Gilles Deleuze

Abstract

This an updated and revised version in the second edition of the book Thinking through Fashion. Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy is often situated within the school of French post-structuralism, but his thought does not share the same emphasis on the centrality of language. Deleuze aims to come up with new concepts so as to rethink and revitalize life and he can thus be situated as a vitalist and materialist thinker. Although Deleuze’s ideas have hardly yet been applied to fashion, Anneke Smelik argues that concepts such as ‘becoming’, the ‘body-without-organs’ and ‘the fold’ can illuminate the study of contemporary fashion. The continuous process of creative transformations is what Deleuze and co-author Guattari (1987) understand by ‘becoming’; for example becoming-woman, becoming-animal, becoming-machine. Becoming implies a different way of thinking about human identity and the way one is dressed: not rigid and fixed from cradle to grave but fluid and flexible throughout life. The process of becoming is connected to the idea of the ‘body-without-organs’, which refers to re-organizing the way in which the body is given meaning. The notion of the body-without-organs can help to counter normative images of what a body should look like – not unlike much of high fashion’s extravagant designs. Deleuze’s concept of ‘the fold’ undoes a binary opposition between inside and outside, between appearance and essence. This insight involves a fundamental critique of the idea that fashion is a superficial game of exteriority covering over a ‘deep’ self hidden in the interior folds of the soul. Rather, identity can be understood as a set of folds; folding-in and folding-out – much like the folds of the garments we wear in daily life. The Deleuzean notion of the fold helps to see how fashion designs set the body in motion, potentially liberating it from the dominant modes of identity in the consumerist world of fast fashion.