`The Clothes Have No Emperor' means to say that Bourdieu's criticism of American imperialism is an understandable slip of his brilliant visual sociology. He writes to those of a disposition to agree completely because they know the facts all the better. Bourdieu may well be the only person alive today who has so perfectly combined theoretical, empirical and political work. Why then has he allowed this critique to be published for all the world to see? Not, I think, because he (...) is wrong, but because the entailments of his own visual sociology do not translate well from place to place. Bourdieu has taught us that the sociology of social space is the next necessary step for those who would become public intellectuals. The question is how to think and speak of the world as such. Bourdieu has given us the outlines of a beginning, but this little essay in question shows that there is more work yet to be done. (shrink)

As major clothing suppliers are being forced by competition to cut costs, is this inevitably leading their suppliers to cut corners in working conditions, and what ethical considerations are relevant? The author is completing her MBA at London Business School and has a background in the textile industry.

Clothes protect our vulnerable skin and they keep us warm or cool. They help us show that we are young or old, rich or poor, at work or play, and whether we may be good to know. But though they are basic, much as food and shelter are - and also may be beautiful - they have long had a bad press in serious, moral and philosophical writing. The main reason for this is that they are external to us, a (...) cover we may hide behind, and one on which some people spend too much money, perfecting a pompous plumage of vanity: also they, and the fashions for them, may not last long. Nonetheless, when we choose our own clothes, we know the choice is a sensitive matter and far from being merely superficial. John Harvey considers the overlapping values that clothes have for us. Clothes both cover and advertise the bodies within them. They help make us the men and women we are, and help us to attract each other. They enroll us in groups, from our own circle to our generation worldwide; and they show just how, as individuals, we want to be noticed. Clothes, like their wearers, may compete in claiming power. They may also, on and off the catwalk, compete to claim the spotlight. In sum they show how we think we matter - and they can matter themselves in ways that may be intimate and even crucial to us. At all times clothes have demanded attention, even when they have been castigated for their vanity, and contemporary opinion is still divided. Are clothes the most frivolous of consumer disposables - or are they, however extravagant, art? Though we wear and see them every day, the value that they have for us is multiple and fugitive and hard to catch exactly. "Clothes" attempts to sort the many-coloured wardrobe which marks off mankind from other creatures. (shrink)

The focus of the titles in this mini-set, originally published between 1926 and 1928 is on the challenges of feeding an increasing global population, technological changes in the home, the evolutionary role of clothes and the dangers and benefits of alcohol.

For I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. They have no struggles; their bodies are healthy and strong. They are free from common human burdens; they are not plagued by human ills. Therefore pride is their necklace; they clothe themselves with violence.Fashion is a mimetic phenomenon. It thrives in the pleasures and desires of imitation. As sociologist Yuniya Kawamura notices in her book Fashion-ology, early sociologists, such as Veblen, Tarde, and Simmel, all regard fashion as (...) a "concept of imitation."1 Even if their specific theories differ, Veblen, Tarde, and Simmel saw fashion as an imitative "flow" most dominantly from the superior to inferior, and this became known as the... (shrink)

The object of the study is clothing as a sociocultural phenomenon, a product of material and spiritual cultures. The evolution of clothing is closely related to sociocultural changes in society. The subject of the study is the transformation of clothing in China under the influence of political, economic, social, and aesthetic factors after the beginning of Chinese economic reform and opening up policy. The significant changes have taken place in Chinese clothing, the main of which was (...) the transition from a uniform style of clothing for the whole country to a variety of fashion and styles, as well as the revival of traditional clothing. The transformation in the style and production cycle of clothing in China is based on objective (technology development, market laws, global fashion trends) and subjective reasons (psychology, personal preferences and aesthetic tastes of consumers). There is always a concept behind the behavior in clothes, and the desire for beauty is the main driving force behind the development of clothing. The social psychology of imitation and difference contributes to the spread of fashion trends in clothing. The author's special contribution to the topic is a detailed examination of the impact on the transformation of clothing of political, economic, sociocultural, aesthetic factors, as well as cultural exchanges and folk traditions. The author traces the sequence of fashion trends in China in recent decades. Сontemporary changes in Chinese clothing culture are not limited to simply borrowing Western trends, but are accompanied by the emergence of postmodern ideas and the promotion of the globalization process, which leads not only to the technological and design enrichment of clothing characteristics in China, but also to the growth of cultural awareness and the revivalization of traditional and local cultures. (shrink)

