Following the tremendously popular Met exhibition, Heavenly Bodies, will be a new show on camp and its place in fashion. Perhaps a cunning commentary on the camp nature of fashion influenced by Catholicism? The show takes its bearings from Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay on the aesthetics of camp: https://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Sontag-NotesOnCamp-1964.html. I am not sure she…
For those interested in football, Arsene Wenger needs no introduction. A Frenchman who revolutionized the way football is played in Britain, Wenger is very Gallic. For one thing, he looks great in clothes, but as the link to this video amply shows, he is quite the intellectual (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPQREjBg9SM). Especially interesting is his emphasis on…
Man, Play and Games is a great book by Roger Caillois. It adds many insights to the already fantastic Huizinga work, Homo Ludens (discussed in many blogposts at V&R, as well as V&R Chapter 6). Philosophical works are fascinating (of course!), and some are surely close to the truth: these two books are examples. …
A lovely new website dedicated to educating us about the craft of analog watches: https://www.thenakedwatchmaker.com/decon-jlc
Scotsman David Hume is probably fashion’s greatest philosophical ally (V&R, Chapter 1). French psychoanalyst, and darling of the Left (though perhaps mistakenly: https://www.lawliberty.org/2018/01/17/jacques-lacan-conservative-icon/), Jacques Lacan is not a critic of fashion, exactly, but he does puncture the “holier than thou” posture of its advocates in today’s industry and media. Fashion combines conformity and self-harm, he…
Separated by centuries, nonetheless the two Englishmen agree. Speaking about Apple products, Apple’s chief of design says: “I believe that human beings sense care in the same way as we sense carelessness.” Here Jony Ive invokes Shaftesbury’s idea of value tones. Objects are constellations of discrete, discernible value qualities combined with symmetry. Care is such…
Egoism or altruism? This question kicked off the eighteenth century, pitting Mandeville and Shaftesbury against one another; their debate is the background to Smith’s economic thought. These men were a study in contrasts. Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733) was a Dutchman living in London, earning his keep as a doctor and writing on the side controversial…
What is a luxury face? A London plastic surgeon speaks about the Beautiful Face, a composite of the requests he gets from clients.[1] The chin most desired by his clients belongs to Selina Gomez and the eyes to Keira Knightley: the nose the Duchess of Cambridge. About that famous nose, the surgeon, Dr. Julian Da…