Every Fashion Victim Is a Michelangelo Writ Small

Artfulness is always gestural, always performative. It is remarkable in just how alien from nature it truly it, because the artful gesture, or artfully turned object always diverts attention from its natural origins and toward the agent who has supervened to give the gesture or object its heightened sense of singularity, which this agent has cultivated. For instance, Michelangelo’s David is not famous for the quality of the marble from which it is sculpted, because, though undoubtedly impeccable, the quality of the marble does not sufficiently command our awe and admiration. The quality of marble certainly contributes to some extent to the overall aesthetic effect of the sculpture, but our admiration is ultimately commanded by the various excisions and alterations which stand as the traces of the sculptor’s altering intervention on the original shape of the marble, as determined by nature, and later the quarrymen, who unearth the marble and divide into slabs. We invest these traces with a certain amount of significance, because we see them an inscription of the human creative power upon the very body of nature.

Michelangelo’s David is a highly revered expression of humanity’s fascination with its own creative powers, but the world is certainly rife with more trivial examples, such as those found in the demimonde of *haute couture.* "Capital-F" Fashion, as an appendage of the culture industry, is interesting because it represents agentive intervention on the surfaces of one’s own body. Fashion as artfulness, then, exchanges an absolute exteriorization of one’s creative powers represented by the plastic arts of sculpture and suchlike—the block of marble is absolutely physically and materially other than me, absolutely not-me—for the relative exteriorization of the textile arts, which adorns my external surface—a surface that is both intrinsic and external to me, a contiguity that also represents a limit, my limit. The relative exteriority of fashion as a sort of flourish unites agent and patient in that one inscribes one’s artfulness or creative powers upon oneself.

Fashion as an expression of artfulness that unites agent and patient brings to mind another peculiarity. Namely, fashion is always already refashioned. Nature already fashions each one of us with the genome; we are shaped and turned according to this information. However, because we collectively deem our natural fashion unsightly, we refashion ourselves by covering our external surface, effectively obscuring it, hiding it from view. Our bodies are the palimpsests upon which nature inscribes itself, only to be covered over by fashion of our own devising, which enables our forgetfulness of our naturalness. Sometimes nature returns with a vengeance, mingling itself with the vestiges of artfulness that we inscribe on ourselves, but a consumerist society nevertheless attempts to keep nature at bay with the commodities that promise greater ease and convenience through progress, thus establishing among consumers a sense of possible immortality if one but manages to remain alive long enough to see to market the goods that will make such an immortality possible.