Elegance, Resistance, and the Creation of the Self: The Politics of the Dressed Body

In the last few years, philosophers have showed some interest in theoretical questions about fashion. This shift signals a new disciplinary trend in philosophy, which has considered matters of personal appearances and taste in clothing as topics unworthy of serious analysis. In this sense, some philosophers have joined fashion theorists in debating important issues about how we dress. However, these works have largely ignored elegance and its significant connection with the aesthetics of the self, and in particular with its implications at the level of political action and resistance. While not denying its connections with fashion, elegance is also distinct from that domain.

In this presentation, I address a metaphysical question for a theory of elegance: What is elegance? I defend the view that elegance refers to a set of practices that deal with the creation and cultivation of the self. The view draws significantly from Foucault’s later discussions of dandyism as an aesthetics of the self. Elegance is a tactic whereby one can create an autonomous space for self-creation. There, we constitute ourselves as subjects in ways that resist the strictures of modern power. Through elegance understood as creation and cultivation of the self, we can develop authentic ways to perform our individual identities.

The pursuit of elegance, I suggest, can be legitimately considered an aspect of one’s aesthetic education in Schiller’s sense, imbuing our daily lives not only with beauty, but also values and meanings that transcend the domain of shallow appearances – or, put it more technically, the domain of the aesthetic narrowly construed. I develop then a view that sees elegance not merely as the outcome of certain ways of dressing and behaving, but rather as specific embodied ways of being and acting in the world – of doing things, one could say.

Bio

Andrea Baldini is Associate Professor of Art Theory and Aesthetics at the School of Arts of Nanjing University and Director of the NJU Center for Sino-Italian Cultural Studies. He is also Young Ambassador of the Jiangsu Province. Since 2015, he is also the coordinator of the Jinling Artist-in-Residence Program, whose aim is to promote cultural exchange between China and Italy. From 2014 to 2016, he was International Postdoctoral Exchange Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences at Nanjing University. He has published extensively on issues related to aesthetics, philosophy of art, and visual culture. Recent articles appeared in the Journal of Visual Culture and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. His monograph A Philosophy Guide to Street Art and the Law has been published by Brill. He is also an independent curator with international experience. His curatorial works focuses on issues emerging in cross-cultural contexts of artistic and aesthetic appreciation. Since 2018, he is also a board member of AAIIC, the Association of Italian Scholars in China.