Page 243 - Več kot moda: onkraj oblačilnih, telesnih, spolnih, odnosnih in komunikacijskih ortodokcij.
P. 243
Summary
an investigation of fashion’s Biblical, mythological, and historical consti-
tution, the author’s narrowly specific interest in fashion (tied especially
to the role and significance of transgressive fashion for transgender per-
sons) broadens to a general meditation on the proposition that, far from
just being a means of dressing a society, fashion also offers a way to seri-
ously think about it. A solid analytical foundation is thus laid for a real-
ist consideration of how to develop more sustained transgressive practices
of thought, communication, clothing, embodiment, and gendering, which
might help bring to awareness the cultural truth of clothing that we have
so ‘naturally’ donned. The critical assessment of the long tradition woven
into the phrase ‘clothing makes the man’ is supported by relevant theories
from sociology, philosophy, anthropology, cultural studies, linguistics, and
communication studies offering cognitive and epistemic insights to em-
power the application of the concept of transgression onto three correlated
phenomena: fashion (more precisely: the gender of fashion), body (more
precisely: the body of clothing), and communicating (more precisely: the
communicating fashion). Kotnik goes on to ask what transgressive fash-
ion is, what to transgress in fashion at all and why fashion transgressions
are relevant. The answers, while neither simple nor straightforward, are
certainly possible and perfectly independent from us as individuals, even
while the best part of how we dress day to day stems from, according to
the author, our dressing for our collectives. This is also the reason behind
the rather Foucauldian proposition that there is a need for an archaeology
of the biopolitics of fashion. Further historical examples clarify the insis-
tence on the thesis that there would be no need for transgression in fashion
were it not for fashion orthodoxies. It is these that, in the form of advice
and dictates, doctrines and dogmas of fashion dominations (to put it in
Bourdieusian terms), structure both producing and consuming practices
in the field of fashion, determining our daily clothing routines as more or
less successful masquerades. Most of what we do with clothes, as well as
what clothes do with us and what they make of us, is perhaps best captured
by Sartre’s aphorism: we are what we make of what others have made of
us. Paraphrasing to express a critique of the homogenising, unifying fash-
ion collectivism: as individual social agents, we are what we make of what
collectives and societies have wished to make of us. In this sense, Kot-
nik’s concluding anthropology of his/her own social skin leaves little un-
said about his/her own (non-)transgressions of orthodoxies in fashion and
elsewhere, unfolding an autoethnographic discourse of narrating his/her
own life story and his/her allodoxic position in the heterodoxic struggle
243
an investigation of fashion’s Biblical, mythological, and historical consti-
tution, the author’s narrowly specific interest in fashion (tied especially
to the role and significance of transgressive fashion for transgender per-
sons) broadens to a general meditation on the proposition that, far from
just being a means of dressing a society, fashion also offers a way to seri-
ously think about it. A solid analytical foundation is thus laid for a real-
ist consideration of how to develop more sustained transgressive practices
of thought, communication, clothing, embodiment, and gendering, which
might help bring to awareness the cultural truth of clothing that we have
so ‘naturally’ donned. The critical assessment of the long tradition woven
into the phrase ‘clothing makes the man’ is supported by relevant theories
from sociology, philosophy, anthropology, cultural studies, linguistics, and
communication studies offering cognitive and epistemic insights to em-
power the application of the concept of transgression onto three correlated
phenomena: fashion (more precisely: the gender of fashion), body (more
precisely: the body of clothing), and communicating (more precisely: the
communicating fashion). Kotnik goes on to ask what transgressive fash-
ion is, what to transgress in fashion at all and why fashion transgressions
are relevant. The answers, while neither simple nor straightforward, are
certainly possible and perfectly independent from us as individuals, even
while the best part of how we dress day to day stems from, according to
the author, our dressing for our collectives. This is also the reason behind
the rather Foucauldian proposition that there is a need for an archaeology
of the biopolitics of fashion. Further historical examples clarify the insis-
tence on the thesis that there would be no need for transgression in fashion
were it not for fashion orthodoxies. It is these that, in the form of advice
and dictates, doctrines and dogmas of fashion dominations (to put it in
Bourdieusian terms), structure both producing and consuming practices
in the field of fashion, determining our daily clothing routines as more or
less successful masquerades. Most of what we do with clothes, as well as
what clothes do with us and what they make of us, is perhaps best captured
by Sartre’s aphorism: we are what we make of what others have made of
us. Paraphrasing to express a critique of the homogenising, unifying fash-
ion collectivism: as individual social agents, we are what we make of what
collectives and societies have wished to make of us. In this sense, Kot-
nik’s concluding anthropology of his/her own social skin leaves little un-
said about his/her own (non-)transgressions of orthodoxies in fashion and
elsewhere, unfolding an autoethnographic discourse of narrating his/her
own life story and his/her allodoxic position in the heterodoxic struggle
243
