Marking identity is an important role of fashion. Subcultures the world over employ fashion this way. Like punk in the late 70s and early 80s — at least in Britain — sometimes these fashion identities take on a strident and antithetical character. The controversial but brilliant political theorist Carl Schmitt dubbed this the manring. …
V&R is a huge fan of the idea of Scheler and Caillois that the universal grammar of nature is pantomime. Schopenhauer hints at something similar though in a more conflictual register. In Tolkien’s story Beren and Luthien, Tinuviel dresses Beren up as a cat, “and she teaches him how to sit and sprawl, to…
Half way into this article is a very good video revealing the craft work at Ralph & Russo. It is the first British fashion house to be invited to showcase its haute couture in Paris in a hundred years. Beautiful stuff, no question: https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/couture-in-2019-who-is-buying-it/index.html
Hanfu is a small but growing trend in Chinese fashion to reclaim the garments and look of old and eradicated aristocratic China. Burke, Scheler, and Kolnai would not be remotely surprised that young Chinese people find this alluring. Nor would David Hume. The look has much in common with what in the West might…
Roger Caillois is a Better Guide to the Sacred Foundations of the West than Giorgio Agamben
Over at the new Adam Smith website, I have a 2000 word essay on Smith’s strange paper on language. Smith is a large part of the argument of V&R, but as with some much of his work I see the figure of Lord Shaftesbury at work: https://www.adamsmithworks.org/life_times/the-place-of-language-in-adam-smith-s-economics
V&R started because I had written a book about the body, but then started to think more about the clothed body through the influence of David Hume and Adam Smith. They argue that ethics is inseparable from the experience of adornment. Fashion is about the body, the passions, beauty, craft, machines, numbers, and industry. …
The Murderer Comes Home
Heirs to the Enlightenment, we pride ourselves on our rationality. Jung and Tolkien have alerted us to the place of myth in our lives — and this reaction video shows clearly how potently (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVp__EspD_k) — yet we nonetheless hold to a self-image as rational, technological, scientific, and skeptical. Over at Law and Liberty…