On the Philosophy of Fashion

I think that this is fashion week (?), although I'm not at all sure what that means, aside from some allusions to it in The Devil Wears Prada. But perhaps it is in fashion that some deep insights regarding our culture can be found. In his essay, "Can Poetry Matter?" Dana Gioia laments the disconnection of poetry from the people and the culture and sees it as engendering a self-selecting community that is isolated from the rest of the culture. The same cannot be said of fashion--people attend to it (perhaps largely due to marketing?); they respond to it and give it feedback at some level (either they buy and wear particular clothes or they choose something else); and they are influenced by it.

A recent New York Times article raises the question of the philosophy that the designer holds with clothes like these. What are these clothes saying? It seems that they are commentary on contemporary America--on our purportedly patriotic obsession with work, on our puritanically repressed and yet over-sexualized culture, on our appreciation for (and seeking of) laurels for our efforts. What does this say about manliness and Calvinism? Perhaps fashion is the poetry of the contemporary world.