This is the question posed here in a NYT article but Jacques Lacan is sure the answer is “no.” The piece offers useful background on the origins of high heels and the fact that men and kings used to wear them. Like so much fashion, they began with the calvary. The thesis of the…
Chapter 5 is the heart of V&R and makes the claim that Scheler’s idea of the estate is the most moral model for business. Examples there and in the blog show that a number of fashion houses are good approximations to the estate. Here, I want to contrast Scheler’s 1913 The Nature of Sympathy with…
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was involved in the founding of my undergraduate institution, the “Godless College,” University College London. Nonetheless, I have never been taken with his ethical thought. Benthamism or utilitarianism is, with Kantianism, one of the two most dominant ethical theories taught at colleges in the Anglosphere. I’m not sure it has the…
*This is the first in what I hope will be a series of thoughts about Lacan and clothes. Since the summer, my friend and sometime blogger here, Chris Wojtulewicz have been reading Lacan together. Each week via FaceTime we have done a seminar on Lacan’s Seminar 7: very meta. Lacan is a genius and has…
As detailed in Chapter 4 V&R, Adam Smith argues that one is moral if in symmetry with the spectator. Who is the spectator, how many are watching, how partial or impartial they are, and do they agree with one another are all delicious questions first raised by any moral analysis using Smith’s ideas. The basic…
Ever since Brexit, fashion pages have beaten the same drum: collapse is nigh because fashion is global. In an earlier post (http://www.ethicsoffashion.com/fashion-and-nation/), I pointed out the very obvious point that this cannot quite be true: heritage brands trade on their nation all the time. Happily, the well-known Suzy Menkes has made another obvious point: the…
Last week Loyola hosted the 2nd Andy Warhol Lecture and a thoughtful puzzle arose. My interest in Warhol is that he was a Catholic but immersed in the world of design and even the demimonde. To many, the worlds of religion and fashion seem obviously opposed. This can only seem obvious to those who have…
*Loyola hosted theologian Brendan Sammon this week. Brendan teaches at St. Joseph’s University, the Jesuit university of Philadelphia. This post is prompted by his talk. A recent fashion exhibition identified a range of objects said to be iconic (https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/moma-makes-a-list-of-iconic-fashion-items). But are they? Can any fashion object be iconic? Leading phenomenologist, Frenchman Jean-Luc Marion,…
Gucci’s coffers are filling most handsomely these days. The company had lost its way and was suffering from over exposure and brand population of its own making. Enter Alessandro Michele and his love of flowers. He is extremely interesting, as is the relationship between fashion and flowers. In a prior post, I looked into the…
Lately, I have been writing about the moral nature of the money that supports the high end of the fashion industry. This is the money of the hyper wealthy held in trusts, typically offshore. Here is a most interesting article on the money-no-object weddings of the hyper rich (https://www.racked.com/2017/6/7/15740564/luxury-weddings). The hyper wealthy, like most…