Ideas Pertaining to a Phenomenological Aesthetics of Fashion and Play: The Contribution of Eugen Fink

There has been until recent times a general tendency to ignore clothing and fashion in the domain of the human sciences, in general, and in philosophy in particular. However, clothing, understood as a basic human phenomenon, and fashion, understood as one of those fundamental phenomena that really form or influence the Zeitgeist of the present age, have proven to be far too important for philosophy to simply keep on ignoring them – at least as far as their influence on our everyday life and, on a specifically aesthetic level, as far as their role in shaping our taste and lifestyle are concerned. Inasmuch as dress immediately covers the surface of our body and thus presents it to the world as “never naked” but “always dressed”, clothing and fashion are clearly connected in the very first place to the bodily dimension of life. Together with certain recent developments of pragmatism such as so-called somaesthetics, the philosophical tradition that has probably paid the greatest attention in our age to the rehabilitation of the embodied constitution of the human world-experience as such is phenomenology. In my paper I will focus primarily on the contribution of Eugen Fink, a great phenomenologist who, in his short but remarkable book "Mode… ein verführerisches Spiel" (1969), investigated fashion with great interest and accuracy, understanding it as a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. I will first contextualize Fink’s contribution to an aesthetics of fashion within his more general conception of the philosophical significance of play, presented in his essay "Oase des Glücks. Gedanken zu einer Ontologie des Spiels" (1957) and his systematic treatise "Spiel als Weltsymbol" (1960). Then I will provide an in-depth analysis and interpretation of his short but remarkable book "Mode… ein verführerisches Spiel", thus promoting a reevaluation of Fink’s important (but relatively unknown, little studied, and seldom mentioned) contribution to a strictly philosophical investigation of the significance of dress, and outlining some elements of a phenomenological aesthetics and anthropology of fashion. Indeed, in this perspective the human being is understood as not only the rational and language-using animal but even as the animal that dresses itself – and quite often, actually, in a very fashionable way!