Abstract
The recent literature on fashion studies features frequent attempts by a variety of scholars to extend fashion studies beyond the representational paradigm that has dominated the field for many years. The claim is that seeing garments as mere tools to express real or ideal Egos leaves out the affective aspects of being dressed emerging from the materiality of both our bodies and the clothes we wear. In this chapter I outline one possible approach, which, in my view, constitutes a promising direction to develop an affective politics of dress. More specifically I propose to further develop a dialogue between fashion studies and body studies as a way to uncover the affective aspects of being dressed. This process involves revisiting ocularcentric notions of subjectivity, based on the idea of the self-contained body as the centre of individual identity, to instead emphasise the body’s constant affective relations with the surrounding world as the trigger of its potential becoming. Finally, I show how dress and fashion can facilitate this shift, acting as lines of flight out of the Ego-territory towards unpredictable outcomes.
This chapter develops ideas and concepts previously discussed in Ruggerone (2017) and Ruggerone and Stauss (2022). Although it aims at extending the arguments previously presented, some materials are drawn from those sources, properly referenced. However, the context in which the materials are used here is novel. I wish to thank my co-author, Renate Stauss, for granting me permission to retrace some of the ideas we developed together when writing the 2022 article.
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Notes
- 1.
Reflecting on this ocularcentric tradition Heidegger (1977, 134) describes it as “the conquest of the world as picture”, which he regards as “[t]he fundamental event of the modern age”.
- 2.
Talking about the self, Kaja Silverman argues: “This object (the self) is able to masquerade as a subject because it is what provides us with our sense of identity, and for most of us identity equals subjectivity. But identity is foundationally fictive: it is predicated on our (mis)recognition of ourselves first within our mirror reflection, and then within countless other human and representational ‘imagoes’” (2006, 36).
- 3.
It is worth noting that, at the core of the phenomenological perspectives there is an interest for the dynamic body–self–world relationship where subjectivity is understood from and as a first-person perspective of oneself as a self, and this includes the level of sensing one’s body—one’s heartbeat or breathing—as embodied, and as ‘above all a relation to the world’ (Zahavi 2001, 163) which must involve all senses.
- 4.
I am indebted to Renate Stauss for introducing me to this expression through her mentioning the work of Didier Anzieu (1989) during our discussions.
- 5.
The whole of phenomenology is permeated by the notion of subjectivity and subjective meanings, which are repeatedly described as unknowable by other human beings. For example, when exploring the conditions of intersubjectivity, another phenomenologist, Alfred Schutz (1967), recurrently argues that, while it is impossible to share the exact experience of another, the best we can do is to find overlaps between our individual experiences of the world. All this contributes to solidify a notion of the individual as a self-contained subject endowed with a consciousness, that is, an ability to make sense of their engagements with the world.
- 6.
Interestingly scholars of fashion have underlined how these sensations often can and do connect to embodied habits and memory of past events and have shown that these connections give rise to specific subjects of fashion (Eckersley and Duff 2020, 1).
- 7.
For a broader discussion of these notions, see Buchanan (1997).
- 8.
Deleuze and Guattari’s theorising often makes use of conceptual pairs; other examples drawn from their work include ‘the smooth and the striated’, ‘the molar and the molecular’, ‘the minoritarian and the majoritarian’, just to name a few. Although related to different purposes, each pair includes a force that organises and a second one that breaks out and away from this organisation, to be eventually re-organised.
- 9.
Modern science has an iconic basis that can be traced back to the ancient Greeks (Plato’s cave), through medieval science of optics and Renaissance perspective, to eighteenth-century empiricism (Jay 1994, 38–40). In Lacan the acquisition of language marks the entrance into the Symbolic with the overcoming of the narcissistic mirror stage and the production of the ‘healthy subject’, emerging from the resolution of the Oedipal phase and the formation of the Super-ego (Jay 1994, 351–2).
- 10.
BwO is not the sensorial body of phenomenology. The latter is a body organism where different organs are predisposed to experience different sensations and a body subject that makes sense of them. On the contrary, the BwO is a variable composition of molecules, neurons, cells but also ideas, signs, cultural symbols and so on.
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Ruggerone, L. (2023). Fashion Studies at a Turning Point. In: Filippello, R., Parkins, I. (eds) Fashion and Feeling. Palgrave Studies in Fashion and the Body. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19100-8_13
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