Undressing Non-Fashion & Empires Over Skin:
Interview with Meltdown Your Books
This interview was conducted online in November 2025. The interview is available to watch as a video via our YouTube, but to satisfy the format, such as the time constraints, the video format is redacted heavily. The full interview is available to read here, and it has been developed and edited by Claire Elise & M.Y.B.
Claire Elise:
So–Hi! Just a quick introduction from me. My name is Claire Elise, and I'm one of the directors of Becoming Press, an independent publishing house based in Berlin, which typically orients itself around what we call minor theoretical literature. In other words, we make books, and we are here today to talk about our 12th book, which is called Empires over Skin: How We Fashioned Our World (2025) by Meltdown Your Books, who is also the author of our third book Where Does A Body Begin? (2023). I am joined today by the author, and this is supposed to be an interview or a dialogue, but in a way, it feels a bit more like a seance–we're having a Pythian encounter. You'll have to forgive the low-tech situation, as the only microphone I could find was this old SM57, which has been probably lying around since I was about 17 and was in punk bands back in the UK.
Apart from that, I will also want to offer a brief disclaimer that I'm not coming from a kind of background in fashion. I don't consider myself to be someone who's just interested in fashion, but, I'm mostly working with the material from this book, as well as my own kind of background in whatever it is that I do.
Welcome – Meltdown Your Books, can you hear me? Are you with us?
Meltdown Your Books.:
I'm here, and I can hear you.
C.E.:
Okay. Amazing. I'm going to start–
M.Y.B.:
[interrupting] —Though, I have to say something now, to give everyone a pretext for your knowledge of fashion. You revealed to me yesterday that you don't know who Anna Wintour is. I think that might not mean much to you, but to an audience that knows anything about Fashion, that really sets the stage for where you're at.
C.E.:
Yeah, you can just throw me right under the bus from the beginning. It's amazing. Thank you so much for that.
M.Y.B.:
You’re welcome.
C.E.:
I would begin by saying that it was almost of spiritual importance for us to return to the original (1st Edition) cover of your first book Where Does A Body Begin?, because I think, as the illustrator of both of your books, Rachel Lilim, said, it is the hardest cover, ever, in the history of biological theoretical literature. I'm really glad that we're back to that design, and it paved the way for a really nice result with the Empires Over Skin. I think you've earned the only black covers in Becoming Press.
M.Y.B.:
I mean, that really makes sense. If you knew me in a more personal way. I only own black clothing. I really don't own any other color. So it really just sort of completes the look.
C.E.:
Yeah, I actually would have guessed! So, I was happy to hear about this book, Empires Over Skin, from the beginning, from the inception, because my interpretation of your sense of humor through Instagram is that, while it can lean heavily into cynical themes or darker themes and imagery, I find it very life-affirming, and I feel like it's a sense of humor that plays-off of something life-affirming buried deep within it. So I find it something that I can relate to, and what was interesting, for me, was that your first book, Where Does A Body Begin? (2023), its point of departure involves your education and your job, whereas this book was extending out of a different kind of passion. I guess we could start by simply asking, what's your background in fashion?
M.Y.B.:
If I can take a huge left turn, just last night I was watching this show–and this will reveal that I’m that kind of person who actually spends her days at home watching anime–called “Orb”, which is sort of an alternate historical retelling of the discovery of the heliocentric model (of the cosmos). The whole show sort of focuses on these individuals’ personal struggles because, I don't know how familiar you are with astronomy but, Ptolemy’s original model of the cosmos is very complex, and sort of unintuitive and inaccurate, as he imagined that around the Earth is this great orbit of all of these planets, which are themselves each orbiting around other orbits, and then there is a process of offsetting the axes of all these planets and orbits, and even then, it's just inaccurate. The struggle of all these characters in the show is that they're true believers in God, and they want to believe that God would not make something so irrational, something so unbeautiful. So their nature is to sort of struggle against that despite the church doctrine at the time and so on.
