Aesthetics of Fashion

This essay addresses the meaning of an “aesthetics of fashion,” and the reasons for its struggle to emerge as a legitimate topic. Fashion certainly deals with aesthetic elements, yet these are not easily attributable to the canonical categories at the center of the traditional understanding regarding the fine art experience. Given that fashion’s formulation of beauty generates consumption, thus demanding incessant product innovation and reinvention, value in this domain hinges on embodied practice rather than detached contemplation; hence, the devising of an aesthetics of fashion is mainly grounded in praxis as opposed to theory. Therefore, fashion as a topic worthy of philosophical investigation has long met with scepticism. Yet, fashion undeniably has its own aesthetics. The concept of an aesthetics of fashion, was first broached and developed by novelists and artists in the 19th century. Today, as a result of having acquired so much importance, the agenda of these particular aesthetics has inevitably triggered its overall conceptual reassessment, even on a purely philosophical level. Furthermore, it is precisely this aesthetic efficacy that accounts for fashion’s increasingly pervasive impact on our current reality, allowing for the crucial role of aesthetic praxis both in the articulation of identities, and in the dialectics between social groups, unfolding in much the same way as it does in the art world.