L’article porte sur un mouchoir décoré par des femmes de l’Armée Républicaine Irlandaise (IRA) pendant leur incarcération à la prison d’Armagh, en 1976. Il s’intéresse aux aspects concrets d’un objet genré et politisé. En effet, le tracé, le remplissage à la couleur, la signature et l’échange de ce tissu prennent place à la fin de la première phase du conflit en Irlande du Nord caractérisée par les emprisonnements politiques. Dans les années 1970, les prisonniers républicains adaptent une activité féminine, la (...) broderie. Illustrant cette pratique, le mouchoir d’Armagh passe pour un exemple de tissu, certes hétérogène et marqué d’emprunts, mais qui conserve ses qualités liées au genre. Cet article s’intéresse donc aussi à la signification même du tissu. (shrink)

Moral discourse is propositionally clothed, that is, it exhibits those features – such as the ability of its sentences to intelligibly embed in conditionals and other unasserted contexts – that have been taken by some philosophers to be constitutive of discourses that express propositions. If there is nothing more to a mental state being a belief than it being characteristically expressed by sentences that are propositionally clothed then the version of expressivism which accepts that moral discourse is propositionally clothed (‘quasi-realism’) (...) is self-refuting. Fortunately for quasi-realists, this view of belief, which I label ‘minimalism’, is false. I present three arguments against it and dismiss two possible defences (the first drawn from the work of Wright, the second given by Harcourt). The conclusion is that the issue between expressivists and their opponents cannot be settled by the mere fact that moral discourse wears propositional clothing. (shrink)

For readers of Women in Clothes, a philosophical guide to fashion. We all get dressed. But how often do we pause to think about the place of our clothes in our world? What unconscious thoughts do we express when we dress every day? Can a philosophy of living be wrapped up in a winter coat? Can we see clothes not as objects, but as ideas? Dressed is the thinking person's book about clothes, exploring these questions by ranging freely from suits (...) to suitcases, from Marx's coat to Madame X's gown. Through literature and art, film and philosophy, philosopher Shahidha Bari unveils the surprising and subconscious ways what we wear communicates with us, about us, and for us. Dressed is about the hidden power of clothes in our culture and our daily lives, addressing the deepest questions of who we are, how we frame ourselves, and how we choose to face the world. (shrink)

Prompted by Heidegger’s search for great art in the modern times, this paper looks into crafts as answering the philosopher’s frustrated call. Using Soetsu Yanagi’s idea of a “religion of beauty,” which turns to the ordinary as beautiful, it suggests that crafts—carefully made by hand while considering its affinity with nature and the human body that uses it—is a way of being, the way Heidegger described the way of “dwelling poetically.”.

There are few sartorial ensembles as heavily signified as masculine as a suit. This article focuses on the suit within queer fashion digital cultures and spaces to explore how butch of colour digital fashion suits up to offer us different ways to think about masculinity. Intervening in the erasure of women of colour in histories of fashion – including menswear – and histories of sexuality – butch, dapper, tomboy, dandy – I argue that butch digital fashion works as a site (...) and composition of flesh, fabric and feeling that reworks masculinity as a project of embodiment. I look at three interwoven dimensions of butch digital fashion – aesthetic process, texture as feeling and spatial imaginations – attending to the themes of fantasy, desire and pleasure. I situate butch within and between fashion studies and media studies to offer butch as a relation, practice, orientation and site of embodiment to think about being and becoming, about the body politics of space and feeling, as matters of race, sexuality, class and gender – and the materialities of race, sexuality, class and gender, mediated by the global, and as the global by the digital. Digital butch fashion is, at once, a visual culture, a creative visual space, a resource of queer fantasy and an aesthetic process. It is messy, tense and fraught with the politics of race, colonialism and class, yet at the same time, dense with possibility, pleasure and eroticism. Butch of colour fashion offers frames and forms for rethinking and remaking masculinity as a sign of a body, as a category of personhood, as a set of practices and feelings made coherent by processes of embodiment. (shrink)

Drawing upon Roland Barthes’ posthumously published notebooks from his 1974 trip to China, in which he remarks upon the ‘complete absence of fashion. Clothing degree zero’, this article offers a ‘late’ reading of Barthes’ interest in fashion, suggested here as a form of writing. In reference to the late works, specifically Barthes’ penultimate lecture course on the Neutral and Travels in China, supplemented by François Jullien’s comments on Barthes’ trip to China, as well as mention of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film (...) Chung Kuo-Cina, it is possible to draw together a reading of fashion as a neutral form. As a final step, reflection is given to Susan Buck-Morss’ reading of ‘history as passing’, as discontinuous moments. Barthes’ writerly mode – which works upon incidental details – is revealed to be a pertinent method. (shrink)

