Fashion Statements presents an eclectic array of essays regarding the meanings of fashion to articulate the new directions of an everyday cultural phenomenon.  Contributors bring insightful, playful, and accessible takes on a subject that, though very much part of popular discourse, often gets little significant attention from theoretical perspectives.  Looking at fashion through the prism of race, class, gender, and technological issues, this book reflects and interprets the hybridity of contemporary cultural inquiry.

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Ron Scapp is a Professor of Humanities and Teacher Education and the founding director of the Graduate Program in Urban and Multicultural Education at the College of Mount Saint Vincent. He has written and edited a number of books, including Teaching Values: Critical Perspectives on Education, Politics and Culture. He is a founding member, with Brian Seitz, of Group Thought, a philosophy collective based in Red Hook, Brooklyn. 

Brian Seitz is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Babson College. His work focuses on representation and politics. He is the author of The Trace of Representation and co-author of Politology: The Athenians and the Iroquois.

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"To think about 'what we wear' may seem to be a waste of time to some, yet it cannot be denied that we seem to live in an epoch where living is more and more defined by the fashionable. Fashion Statements offers the reader a number of innovative and thoughtful investigations and provocations, stimulating a re-thinking of what exactly the 'fashionable' means. The diverse and talented authors of these writings shed a fascinating variety of lights upon the subject—Foucault and Westwood, denim and despair, the glory and the subjection of the naked and the dressed,  just to mention a few. Open up this book to any page and you will find an original reflection on fashion and its power to signify, obfuscate, imprison, swindle, protect, seduce, delight, and foil. These essays are testimony to the fact that if philosophers, critics, and cultural observateurs are to truly live up to their respective tasks, not one of them could keep their title without examining the question of the fashionable.  Fashion Statements shows that philosophy can and should do a thinking of the trend 'itself'. Herein is found more than a few replies to the question Quentin Crisp put to Calvin Klein: 'What does it all mean?'"--Kevin R. MacDonald, Professor of Philosophy, The Fashion Institute of Technology

< Introduction: Just Looks—Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz * PART I: New Look * You Cannes Come In Here Dressed Like That: A True Story in Two Shoes—Erin Norris * The Head Monkey at Paris: Henry David Thoreau on Fashion—David Krell * Tech Savvy: Technology as the New Fashion Statement—Ava Chin * Fashion Statements: Communication and Culture—Malcolm Barnard * Fleshing It Out: The Tyranny of the ALine Skirt—bell hooks * Osh Kosh B’Gosh—Mary O’Donoghue * Is Clothing Art? * Jeff Weinstein * Fashion Advice from the Anti-Christ—Lydia Hartunian * Puro High Life—Maythee Rojas * Irony killed by the Ironic T-shirt and the True Religion of the American Jean—Anne O’Neil * Jackie O., Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Chanel—Ellen Fridland and Andrew Porter * The Hat’s the Thing—Johanna Wagner * 'Pod Peeps: Why The iPod And Other Gadgets Are Fashion Staples In The 'Hood—Lynne D. Johnson * Dressed to Kill, Or: Women’s Right to Bare Arms—Kelly Oliver * The Naked Truth of Anti-Fashion Philosophy—Nickolas Pappas * Vivienne Westwood: Keeping Critique Alive—Sinéad Murphy * Fashion at a Glance—Edward S. Casey * PART II: Retro Look * Plato’s Greater Hippias—Albert A. Anderson, translator Read Less