Margaret Mead Japan China Religie en seks Moral panics Seks en robots Seksuele ontwikkeling Seksualisering Leeftijdverschillen Geweld en misbruik Consent Sexting Prostitutie Pornografie"Fashion is irrational in the sense that it seeks change for the sake of change, not in order to ‘improve’ the object, for example by making it more functional." Lars SVENDSEN - Fashion - A philosophy, p.29
Lars SVENDSEN"But if philosophy is to be a discipline that contributes to our self-understanding, and if fashion really has been – and is – as influential as I claim, it ought to be taken seriously as an object of philosophical investigation."(7)
[Dat is niet gebeurd door die academische filosofen, die zich natuurlijk te verheven achtten boven zoiets 'oppervlakkigs' zoals de auteur ook constateert.]
Mode is steeds belangrijker geworden voor steeds meer mensen, man en vrouw, jong en oud.
"I would go so far as to claim that an understanding of fashion is necessary in order to gain an adequate understanding of the modern world, even though it is definitely not being asserted that fashion is the ‘universal key’ that is solely capable of providing such an understanding.
At the same time, fashion would seem to be one of the least important things one could imagine. In many contexts using the prefix ‘fashion’, as in ‘fashion philosophy’, is synonymous with dismissing it as something that lacks substance and gravity."(10-11)
"This book is mostly critical of fashion, but it does not condemn it. A central ambition is to establish a more reflective relationship to fashion and as such to change our attitude towards it. This will not completely liberate us from fashion, but we can achieve a relative degree of independence from it."(11)
"Generally speaking, it is the question of fashion’s relevance for the formation of identity that has preoccupied me in this investigation, although fashion can of course be analysed from many different angles."(11)
Svendsen richt zich op kleding.
"It is not unreasonable to link the concept of fashion closely to clothes, but at the same time it is obvious that not all clothes can be included under ‘fashion’, and as such the term ‘fashion’ has a narrower frame of reference than the term ‘clothes’."(13-14)
"European clothing had changed relatively little from the Roman Age to the fourteenth century. Although there had of course been variations in clothing as regards materials and details, to all intents and purposes the form of clothes remained unaltered. Broadly speaking, rich and poor wore clothing of similar form, although rich people had their clothes made of more expensive materials and decorated themselves with ornaments."(21-22)
"In order to be able to talk of ‘fashion’ it is not sufficient for a change to take place on rare occasions. It only becomes a fashion when this change is sought for its own sake and takes place relatively frequently."(22)
"Change in clothes became a source of pleasure in itself. Naturally for centuries this conscious change of styles was accessible to only the few, the rich, but it gradually spread with the emergence of the bourgeoisie, together with concurrent desire to be ‘in fashion’." [mijn nadruk] (23)
"Gradually beauty drops out as a central aesthetic norm, and the insistence on something being new becomes the most crucial factor: the logic of fashion has outdone all other aes- thetic conditions." [mijn nadruk] (27)
"The insistence on originality was the mantra of the artistic avant-garde."(27)
"Fashion is irrational in the sense that it seeks change for the sake of change, not in order to ‘improve’ the object, for example by making it more functional. It seeks superficial changes that in reality have no other assignment than to make the object superfluous on the basis of non-essential qualities, such as the number of buttons on a suit jacket or the famous skirt length. Why do skirts become shorter? Because they have been long. Why do they become long? Because they have been short. The same applies to all other objects of fashion." [mijn nadruk] (29)
"Fashion used to follow a modernist norm, in that a new fashion was to replace all previous ones and make them superfluous. The traditional logic of fashion is a logic of replacement. For the last ten years, however, fashion has been defined by a logic of supplementation, by which all trends are recyclable and a new fashion hardly aims at replacing all those that have gone before, but rather contents itself with supplementing them."(33)
"In presentations of utopias, fashion is normally absent. We can already see this in Thomas More’s Utopia, where everyone wears the same type of functional clothes that have not been dyed and have not changed their form for centuries. More also stresses that all clothes are used until they wear out. Totalitarian regimes have also had a tendency to insist that all citizens of the state wear uniforms. The Mao outfit is a typical example." [mijn nadruk] (33-34)
"Why did fashion become so attractive? What was it about fashion that attracted so many people into its sphere? In this chapter we will look more closely at a number of theories as to how and why fashion develops the way it does. Various versions of the so-called ‘trickle-down’ theory will be central, as this is the actual basic model in most accounts of the development of fashion, but we will also see that this theory has become steadily less tenable as fashion has continued to develop."(36)