The article presents an account of the visual relations created by garments through their plastic formants, examining the role played by form, material, and composition in creating body hierarchies that produce prescribed behaviors between different subjects. The work dissects the concept of thematic role from Greimasian theory, investigating the manners in which an eighteenth-century wedding dress presents the chaining of programs governing materials, garments, and the body in the production of narrative interactions between subjects. The work utilizes a combination of (...) Greimas’ method with the Visual Semiotics continued by Floch and Oliveira, as well as Hammad’s Semiotics of Space which permit the exam of optical relations created in the body through its clothing – relations that can be read as manifesting values that are both historically and socially determined, or in the act of apprehension of an object. The eighteenth century provides a type of “original” case, whose results are pertinent to a broader study of the relations between body and dress: the work concludes with the understanding that Fashion changes through the transit of values and roles invested in the body and dress – a set of changes closely linked to the construction of social roles. (shrink)

In addition to natural curiosity, science is characterized by a number of psychological processes and perceptions. Among the psychological features, scientific enquiry relates to uncovering—or discovering—aspects of a world perceived as hidden from humans. A speculative theoretical model is presented, suggesting the evolution of science reflects psychological repercussions of wearing clothes. Specifically, the natural world is perceived as hidden due to the presence of clothing. Three components of scientific enquiry may arise from clothing: detachment from sensual experience, a (...) perception that the world is veiled in mystery, and an intellectual desire to uncover the hidden structure of nature. Rather than beginning with the emergence of Homo sapiens, the proposed connection with clothing implies that psychological foundations for science began to develop during the last ice age, with the invention of complex clothes that fully covered the human body. After the end of the last ice age, elements of scientific thinking began to emerge in societies where clothing was worn routinely for psychosocial reasons, including modesty. Notably, a scientific attitude was essentially absent in hunter-gatherer communities where nakedness remained the norm. This novel perspective aims to advance the history and philosophy of science, revealing the emergence of science as a situated phenomenon contingent on humans being covered. (shrink)

This article is about clothing inventions, material participation, and acts of citizenship. I explore how pioneering Victorian women at the turn of the last century inventively responded via clothing to restrictions to their (physical and ideological) freedom of movement. While the bicycle is typically celebrated as a primary vehicle of women’s emancipation at that time, I argue that inventive forms of clothing, such as convertible cycling skirts, also helped women make claims to rights and privileges otherwise legally (...) denied to their sex. I ask: Do clothing inventions create possibilities to act differently? Can they be thought of as wearable technology, and in what ways do they (and their invention) enact political concerns? Might convertible cycling skirts be considered “acts of citizenship?” Throughout, I mobilize concepts of multiplicity, in-betweenness, and ambiguity to make a case for the relevance of clothing research for science and technology studies. (shrink)

A Dealer of Old Clothes treats David Walker, an early nineteenth-century abolitionist, as a philosophical sage. In this text, Scriven poses philosophical questions to Walker via his Appeal and solicits philosophical answers on topics such as race, emancipatory struggle, and the problem of evil.

Judges in Street Clothes provides an historical, theoretical, and practical analysis of the ethical restrictions placed on the public lives of judges. The State’s interest in maintaining an independent and impartial judiciary is considered against a judge’s right to engage in educational, religious, charitable, civic, and professional activities.

By delineating the parametric variations that affect infant performance in the standard A-not-B search task, the Thelen et al. model provides an important contribution to the field of infant development. We discuss several broad issues pertinent to interpreting the model. We note that the phenomenon modeled by Thelen et al. is not necessarily the one originally described by Piaget. We describe data on infant self-correction that are not addressed by the Thelen et al. model. Finally, we suggest that psychological constructs (...) such as representation and knowledge structures are valuable to our understanding of the A-not-B phenomenon in particular and psychological development in general. (shrink)

