Philosophical Accounts of Fashion in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century: A Historical Reconstruction

Notwithstanding the great importance of clothing and fashion for the human being, there has been until recent times a general intellectual tendency to ignore them and neglect institutional significance to them. If this is true for the field of the social sciences, it is even more valid and appropriate for philosophy. However, a survey of the field shows that various philosophers expressed a genuine interest in fashion, sometimes only in a cursory way, but other times in a more systematic way. The aim of this chapter is to provide a historical reconstruction of some stages in the development of a philosophical discourse on fashion during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and also to show that fashion, should one want to assign it to a particular domain within the great field of philosophical disciplines, must be definitely assigned to the field of aesthetics and thus considered as an aesthetic problem.