and ever-weaving from the loom of time. As the Earth-Spirit in Goethe’s Faust says – and note that these words betray the fact that God himself is not naked,
‘Tis thus at the roaring loom of time I ply, and weave for God the Garment thou see’st him by.’
Or as Carlyle writes in Sartor Resartus, or ‘The Tailor Re-tailored’,
‘The whole external universe and what holds it together is but clothing and the essence of all science lies in the PHILOSOPHY OF CLOTHES.’
The philosophy of clothes is not some specialized sub-discipline taught in fashion school ghettos. It is the key to understanding everything. It is the germ and gem of all science.
The human being is the fashioned animal and fashion is the key to understanding the human being. Put simply:
Mankind = manikin = mannequin
The fashion designer is not just the maker of clothes or purveyor of frocks, he is the creator, something almost divine. Like Plato’s demiurge or creator-deity in the Timaeus, the fashion designer in the sky and the fashion designers here on earth are his prophets, his true disciples: mortal portals to his immortal power.
In our depressingly sick society, we must fashion a new garment, a new and splendid outfit to clothe the naked body politic. And it must be a beautiful garment. Against the dominant utilitarianism that reduces all human experience to a mechanism of profit and loss governed by a crude hedonistic calculusm the body politic needs a sumptuous and gorgeous new frock. This is the eternal truth of dandyism and what we might venture to call ‘the dandiacal body’. Where most people dress to love, the dandy lives to dress. God loves dandies because, truth to tell, he is one himself. All forms of utilitarianism have to be refused through a refashioning of the human being through fashion. Dress and dress beautifully, for by doing so you are honouring the deity and becoming a little closer to the deity yourself.
But not too close. Remember why it is that we need clothes. To cover our shame, of course. It is because Eve was tempted by the wily serpent and Adam tasted the forbidden fruit that we were forced to exit paradise. It is only with the Fall and the fact of original sin that we felt shame in the eyes of God and covered ourselves with the first clothes, a tiny fig-leaf. If our entire social order is based on covering our shame, then the world that we inhabit is based on the need for clothes.
But here’s the delicious and essential paradox: clothes conceal and cover. They hide. But they also disclose, they reveal precisely by concealing. Think of the extraordinary importance of the slit, the hemline, the décolletage, of the symbolic phallic display of collar and tie. We see more in seeing less. Or at least we think we do.
This, of course, in a rigorously Heideggerian sense, is the true function of clothing, its bivalent play of disclosure and concealment. Full nakedness is always a crushing disappointment because it extinguishes desire. It is only in concealment that desire is mobilized. It is only through the slit, through the dark recesses of what the slit conceals, that desire takes wing. It is only in the not seeing that we desire to see, perchance to touch, even to taste.
You might ask: am I serious in advancing this clothes philosophy as the single key to everything?. My dear, I’ve never been more serious in my life. As Herr Diogenes Teufelsdröckh counsels, we must pass from the everlasting No, through the Centre of Indifference, to the everlasting Yes. We can only begin to think this through if we seriously meditate on the meaning of clothes and give ourselves up wholeheartedly to their philosophy.
