Mode...ein verführerisches Spiel

This is one of the geekiest posts I'm going to write.  The other day I discovered that Fink wrote a book on fashion, Mode...ein verführerisches Spiel [Fashion...a Seductive Play], published in 1969, placing him at 64 at the time of writing. The illustrations, done by Walter Niggli, who, as far as I can tell, is still alive, are particularly great. (I do doubt this, though, since that would make him 103.) The book was published by Modehaus Spengler, a Swiss fashion company. As far as I can tell, which is based only a quick Google search, the book isn't discussed anywhere except in a few bibliographies. This surprises me because this is a clear, approachable, and interesting take on Fink's philosophy, and it is awesome.

Fink's take on fashion is not unlike his take on anything else, meaning he anchors his discussion on what he takes to be the five fundamental phenomena of human being, i.e. work, mastery, love, death, and play, and always in a particular relationship to the world. The five Grundphänome are also what distinguish human from animal and other non-human being.

Fink shifts from an initial idea of clothing as decorative fabric to clothing as housing the body in the way that a house might, but at the same time it expresses something significantly different. What does it mean to have a body? What's the relation between the body, expression, and nudity? There's something, too, about the way we find ourselves moving about the world. Clothing has a particular symbolism that expresses these relationships.

There's something about fashion, which enables us to signalize at once both that we are different and that we belong, that lends a sociality. This sociality, though, isn't the same as a community, and also doesn't take itself as seriously. A great deal of this is due to the culture industry that forces us to fill free time in specific ways, such that this time isn't actually free. It also introduces a false conception of play, namely of play as opposed to seriousness. The way out isn't to give up play, but to rehabilitate it. The seductive element is precisely there in the role of the culture industry. The seductive part need not be strictly negative, though, since it still produces inspiration, excitement, and an interest in beauty.

Ultimately, "Fashion belongs to freedom and play, but also to the raging hunger of the sex, which masks itself, covers its face and through all masks, it pulls through. Fashion is adjacent to the superfluous and the superficial and is therefore already "necessary" in a higher sense. The dress of fashion is dialectic, a veiled revealing of a shameless shamefacedness, high tension of drive through covering of immediate ends, the transfiguration of flesh through the magical mean of textiles. Yes, even all of fashion as a phenomenon of being is dialectic, something, which is decided neither on the one side as positive character, nor on the other as negative; much more it portrays itself as a moving counterplay of opposites (113)." 

Of course last time I mentioned feeling like a jackass every time I think of Heidegger when I'm the woods, so naturally today I stumbled upon the Martin Heidegger Weg. Is it just a coincidence that it's a dead end?