The Clothed Body

The Clothed Body
of passage and transformation. Thus the sensory dimension becomes a
political dimension, since perception and communication consist in
opposing received meaning, while at the same time they tend to make
‘feeling’ common property. Certainly, the garment, the accessory, the body
tout court, transformed into discourse and communication, are often
cheated of their own truth, their adherence to things, their essence, and so
become, at best, myth, at worst, idle chatter. Fashion, as a system of
images, is transmitted through series and stereotypes, filters in which the
image has become an imperative sign. The problem is one of understanding
to what extent we perceive the body through the ‘already seen’ and the
‘already felt’, and to what extent the fashion image, or rather the not
merely visual complexity of the fashion system, manages to activate aesthesis
as transformation and rupture of the preceding order, as continual
excess, and aesthetics as social practice. This is surely the meaning of that
rupture with the imperative function of images and, more generally, with
the merely visual dimension, which is generated by the relation between
fashion and music.
122