Monday, September 24, 2007

The Ancient/Modern Split in Fashion


Hegel, on the art of fashion:

"[T]he cut of our clothes today is inartistic and prosaic in comparison with the more ideal drapery of the ancients. ... [T]he clothing portrayed in the art of antiquity is a more or less explicitely formless surface and is perhaps only determined by the fact that it needs a fastening on to the body. ... In our modern dress, on the other hand, the whole of the material is determined by the stitching, and, in general the cut and fall of the garment is produced technicaly and mechanically by the tailor. ... [T]he clothes are precisely only a poor imitation or a disfiguration of human limbs according to the conventional fashion and accidental whim of the day; once the cut is complete it remains always the same, without appearing determined by pose and movement."


Hegel continues by saying that clothes are an "untruthful imitation of our natural form" that is not shaped by our inner life, as clothes were for the ancients. And there were still tailors all about in Hegel's time!

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