Fashion Myths: A Cultural Critique

Description

Besides products and services multinational corporations also sell myths, values and immaterial goods. Such »meta-goods« (e.g. prestige, beauty, strength) are major selling points in the context of successful marketing and advertising. Fashion adverts draw on deeply rooted human values, ideals and desires such as values and symbols of social recognition, beautification and rejuvenation. Although the reference to such meta-goods is obvious to some consumers, their rootedness in philosophical theories of human nature is less apparent, even for the marketers and advertisers themselves. This book is of special interest for researchers and students in the fields of Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Marketing, Advertising, Fashion, Cultural Critique, Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology and Psychology, and for anyone interested in the ways in which fashion operates. Cover Contents A critical inquiry into fashion Fashion as a philosophical topos a historical prelude Key question, method and structure The fashion concept of proletarized luxury clothing Ancestors of fashion: Natural rhythms, trends, costumes Pseudo-reincarnation via re-wrapping: ‘re-in-vesti-nation’ Fashion myths – meta-goods in marketing and advertising Philosophic-anthropological implications of fashion Pseudo-tragedy Melioration Reinvestination The ideal-typical incarnation of fashion: The Dandy as Staging artist Aesthete Enemy of old age Implications of fashion: desiderata of life as an artwork Individual existence as entelechy in the social context Melioration by means of ascesis Philosophy of death and the art of dying Conclusion References