sociology and anthropology of the imaginary

In Western societies, a long-standing philosophical tradition prioritizes deeper meanings over surface appearances, thus reducing clothes to mere false impressions, favoring an unvarnished truth instead. Then, to write on clothes implies the reversal of a whole philosophical attitude: trying no more to pose clothes as a source of mistakes, but as a mold, matrix, no longer as a secondary and accessory element, but as a very first and founding element, determining individual behaviors as the social structures. It is this reversal that this book tries to promote. And doing so, it tries to address what is obviously missing: a theory, and also -theories being reinforced by practices- the sociological practices of clothes and fashion.