"Normally people did not have more than one set of clothes. This changed dramatically with the expansion of mass production, which made more clothing readily accessible to more people. This ‘democratization’ of fashion did not mean that all distinctions were erased, rather that almost everybody was incorporated into the social interplay of fashion. While the struggle to look distinguished had formerly been reserved for the highest echelons of society, mass production made it possible for the lower classes to take part as well. Since then this tendency has only increased."(38)
"This is normally presented as the result of a so- called ‘trickle-down’ effect, where innovation takes place at a higher level and then spreads downwards because the lower social classes strive to move upwards, which results in their always being one step behind."(39)
"The ‘trickle-down’ theory is only partially right, then, when we take a close look at the history of fashion. To a greater extent movement over the past forty years has been in the opposite direction..."(46)
"According to Lurie, there is a proportional relation between the number of items of clothing one has and how much one is able to express visually, because clothes are one’s visual vocabulary. So a person with a small wardrobe can express only a few messages via clothes, while someone interested in fashion with a large wardrobe is able to express a number of different messages. But there is no reason to believe that this is so. Most clothes communicate so little that even a large wardrobe will not communicate all that much, so it is doubtful that the average slave of fashion should be ascribed any greater visual ability to communicate than, for example, a person who only has a few items of clothing but who indicates a distinct subcultural affiliation."(65)
"Obviously clothes communicate something, but what is it? They cannot be said as a matter of course to express a message."(66)
"The shaping of self-identity in the postmodern era is in a crucial sense a body project. We can see the body to an increasing extent tending to become seminal for an understanding of self-identity. The ego is very much constituted via the presentation of the body. We can also see this in relation to a number of practices, such as asceticism or a diet, which formerly had a more spiritual purpose, but now mainly have to do with shaping the body."(75)
"We seek identity in the body, and clothes are an imme- diate continuation of the body. That is also why clothes are so important to us: they are closest to our body. Our perception of the human body is influenced to an amazing extent by the fashions prevalent at the time. Anne Hollander has shed light on this in her book Seeing through Clothes, in which she demonstrates how portraits of nudes continually show the models as if they were dressed, even though it is patently obvious they are not." [mijn nadruk] (77)
"Human perception never depicts neutrally, it interprets, and the interpretations depend on people’s perceptual habits: what we see when we look at something depends on what we have seen previously. The visual dressing of the naked body with invisible clothes that shape it does not only apply to artistic representations but also to live experience." [mijn nadruk] (78)
"Nakedness only says something by being in a dia- logue with clothes. At the same time, naked skin has clearly become increasingly central in fashion."(78)
"There are limits to how much a body can be modified via cosmetics, hairstyles and training, but by intervening more directly via cosmetic surgery (removing a little here and adding a little there) the ideal of beauty that applies at any given time can apparently be brought within the reach of more and more people."(81)
"One recent study claims that 43 per cent of all men in the us are dissatisfied with their appearance – three times as many as 25 years ago. More and more men are modifying their appearance by cosmetic surgery."(81)
"Cosmetic surgery is only a radicalization of earlier forms of body modification: there is only a difference of degree between having a haircut and having liposuction or a silicone implant. Other forms of body modification, such as piercing, tattooing and scar decoration, also became highly popular in the 1990s. Like all other fashions, however, the trend died away when the fashion became too widespread."(82)
"The hours spent in the gym and the intervention of the plastic surgeon are not seen as imposed on the individual from the outside. Apparently, one freely chooses to replace fat by muscle and to submit to the surgeon’s scalpel. At the same time it is obvious that this free choice is not unqualified at all but takes place on the basis of an internalization of social norms." [mijn nadruk] (83)
[Uiteraard. ]
"Trousers are a good example of what Roland Barthes calls a ‘mythologization’ (i.e. naturalization), by which a completely contingent definition is raised to the status of a natural law. There is no physiological reason for trousers being a specifically male garment. In nineteenth-century France women were actually forbidden to wear trousers, although working-class women in particular broke this prohibition. Knickers were also highly suspect, as the separation of a woman’s thighs, even by a small piece of fabric, was considered directly obscene. Girls could wear knickers until puberty, but not subsequently, as the only adult women who wore them were prostitutes." [mijn nadruk] (87)
[Is het echt? Prachtig.]