I find that I relate to this quite deeply, because that's sort of my relationship to fashion, which is to say that I am deeply cynical about it because I believe that there is a more beautiful version of it that could exist. I grew up in Colorado, which may not mean something to your European audience, but to Americans, Colorado is infamous for its horrible (and kind of ugly) clothes; it’s like the anti-fashion capital of America, and so growing up, I was sort of always at odds with that. I didn't really understand how to assemble a good looking outfit, but I would assemble looks that were at least anti-Colorado; however disastrous they might be. I wore all kinds of egregious colors or outrageous materials just to differentiate myself from it all, because I didn't, to return to my analogy, have a heliocentric model to orient around. I think, in general, my love of fashion is the same as my love of art and music, and anything else. It's the belief that the things around us could be made beautiful and coalesce into something worthwhile and worth engaging with.
C.E.:
So I'm quite happy about, specific phrasing you just used there, because even though I was reading my notes whilst speaking in the beginning, I managed to skipped one line which I have highlighted here: “I feel like your sense of humor plays on a love for a life that could have been”; there is, again, this kind of life-affirming element to the cynicism.
The next thing I could ask about, in terms of the transition from Where Does A Body Begin?, your first book, to Empires Over Skin, is what compelled you to go through the strenuous and often horrible process of trying to write a book again? There were things about Where Does A Body Begin? that you were not so satisfied with, and, from the beginning, I was kind of imposing a sequence onto your two books and thinking, “okay, so you start with the body and you moved on to clothes”, but through talking to you, I understood that you were not really intending to present it as such, or even seeing it in this way. As it turns out, the reason that you turned from the body to fashion was more to do with trying to settle a score that you felt wasn't fully settled in Where Does A Body Begin? So it's a bit of a long question, but I'm wondering if you could reflect upon what you see as the kind of “problematique” that runs through these two books?
M.Y.B.:
If I could offer an insight into my process for a lot of things, which is: David Lynch, if you're at all familiar with his personal life, he lived a very ascetic and unintensive lifestyle. He had routines; he ate the same thing each day, he drank the same coffee, and he lived like this because he wanted to give himself the freedom to be creative in an intellectual space, while sort of giving his life a sense of balance and structure. Honestly, I relate to that a lot, in the sense that both my memes and my books come from the fact that I give myself a lot of opportunity to think about things and react in that moment. To elaborate, the books each really stem from a single experience: Where Does the Body Begin? was a response to a single conversation I had with someone, and Empires Over Skin began in response to a single video that I watched, the creator of which I can't even recall–but I know it was a TikTok.
Essentially, the video involved this girl describing to her audience, what they should do to become fashionable, like her. The premise of it was, you know, “there's nothing I could tell you because styles are a totally individual thing. It's, you know, it's your personal expression and you just have to know who you are and that'll come through in your fashion.” I was so frustrated with that video because it's such a deceptive thing to say to people. It's so funny for a fashionable person dressed in all the latest styles to be like, “this is my personal identity,” “I simply chose to wear baggy pants in the season where baggy pants are fashionable, and I just happened to be wearing these, you know, low-rise Filas because, oh gosh, that just happens to be who I am as a person and has nothing to do with this sort of fashionable moment right now.”
I felt the need to write this book, which ended up more philosophical than it should have been if I wanted to reach that kind of audience, but I think the hope is that someone might watch that video and read my book and feel the discontent between those two worlds. So, for me, the through-line of those books is that I'm, as you kind of describe, someone who wants to believe that the world could be better, and I sort of “live a happy life” because of that, but I nonetheless feel that deeply cynical about certain things, frustrations which share a lot of similarities between them, and which always go back to the same sources.
