Dress material

This paper argues that our understanding of the aesthetics of fashion design suffers from two related problems. First, if we allow that fashion, like every creative art, is the bringing of form to matter, it is nevertheless the case that the concept of materiality as it has been understood since Aristotle has privileged the art of sculpture over that of dress. Second, if we grant that fashion, like the other arts, is currently engaged in an immanent critique of its limits, this critique of the forms of fashion (and with it that of the categorisation of its objects), is misunderstood as an application of Rosalind Krauss' concept of an expanded field. In both cases, it is the inescapable situation of the body in fashion design that renders these ideas problematic. The paper proposes that we rethink the unity of form and matter in fashion design through the singular idea of dress material. The latter denotes not a type of fabric but the thread-thin rift that separates dress (here not a means of adornment but the principle of self-presentation) and material (not any old stuff that might be put to use but the counter-principle of self-refusal). Dress material is thus an ontological investigation of the 'ambivalent' unity of display and modesty, concepts familiar from the field of fashion psychology, rethought from the perspective of Heidegger's essay on the origin of the work of art.