From The City College of New York, Nickolas Pappas approaches fashion from a philosophical perspective and focusing on anti-fashion.
According to Pappas, if fashion rests on the mechanism of social imitativeness, anti-fashion represents the contrary attempt to justify social presentation without reference to social forces. The prisoners in Plato’s allegorical cave think as fans of fashion do, asking only how things appear to their fellow prisoners. But what can appear one way or the other has less reality to begin with. Social presentation that rises above appearance presents the truth about a human; and by this reasoning ancient Greek athletic nudity, and black dress in other cultures, worked as a first anti-fashion. Today’s anti-fashion (jeans, black clothing, tattoos, the shaved head, the man’s suit) retains something of the old philosophical enterprise of finding a true or natural way of being in society.

The lecture is introduced by Giovanni Matteucci and held within the course of Everyday Aesthetics, Master in Fashion Studies, Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna - Rimini Campus