Value, Virtue, and Vivienne Westwood: On the Philosophical Importance of Fashion

Open Philosophy 6 (1):481-95 (2023)
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Abstract

The late Vivienne Westwood sketched a role for fashion that elevates it from the prosaic to the status of art, as something important, life-enhancing, and worthy of pursuit. Here, a philosophical treatment of Westwood’s vision of fashion that does justice to the artistic and life-enhancing value that fashion can realise is offered, using an emergent theory in contemporary analytic aesthetics. The virtue theory of art delineates the intrinsic worth of art in terms of the opportunities it provides for us to exercise and cultivate virtues such as courage, self-expression, imagination, wit, or authenticity. Our engagement with art can subsequently be genuinely life-enhancing in lieu of the constitutive role the virtues play in living well. The present study takes Westwood’s claims as a jumping-off point, considering how they speak not just to her own designs but to our relationship with our clothes more broadly. Fashion is defended as a practice that performs this function in analogous ways to other genres of art and thus has clear artistic value as well as enables us to live well. Given this potential, just as Westwood claimed, there are reasons to perform the practice well because it has importance for the ways in which it can realise artistic value and aid us in living well.

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Colette Olive
University of Leeds

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References found in this work

Games and the art of agency.C. Thi Nguyen - 2019 - Philosophical Review 128 (4):423-462.
Aesthetic virtues: traits and faculties.Tom Roberts - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (2):429-447.
The experiential account of aesthetic value.Alan H. Goldman - 2006 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (3):333–342.
Street Art and Consent.Sondra Bacharach - 2015 - British Journal of Aesthetics 55 (4):481-495.
Virtues of Art: Good Taste.Dominic McIver Lopes - 2008 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 82 (1):197-211.

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