Otto von Busch, associate professor of Integrated Design, School of Design Strategies, wrote a book, from which the below is excerpted. The Dharma of Fashion: If you crave fashion, make friends with your desire.
I share some parts that resonate strongly with me, and a link to the entire excerpt.
Fashion is fueled by our desires, and in many ways, we dress to become our desires. But uncontrolled desire combined with our hunger for attachment easily turns into craving. We spot an attractive friend crossing the road in just that right thing, making him or her stand out as a mirage of perfection. We may not spell it out, but the rush in the body cries “I need that too!” The look appears to us as a ticket to that world, a signature texted at a postcard from a place of allure. A low-level fever runs through my body; “I need to find that outfit!” Passion can be almost indistinguishable from a fever, so no wonder fashion is such an incubator to that pleasant sickness of consumerism.
We are continuously sold aesthetic rebellion and independence. We do not submit to fashion, we crave fashion. We celebrate impulse buying and happily engage in retail therapy. Fashion is not about subordination as much as a site for tension, anxiety release, and soothing from stress.
And even as we cannot escape the news of environmental impact of mass consumerism, we keep shopping. Perhaps it is true, as Buddhist ecologist Stephanie Keza argues, that we are stricken by a “sickness of consumerism,” a spiritual disease of unquenchable consumption, poisoning and denial?
But don’t we also crave fashion because it is a little forbidden, that it flirts with danger, the gamble of the passions? Fashion is the antipode to frugality, and some shame is still bound to the blatant egotism of fully and flamboyantly celebrating one’s desires, which may still be the model of orgiastic pleasure. Indeed, isn’t fashion partly about the pleasure of challenging virtue, gluttonous delight and a thrill in greedy jealousy, to envelope ourselves in virtuous sin, taking sartorial risk and challenging the fates? It is the kick that makes me feel more alive, if only for a short while.
Through consumption, grasping generates both the safety of identity as well as the thrill of becoming anew. As I consume, my sense of identity becomes tightly knit to my feeling states. “Shopping is a way that we search for our selves and our place in the world,” psychologist April Benson argues, “a lot of people conflate the search for self with the search for stuff.” As I wear sophisticated Japanese designer-clothes, my whole cognition speaks to me as if I am a sophisticated person. I want to feel like a queen or king again, and I crave more. As what I acquire arouses me, I am also seduced into believing I am what I consume. The mantra of consumerism is I crave, therefore I am.
Otto von Busch is Associate Professor of Integrated Design at Parsons School of Design. This essay is an excerpt from Otto von Busch, The Dharma of Fashion: A Buddhist Approach to Our Life with Clothes (Schiffer Publishing, LTD, 2020).