Chinese traditional costume is one of the important carriers of Chinese culture. The process of the emergence and development of the culture of traditional Chinese costume also reflects the cultural background and evolution of ancient Chinese society. In the context of the strengthening of the Chinese economy, the inheritance and development of Chinese clothing culture is of great importance for modern society. The epochs of Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern dynasties are a period of Chinese history marked by frequent (...) wars, ethnic integration and convergence of various ideas. Against this background, there was a weakening of the Confucian "ritual" style, followed by the spread of the teachings of Xuan Xue, Buddhism and Taoism, and a freer, down-to-earth, elegant clothing culture appeared. This article consists of the following three parts: Diversity of social background; Artistic forms of costume culture of the Wei-Jin eras; Modern trends in the development of clothing culture. Based, among other things, on such material as the scroll painting "The Fairy of the Lo River" by the artist Gu Kaizhi of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, this article analyzes the influence of the teachings of Xuan-xue, Buddhism and Taoism on the costume of the Wei and Jin dynasties, illustrates the direction of development of modern Chinese costume culture, and continued the path for the development of clothing culture with Chinese specifics. (shrink)

In several recent articles, Michael Wreen has given a plausible account of the structure of ad baculum argument and argued that it is neither inherently fallacious nor even commonly so. He has also, arguing mainly in terms of examples, attempted to show that a number of common assumptions about the ad baculum are incorrect. Most controversially, he argues that the ad baculum is not essentially dialectical and that it does not essentially involve threatening. I argue that the genuineness of his (...) examples as cases of ad baculum is doubtful, except insofar as they do at least implicitly have these features. I argue further that the stock cases used by Copi and other textbook writers extensionally define the ad baculum, which is a strategy already familiar to students from ordinary life, which is essentially first personlsecondperson, and which does essentially involve a threat. (shrink)

As a result of the development of new technologies such as satellite communication, digitalization, and multimedia computer networks, new media such as blogs, online magazines, and wireless network media have sparked a lot of interest. This study uses 3D clothing display technologies to improve the customer experience of online clothing marketing, aid in the improvement of online clothing marketing efficacy, and extensively discuss the digital clothing anthropometric model. Furthermore, this study employs the convex hull approach and (...) NURBS fitting technology to address concerns with digital clothing anthropometric measurement and provides a practical solution for measuring straight line length, circumference length, and curve length. Furthermore, this research incorporates 3D intelligent technology to develop an online fitting system as well as an intelligent display system for garments. The simulation experiment investigation revealed that the smart clothing 3D display system proposed in this work has a substantial impact on growing online e-commerce clothing marketing as well as improving clothing marketing effectiveness. (shrink)

On the surface, the world of fashion may seem like a utopia: the glamour, the ability to purchase confidence and performance, giving people the freedom of self-expression. However, many of us are masked from the dystopia that drives this industry. The business models of fast fashion often thrive on exploiting land and people, through supply chains that are as opaque as offshore banking scandals, with many middlemen and much finger- pointing. The way clothing is consumed is much like a (...) subscription model, with consumers paying low costs more frequently, rather than investing a large amount into a long-lasting garment. This all results in poor-quality and -performance clothing, excessive waste of... (shrink)

What has intrigued me is the process by which invited contributors to the broadcast debates on such delicate matters are chosen. Some of..

Clahsen's view on language is intimately linked with the Chomskian distinction between competence and performance. He uses performance to verify theoretical assumptions about the underlying structure of competence. Using mostly off-line tasks, he may fail to answer the question of how language is generated and perceived in natural situations.

There is a simple joy in finding that the emperor has positively no clothes and especially when the finger is pointed in ribald good English. Donald McCloskey does this service in “The Rhetoric of Economics”, where he argues with force and wit that “modernism” (meaning, roughly, positivism, as in “Positive Economics”) will do as an account neither of what economists do nor of what it makes philosophical sense for them to attempt. Instead they should recognize that models are always metaphors (...) and should make a virtue of the literary devices, which they in fact rely on. Armed with the craft of rhetoric and a new “poetics of economics,” they will achieve better writing, better teaching, better foreign relations, better science and better dispositions. (shrink)

Studies of early modern dress frequently focus on its connection with status and identity, overlooking clothing’s primary function, namely to protect the body and promote good health. The daily processes of dressing and undressing carried numerous considerations: for example, were vital areas of the body sufficiently covered, in the correct fabrics and colours, in order to maintain an ideal body temperature? The health benefits of clothing were countered by the many dangers it carried, such as toxic dyes, garments (...) that were either too tight or voluminous, or harboured dirt and diseases that could infect the body. This article draws on medical treatises and health manuals printed and read in Italy and England, as well as personal correspondence and diaries, contextualised with visual evidence of the styles described. It builds on the current, wider interest in preventative medicine, humoral theory, health and the body in the early modern period by focusing in depth on the role of clothing within these debates. (shrink)