Where language falls short though, clothes might speak. Ideas, we languidly suppose, are to be found in books and poems, visualised in buildings and paintings, exposited in philosophical propositions and mathematical deductions. They are taught in classrooms; expressed in language, number and diagram. Much trickier to accept is that clothes might also be understood as forms of thought, reflections and meditations as articulate as any poem or equation. What if the world could open up to us with the tug of a thread, its mysteries disentangling like a frayed hemline? What if clothes were not simply reflective of personality, indicative of our banal preferences for grey over green, but more deeply imprinted with the ways that human beings have lived: a material record of our experiences and an expression of our ambition? What if we could understand the world in the perfect geometry of a notched lapel, the orderly measures of a pleated skirt, the stilled, skin-warmed perfection of a circlet of pearls?
Some people love clothes: they collect them, care for and clamour over them, taking pains to present themselves correctly and considering their purchases with great seriousness. For some, the making and wearing of clothes is an art form, indicative of their taste and discernment: clothes signal their distinction. For others, clothes fulfill a function, or provide a uniform, barely warranting a thought beyond the requisite specifications of decency, the regulation of temperature and the unremarkable meeting of social mores. But clothes are freighted with memory and meaning: the ties, if you like, that bind. In clothes, we are connected to other people and other places in complicated, powerful and unyielding ways, expressed in an idiom that is found everywhere, if only we care to read it.
If dress claims our attention as a mode of understanding, it’s because, for all the abstract and elevated formulations of selfhood and the soul, our interior life is so often clothed. How could we ever pretend that the ways we dress are not concerned with our impulses to desire and deny, the fever and fret with which we love and are loved? The garments we wear bear our secrets and betray us at every turn, revealing more than we can know or intend. If through them we seek to declare our place in the world, our confidence and belonging, we do so under a veil of deception.
Old, favoured clothes can be loyal as lovers, when newer ones dazzle then betray us, treacherous in our moments of greatest need. There is a naivety in the perilous ways we trust in clothes. Shakespeare knew this. King Lear grandly insists to ragged Poor Tom that: ‘Through tattered clothes great vices do appear;/ Robes and furred gowns hide all’ – even when his own opulence can no longer obscure his moral bankruptcy. Emerson too, mockingly corrects us when he writes: ‘There is one other reason for dressing well… namely that dogs respect it [and] will not attack you.’ (...)
We’re prone to disparage as crude the analogue of self with stuff, as though the substance of the soul might only be short-changed by the material things with which we seek to express it. And it is difficult not to read the diminution of dress in philosophy as part of a more general disdain for matters regarded as maternal, domestic or feminine. ‘Surface,’ wrote Nietzsche, is a ‘woman’s soul, a mobile, stormy film on shallow water.’ Relegating women to the shallows is, of course, to deny them depth, but the surface to which they are condemned is not without its own qualities: fluidity, responsiveness, sensitivity to a given moment or sensation. Female writers have always understood this. In Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth (1905), Lily Bart concedes to herself the powerful truth of her passion for Lawrence Selden:
But Wharton’s insight goes beyond reference to a newly outward-facing modernity, and is more profound than the upturned paradox of a surface that could speak of the inner self. Lily is bound to Lawrence not simply by some romantic pledge of affection but in the particularities of his being, as though the tightest seam ran back and forth between her slow-gathered sense impressions (his voice, his hair, his clothes) and the interior life to which they seem to reach. As Lily is to Lawrence, we too are inwoven with the stuff of the world and the people to whom those things belong or refer. (...)
This is not to say that clothes are the self, but to suggest, exploratively, that our experiences of selfhood are contoured and adumbrated by many things, including clothes, and that the prejudices by which we disregard the concern for appearances or relegate dress to the domain of vanity, are an obstacle to a significant kind of understanding. As Susan Sontag says, contra Plato, perhaps there is ‘[no] opposition between a style one assumes and one’s “true” being… In almost every case, our manner of appearing is our manner of being.’
Perhaps we simply are in clothes. And in clothes, our various selves are subject to modification, alteration and wear. This happens in clumsy ways – the glasses you hope might lend you new seriousness, the reddened lips that mimic arousal – but also in innumerably subtle ways: the heel that cants the body, contracting your stride, the tie that stiffens your neck and straightens your spine. Some garments constrict and reshape us physically, but also, sometimes, emotionally. And there are garments we can feel, that itch and chafe, that make apparent the difference of their textures to that of the surface of our skin, as though we and they are not one. In these, we are alert to the experience of being in our bodies, in a way that seems at odds with the rest of the world gliding past, apparently immune to discomfort. In such garments, too, we are always alert to the ever-present physicality of our bodies.
