Seminario di Dipartimento (SeRiC): The Sight of Anti-Fashion

Partecipanti: Nickolas Pappas - CUNY - City University of New York

The Sight of Anti-Fashion - Nickolas Pappas

 As a matter of fact Greek nudity was unique in the ancient Mediterranean. Nevertheless it was treated by the Greeks themselves as in some respects a default presentation of the human person, and (in Thucydides) as the uniform toward which non-Greek dress was evolving. Because it was perceived as standard human attire I would call nudity an anti-fashion for classical Greece. 

Specifically, I put ancient nudity together with black clothing, with a modern man’s suit, and sometimes other phenomena like denim jeans; sometimes also practices that accompany clothing, like the shaved head or tattoos. For one point of contact among these anti-fashions is that they are justified or celebrated because of the way they are understood to signify the male body.

But what moves us about anti-fashion is that we justify what we wear by appeal to some authority other than fashion. Anti-fashion calls for a judgment that resembles fashion judgment yet contradicts it.

Here again I believe that Greek nudity qualifies as an anti-fashion, having been not only a symbolization of the male body but also the subject of incommensurable systems of judgment. My primary evidence comes from Plato’s discussion of Greek nudity, in Book 5 of the Republic, where it is the occasion for a peculiarly Platonic double meaning of vision as both the basis for ignorance and the image of knowledge. The ignorant eyes reinforce the conventions that create fashions; the eye of the soul replaces public opinion about what to wear with knowledge of what it is best to wear. And in this doubled way of seeing what clothing means, the Republic anticipates the standoff between socially-justified fashion and anti-fashion that hopes for a justification beyond the social.