Fashioning: Adornment as a Technology of Becoming

Getting dressed in the morning, many of us will look in the mirror and ask ourselves what our outfit says about us. In this way, it is easy to treat clothing as something to be read: a way of communicating who we are, where we belong, and what we value. Yet this familiar way of thinking about fashion can obscure as much as it reveals. Fashioning argues that our preoccupation with what adornment means encourages us to approach clothing from the perspective of a spectator, overlooking both the ways demands for social legibility constrain us and the transformative possibilities available from the perspective of the wearer. The question we are left with is what can clothing do? Moving from the fashion industry to transgender beauty practices, artificial nails, handbags, Halloween costumes, punk and country music fashion, and the work of designers such as Alexander McQueen and Miuccia Prada, Fashioning develops an account of adornment as a technology of becoming. Clothing can negotiate social identities, restructure our conscious experience and agency, sustain communities, and make previously unrealized ways of living available in the present. In doing so, fashion reveals that neither our selves nor our social practices are exhausted by what they presently are. Bringing analytic aesthetics into conversation with phenomenology, social and political philosophy, queer and trans philosophy, and pragmatist metaphilosophy, Fashioning ultimately asks what philosophy itself might learn from fashion: how attending to possibility rather than merely actuality might help us fashion new selves, practices, and worlds.