By contrast, there are clothes we wear almost imperceptibly, that are light or diaphanous to the point of being hardly seen or felt, as though we are sheathed in air. There are clothes that we are so accustomed to that we go about our business with barely a thought to the bodies they encase. If the self is somehow experienced, then perhaps there are moments when we strive to be seen and others when we seek a certain kind of invisibility. We wax and wane in the things that we wear. In clothes, there are always possibilities for difference and transformation.
by Shahidha Bari, Aeon | Read more:
Image: via:
Some people love clothes: they collect them, care for and clamour over them, taking pains to present themselves correctly and considering their purchases with great seriousness. For some, the making and wearing of clothes is an art form, indicative of their taste and discernment: clothes signal their distinction. For others, clothes fulfill a function, or provide a uniform, barely warranting a thought beyond the requisite specifications of decency, the regulation of temperature and the unremarkable meeting of social mores. But clothes are freighted with memory and meaning: the ties, if you like, that bind. In clothes, we are connected to other people and other places in complicated, powerful and unyielding ways, expressed in an idiom that is found everywhere, if only we care to read it.If dress claims our attention as a mode of understanding, it’s because, for all the abstract and elevated formulations of selfhood and the soul, our interior life is so often clothed. How could we ever pretend that the ways we dress are not concerned with our impulses to desire and deny, the fever and fret with which we love and are loved? The garments we wear bear our secrets and betray us at every turn, revealing more than we can know or intend. If through them we seek to declare our place in the world, our confidence and belonging, we do so under a veil of deception.
Old, favoured clothes can be loyal as lovers, when newer ones dazzle then betray us, treacherous in our moments of greatest need. There is a naivety in the perilous ways we trust in clothes. Shakespeare knew this. King Lear grandly insists to ragged Poor Tom that: ‘Through tattered clothes great vices do appear;/ Robes and furred gowns hide all’ – even when his own opulence can no longer obscure his moral bankruptcy. Emerson too, mockingly corrects us when he writes: ‘There is one other reason for dressing well… namely that dogs respect it [and] will not attack you.’ (...)
We’re prone to disparage as crude the analogue of self with stuff, as though the substance of the soul might only be short-changed by the material things with which we seek to express it. And it is difficult not to read the diminution of dress in philosophy as part of a more general disdain for matters regarded as maternal, domestic or feminine. ‘Surface,’ wrote Nietzsche, is a ‘woman’s soul, a mobile, stormy film on shallow water.’ Relegating women to the shallows is, of course, to deny them depth, but the surface to which they are condemned is not without its own qualities: fluidity, responsiveness, sensitivity to a given moment or sensation. Female writers have always understood this. In Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth (1905), Lily Bart concedes to herself the powerful truth of her passion for Lawrence Selden:
She was very near hating him now; yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin, dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes – she was conscious that even these trivial things were inwoven with her deepest life.When we speak of things being ‘woven together’, we mean affinity, association, inseparability, but Wharton’s ‘inwoven’ intimates more: an intimacy so close that it is constitutive. Wharton’s contemporary Oscar Wilde quipped in The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890) that ‘it is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.’ With his dandyish green coats and carnations, Wilde teasingly nudges us towards the stark secularity of a new world in which divinity could be as readily located in dresses as in deities.
But Wharton’s insight goes beyond reference to a newly outward-facing modernity, and is more profound than the upturned paradox of a surface that could speak of the inner self. Lily is bound to Lawrence not simply by some romantic pledge of affection but in the particularities of his being, as though the tightest seam ran back and forth between her slow-gathered sense impressions (his voice, his hair, his clothes) and the interior life to which they seem to reach. As Lily is to Lawrence, we too are inwoven with the stuff of the world and the people to whom those things belong or refer. (...)
This is not to say that clothes are the self, but to suggest, exploratively, that our experiences of selfhood are contoured and adumbrated by many things, including clothes, and that the prejudices by which we disregard the concern for appearances or relegate dress to the domain of vanity, are an obstacle to a significant kind of understanding. As Susan Sontag says, contra Plato, perhaps there is ‘[no] opposition between a style one assumes and one’s “true” being… In almost every case, our manner of appearing is our manner of being.’
Perhaps we simply are in clothes. And in clothes, our various selves are subject to modification, alteration and wear. This happens in clumsy ways – the glasses you hope might lend you new seriousness, the reddened lips that mimic arousal – but also in innumerably subtle ways: the heel that cants the body, contracting your stride, the tie that stiffens your neck and straightens your spine. Some garments constrict and reshape us physically, but also, sometimes, emotionally. And there are garments we can feel, that itch and chafe, that make apparent the difference of their textures to that of the surface of our skin, as though we and they are not one. In these, we are alert to the experience of being in our bodies, in a way that seems at odds with the rest of the world gliding past, apparently immune to discomfort. In such garments, too, we are always alert to the ever-present physicality of our bodies.
By contrast, there are clothes we wear almost imperceptibly, that are light or diaphanous to the point of being hardly seen or felt, as though we are sheathed in air. There are clothes that we are so accustomed to that we go about our business with barely a thought to the bodies they encase. If the self is somehow experienced, then perhaps there are moments when we strive to be seen and others when we seek a certain kind of invisibility. We wax and wane in the things that we wear. In clothes, there are always possibilities for difference and transformation.
by Shahidha Bari, Aeon | Read more:
Image: via:
