The Bloggomist: Acorn & Oak Tree
Fashion Opinion

It seems that, for a genre of often overlooked or under appreciated art objects, fashion is something that everyone’s got an opinion about. Whether it’s a divisive new trend or an essential idea, like my Long Island Dad always says, everybody’s got a rap. So when a fashion designer, or just an enthusiast, starts musing and it sounds like more than the usual rambling and, in fact, sounds a little like philosophy, I perk up.

This week I rented Lagerfeld Confidential and was struck by how Karl’s relationship to anything and everything he creates is not only interesting in of itself, but so in line with Martin Heidegger’s notion of existence in Being and Time. Maybe it’s a German thing.

In Being and Time, Heidegger asserts that we are temporal beings – time orients and delimits our existence. For instance, some experiences are not plausible for us. None of us will be building the transcontinental railroad. That already happened. So, we make choices and build our lives according to what we actually can do.

At the same time, our being isn’t a dot on a timeline, limited by the past but consumed with the present. No, according to Heidegger, our being is oriented towards the future. Our existence is an assortment of projects that we set out to achieve, eventually complete, and then being anew, with a different set of goals. Constantly moving forward, everything we do has the future in mind.

In the beginning of the film, Karl mentions a German proverb, “You cannot borrow from your past” and goes on to describe his interest in the fashion industry’s “futurism”. Like the 1920s Italian painters who go by that name, Karl seems to also strive for continuous change, activity and progress. He says that “the briefness of the cycle [of collections] must mean something to me because I love chance, I’m attached to nothing… Moving on is no big deal.” He says that “Each collection is the first and, luckily for me, not the last, so I can make up for my mistakes the next time.”

Dynamism of a Cyclist by Umberto Boccioni

While fashion’s relentless pursuit of the new may not sit well with some people, I find that for me, that’s part of the appeal. Unlike other art forms, which often strive to capture a moment or emotion, to nail it down and understand it, fashion, by some popular accounts, ‘has no point’ and is free to flit along the surface. Without pretention toward the grandiose, fashion provides an honest and joyful account of us, sociologically and philosophically, in nearly real time. In the movie, Karl describes his love of photographs: “they capture a moment that’s gone forever impossible to reproduce.” He then continues on to say that he himself is not a photographer, but an advertising photographer, therefore allying himself once again with the dynamic and future-oriented world of fashion.

Besides the philosophical implications of an ever-present art form, fashion is an industry in which it is not rare to see people work into their deathbeds. The excitement and creativity are more than these people can part with. In Being and Time, Heidegger draws a clear distinction between his view of us as many different “not yets” (future projects on the horizon) and Aristotle’s teleology (remember the acorn to oak tree?) In the Aristotlean view (or so goes the criticism), once your goal is reached, you have been actualized and there you are. In the Heideggerian view, one is never complete or finished in this way. If our projects define our existence, without our projects we would be the equivalent of dead people.

Heidegger quotes Nietzsche when describing inauthentic beings as those who have “becom[e] too old for their victories.” At 76 years old, traipsing around the world in heeled boots, Karl (and the myriad of designers who work well into their advanced years) hardly seems too old for anything.

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To see more from Zinzi Edmundson, visit: http://evilmonito.com/author/zinzi/

Published on 16 December 2009 | 3 |