"What is ‘beautiful’, what would represent a deviation from a beauty norm and what role such a deviation plays are all relative when it comes to time and place. If one searches for universal ideals of beauty, one is liable to emerge empty- handed."(88)
"The eighteenth-century separation of arts from crafts placed tailoring very much in the latter category. Clothes were placed in an extra-artistic sphere – where, for the most part, they have remained. Ever since haute couture was introduced around 1860, fashion has aspired to be recognized as fully fledged art."(90)
"Fashion designers have never managed to gain total recognition as artists, but they continue to strive so to do."(91)
"Our everyday lives have become increasingly commercialized, an ever greater number of commodities are in circulation, and more and more we are attempting to satisfy our needs and desires by consuming commodities and services. What does it mean that we now live in a ‘consumer society’?"(111)
"Every population displays a number of different patterns of consumption linked to such as geography, age and financial status."(112)
"We do not only consume to cater for already existing needs: we do so probably just as much in order to create an identity. Additionally, consumption functions as a kind of entertainment."(113)
"The romantic emancipation from norms and restrictions gives consumption greater scope. Consumption becomes a central area for people to develop their freedom, which in turn has a consolidating effect on the consumption system."(115)
"The idea that consumers are almost hypnotized by marketing was first advanced seriously in the 1950s by the cultural critic Vance Packard, but despite the fact that this idea can be said to have been thoroughly refuted, it still resurfaces at regular intervals. Obviously advertising has an influence, otherwise it would hardly have existed, but, rather than being ‘brainwashed’, consumers act deliberately." [mijn nadruk] (116)
"Today, practically every product is saturated with meaning – even the most trivial bottle of mineral water has to contain all sorts of messages – but it is also becoming increasingly clear that hardly any of this means anything at all."(126)
"‘Identity’ is one of the seminal concepts for describing the function of fashion. Fashion allegedly contributes to the formation of identity. Our identities have become problematic – they are no longer something we take for granted. This is linked to a general focusing on self-realization. Self-realization is an extremely modern phenomenon."(137)
"The present-day pursuit of self-realization is perhaps the absolutely clearest expression of what a grip individualism (the individual as an ideology) has got on us. Individualism is so all-pervasive that it is hard to think of anything more conformist."(138)
"It must be emphasized, however, that a person will not be completely fashionable if he or she follows fashion too well. A hint of personal taste should also be suggested, for example by combining two garments in a distinctive way. Fashion is always to be found in the interspace between the individual and the conformist."(142)
"The heyday of clothes fashion – the period during which it still appeared to be presenting something new – basically lasted for only a century, from the time Charles Frederick Worth opened his fashion house in Paris in 1857 until the 1960s. Since then the traditional replacement logic of fashion, by which something new is constantly replaced by something even newer, has itself been replaced by a logic of supplementation, where all styles become more or less contemporaneous and every style is endlessly recyclable."(155)
"Pluralism in fashion does not necessarily make us any freer. Anne Hollander claims that ‘the tyranny of fashion itself has in fact never been stronger than in this period of visual pluralism.’ This is not least due to the fact that all of us have been made responsible for the surface we present to the outside world."(156)