CFP: CFP: Thinking Nietzsche on fashion and design for The Agonist

Submission deadline: January 6, 2018

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Call for Papers

The Agonist’s Fall 2018 Issue

Nietzsche on Fashion and Design

 

As an untimely thinker, one who often proclaimed the greatest task is to think against the grain, Nietzsche was not in fashion during his time. He is also not a philosopher often associated with the fields of fashion or design. Despite his notorious criticisms of “fashionable” ideas, an enthusiasm for elevating aesthetic values, and his interest in the body, he never mentions clothing. Furthermore, other than his brief discussion of “Doric architectonics” in The Birth of Tragedy and some offhand remarks from Twilight of the Idols (“The architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollonian state…Architecture is a kind of eloquence of power in forms”), he rarely mentions architecture. Nietzsche is rarely mentioned in fashion studies, nor did he write to fashion magazines or theorize fashion (as Mallarmé, Simmel, Benjamin, Barthes or even Fink did). And while much has been written on the artists, dancers and composers that have found inspiration in Nietzsche’s philosophical ideas, his influence on architects, urban planners and fashion designers— both directly (Karl Lagerfeld and Le Corbusier) and indirectly (Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau)—has been largely ignored.

As Nietzsche’s fame has caught up with him posthumously, we are left with his philosophy, photographs of his austere, banal, and period-appropriate suits, and countless questions on his relationship to design. For the upcoming issue of The Agonist, we welcome contributions – from scholarly essays to artistic explorations – on what an engaged, critical dialogue with Nietzsche’s philosophy from the perspective of fashion and design might look like. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

Fashion and philosophy

Nietzsche and architecture

What does/would Nietzschean fashion look like?

Fashion designers inspired by Nietzsche

The fashion designer as philosopher

Nietzsche and environmental aesthetics

To submit your work for review, please send an abstract of 250 words or a 250-word proposal of your suggested artwork to [email protected] latest by June 1, 2018. The final paper submission and final work submission deadline is August 1, 2018. Please see the Submission Guidelines at

http://agonist.nietzschecircle.com/wp/submission-policy.

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