La mode au bord du vide - Semaine de la Pop Philosophie

Francesco Masci, philosopher Benjamin Simmenauer, philosopher lectures followed by a debate

Francesco Masci

Fashion and seduction, or the perfect oxymoron

Fashion is blind to desire. The mechanics of seduction, that dialectical relationship of mutual transcendence in the exhaustion of sexual pleasure, are completely unknown to it. Unless one naively confuses fashion with the art of clothing, it is impossible to attribute to it the fantasies triggered by unveilings and fetishisms that fuel erotic desire. Its material is time, and its engine is pure negation, which anticipates no positive resolution. Anything that exceeds the recursive moment of the temporal erasure of what was already destined to disappear is no longer fashion. It belongs to advertising. Fashion derealizes bodies, which become machine-bodies incapable of arousing the slightest desire, except for the perverse desire, because it is mimetic, provoked by an artifact. These are bodies forever detached from others, incapable of awakening any erotic impulse—not because of a perfection that would make them unattainable, but because of their excessive availability. They potentially belong to everyone and no one. Fashion is the anti-utopia of a world without hope or disappointment, an etymologically cool, cold world, rid of the passions of seduction that only difference can arouse. There is nothing to take, nothing to surpass. The other is nothing more than the mirrored image of the self, and no pleasure, except onanistic and narcissistic pleasure, can emerge.

Benjamin Simmenauer

How does fashion manage to make us ugly?

Fashion’s detractors sometimes criticize it for forcing us to adopt unflattering, or even completely ridiculous, dress codes. Fashion shows are thus subject to parodic reinterpretations or “memes” on social media. In retrospect, we harshly judge the stylistic wanderings of our ancestors, whether they adopted the tight, colorful outfits of Tecktonik, the bouffant hairstyles of the 1980s, or the pagoda shoulders beloved by Pierre Cardin. Fashion seems capable of forcing us to have bad taste.

Explanations for this phenomenon vary widely. The simplest is to postulate, like Roland Barthes, a kind of mysterious order, “Fashion,” which imposes choices on individuals that are not really their own. Barthes sees Fashion as a “system” that arbitrarily associates meaning with clothing and imposes its categories and distinctions on society. I do not believe in the existence of such a power, and will try to show that the most absurd and least flattering fashions, while being the effect of complex individual interactions, are nonetheless rationally explicable. I will focus in particular on the notions of costly signaling, conditional preferences and salience.