

Dress is a basic fact of social life and this, according to anthropologists, is true of all known human cultures: all people ‘dress’ the body in some way, be it through clothing, tattooing, cosmetics or other forms of body painting. To put it another way, no culture leaves the body unadorned but adds to, embellishes, enhances or decorates the body… Dress is the way in which individuals learn to live in their bodies and feel at home in them.” As Roland Barthesonce stated, “…Clothing concerns all of the human person, all of the body, all of the relationships of man to body as well as the relationships of the body to society…” The cultural manifestation of this need to ‘dress’ is better known as fashion; which Lars Svendsen (in his book ‘Fashion as a Philosophy’) describes as being “…one of the most influential phenomena in Western civilisation since the renaissance.” Svendsen notes that fashion has “…conquered an increasing number of modern man’s fields of activity and has become almost ‘second nature’…” The logic of fashion he states, “…also encroaches on the areas of art, politics and science, [making it] clear that we are talking about a phenomenon that lies near the centre of the modern world.”