More Philosophy on the Catwalk (With Reference to the Case of Andrea Sachs and her Cerulean Blue Sweater)

 

Anne Hathaway as Andrea Sachs and Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly

The Devil Wears Prada (dir. David Frankel, 2006)

 

 

When writing about fashion, it's important to do so with reference to politics and philosophy; to show, for example, how the sartorial expression of identity is never purely an individual matter. 

 

For as Miranda Priestly so memorably instructs a smirking Andrea, no one pulls on a lumpy blue sweater as a matter of personal preference [1]. 

 

That's not to argue that the way we look is determined and regulated in the minutest detail by the fashion industry, or that human beings lack a certain degree of free will.

 

But it is to indicate how those who say they don't care about the dictates of fashion are never truly exempt from the latter and that, to paraphrase Schopenhauer, whilst we are free to wear whatever we want, we are not free to choose what we want [2].

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm referring to the scene in The Devil Wears Prada in which Miranda Priestly (editor of a hugely influential fashion magazine) instructs her fledgling assistant Andrea Sachs (a college graduate who aspires to be a serious journalist) on how her unstylish dress sense doesn't reveal that she is above (or outside of) the world of fashion. 

      In fact, quite the opposite; it exposes her as an unwitting fashion victim, naive about the importance of design. Objecting to Andy's use of the word stuff to describe (and dismiss) fashionable clothes, Miranda launches into a devastating monologue:

 

"Oh, okay. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select, I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue. It's not turquiose, it's not lapis. It's actually cerulean. You're also blithely unaware of the fact that, in 2002, Oscar de La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns, and then I think it was Yves St. Laurent [...] who showed cerulean military jackets [...] 

      And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores, and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs, and it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry, when in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room, from a pile of 'stuff'."   

 

      - From the original screenplay by Aline Brosh McKenna. To watch how the scene plays out on screen, click here. 

 

[2] See chapter 5 of Schopenhauer's 1839 essay Über die Freiheit des menschlichen Willens, trans. into English as 'On the Freedom of the Will', by Christopher Janaway, in The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2009), where he argues that whilst man always does what he wills, he does so necessarily.