Phenomenology of Body and Fashion Design

The purpose of this essay is to provide the conception of a phenomenological fashion design. But the ultimate purpose of this essay lied in the attempt to let the skin of culture and its deepest flesh interpenetrate each other. Fashion design is the cultural skin that becomes more and more significant in the current culture of spectacular. And philosophy is, as it were, the deepest flesh from which the culture is nourished with its ultimate sense, even though it now seems to abandon such a role. Philosophy today has confined itself within its own pedantic, autistic problem. Hence, current culture is just like a skin without flesh. It has lost the flesh, from which it could be provided with its vividness, while the philosophy has lost its skin, through which it finds its lived expression. That is the reason why the current culture is, as Jean Baudrillard has indicated, so pale despite its spectacular “colorfulness.” Fashion design is no exception. This essay attempts to fulfill the task failed by both fashion design and philosophy. It will reflect on fashion design in the light of its relation to the body from the perspective of Merleau-Pontian phenomenology. This will gives us the opportunity to criticize both modern fashion history and its opponent, postmodern fashion, and then to propose a new direction of fashion design.