<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/1.....module=Opi>
"In an April interview about the pandemic, the philosopher Slavoj Zizek said we should “forget about the economy we have now” and “treat simply as irrelevant things like the fashion industry.” He was voicing a prejudice usually unspoken: a contemptuous disregard for fashion. For him, the industry is merely about conspicuous consumption and self-indulgence — and should simply be allowed to die.
"But Mr. Zizek is wrong. Not only should we not let the fashion industry die; we couldn’t if we tried....
"This is because fashion is integral to our existence, not an irrational indulgence. It springs from deeply rooted impulses to adorn the self, to communicate sensuously, to participate in the social collectivity and lend it shape and legibility. Fashion is a daily practice wherein culture touches the body in the most literal, intimate way. It’s no more likely to die than is art or architecture, music or fine cuisine — all of which are also suffering in this pandemic, though Mr. Zizek targets none of those for extinction.
Why then banish fashion? The answer is simple: Fashion codes as “feminine,” as a woman’s realm (although all genders participate in it). And even brilliant philosophers can succumb to the ingrained misogyny that denigrates women’s culture as irrelevant, wasteful, even destructive....
"The answer lies precisely in the allure of this very process — this cycle of fascination followed by rejection. The rhythms of this process mirror the deepest parts of our conflicted, decadent, yet anhedonic Western psyche: an attraction to pleasure, sex, bodies and beauty, followed by the swift denunciation of these same elements. It’s the superego battling the id, the Catholic confessional. Indulge, repent.
"In a patriarchy, women bear more of the stigma for these “moral failings” because they occupy (metaphorically) the realm of flesh and sex, of indulgence and aesthetic enjoyment. Fashion occupies these realms too, and so winds up shouldering the burden of cultural and psychological ambivalence.
"As the pandemic changes our dress and appearance, it changes our relationship to our bodies, granting us a new consciousness of our physical selves. We think more now about our breathing, heart rate, oxygen levels. In everyday conversations, we discuss death rate and contagion, symptoms and treatments. We are attending to our biological, mortal selves as never before.
"At the same time, we also attend to one another’s biological selves as never before. We measure our distance from others in the street or the grocery store. We assess whether someone nearby poses a physical, even deadly risk.
"Such vigilance may come more easily to women than to men. Women are accustomed to estimating what constitutes a safe distance from strangers, gauging their potential to harm us. We already think about our bodily vulnerability in a daily way. We already understand that our bodies are permeable.
"Women are the bearers of “bodiliness,” the sex whose biological form and function get staged and noticed. Traditionally, women’s clothes more often outline and emphasize individual body parts (hips, legs, breasts), making female sexuality a public spectacle. Men, though, tend to glide unnoticed — their clothes skimming their bodies, their sexuality implicit rather than staged. They are, in linguistic terms, the “unmarked” sex — default “neutral” persons. But a pandemic re-corporealizes us all, re-rooting everyone, including men, in fleshly reality in all its precarity.
"To navigate the world during Covid-19, everyday transactions such as travel, attending school and entering businesses may require temperature checks, health questionnaires and perhaps even lab tests. Private bodily information is becoming a new shared currency — tokens exchanged for small freedoms. While such sharing raises serious privacy concerns, it also reminds us of the deep, physical connection among us all...."