C.E.:
I think it's very interesting that, despite a different prompt, you're revisiting the same problem from a completely different angle, starting not from a discontentment with biology, which is to say, your job and studies and so on, but this time from something that, by its very nature, a lot more people can relate to. There is a chance that if people are able to see themselves in the book, or identify with the book, more, or with the “subject” of the book more, then they might have a stronger chance of kind of getting to “the point” that is embedded in the subtext of both books. So–over the next 30 minutes or 40 minutes, we can slowly flesh-out some ideas from the book, and work towards what we can call, for the sake of this interview, a theory of Non-Fashion.
I propose that we begin with the idea of “Dress vs. Fashion”, as it gives an easy opportunity for you to just nail down a solid definition of the word fashion.
M.Y.B.:
I think this is the worst part of the book, in the sense that it's me dealing with the baggage of how people have talked about fashion, through an academic lens, for a hundred years. Obviously we all have an intuitive knowledge of these things, in a way, because if I, for example, say, “you're wearing a costume”, or “you're wearing clothes”, or “you're wearing fashion”, everyone's got an intuitive sense for these terms. And yet fashion scholars create very specific definitions for all of these words to try and delineate different phenomena. This is an issue that you guys, in the philosophy world, run into as well, because if I say, for example, “to be” or “immanently” or “transcendentally”, these words carry the baggage of 2000 years of discourse. So the beginning of the book is me just attempting to welcome the reader and to situate them into these concepts and words, so that I can have a meaningful discussion about fashion, and to attempt to be consistent with myself.
To elaborate on your question, however, we can begin with two phenomena: first, there's the phenomenon of wearing clothes at all, and the fact that you can go back thousands of years and find all this historical evidence of people wearing things for various reasons, from signification (expressing something), to adornment (in terms of aesthetics) to practical reasons (like warmth). The second phenomenon would involve Shein dresses that come out every two weeks and this constant urge to get the new thing, to dress in the newest and latest styles. These two phenomena could both be called fashion in the colloquial sense, but we want to differentiate between them, to discuss them as different phenomena. So we call this idea of wearing clothes at all, or adorning the body, “Dress”, and then we refer to this perpetual change as “Fashion”, which is admittedly unintuitive. I read through the book multiple times trying to find myself misusing the words because I just know that I'll drop into the colloquial usage of them, but I think I caught them all. So hopefully no one reads the book and finds me misusing the words. But really, the premise of the book is not “Dress”, I'm not necessarily interested in clothing as it is, but I'm interested in “Fashion”. I'm interested in the modern and post-modern phenomenon of consumption for consumption's sake.
C.E.:
Okay! We'll get into postmodernism soon, or now, actually, let’s just get through it. I can't imagine that you wanted to talk about postmodernity in this book, as it brings with it so much of this philosophical baggage. Yet, in the end, you dedicated a chapter to it. So would you be able to speak to your motivations, in terms of why you feel that postmodernity is important for fashion?
M.Y.B.:
When I was writing this book… I spent a lot of time (in my own head) trying to imagine someone at a bookstore who had never read any philosophy, picking up the book and being able to read it to the end and understand what I meant. And I think I failed to some degree. I think people who follow our pages will probably have some sense of these terms, and can follow it. But someone who is philosophically uninclined will find it a bit difficult. So in that sense, I spent an early part of the first chapter trying to define postmodernism with the hope that I could use it very lightly. I hoped that I could just dabble a little bit in explaining what postmodernity is and how that relates to the kinds of changes fashion has undergone in the past 50 years, but you're right, because the problem starts to spiral out of control the more you realize that postmodernity is the source and basis for all of our current and contemporary fashion trends on the internet.
In short, the point of the postmodernity chapter is that in the early 20th century, the idea of the fashionable image arose. We arrive at the idea of the fashion shoot, and the art of creating a meaning of fashion which extends outside of the clothes themselves.
A lot of haute couture starts showing up exclusively in photos, rarely being actually worn by people, but these fashionable images help to drive economic value, because if you can see a dress worn on a particular celebrity, then you can discern what that brand represents, and what kind of person it's supposed to appeal to. Later, once you get to the 1980s, you start to see the dominance of the image reach its pinnacle, where the image supersedes all other forms of meaning, and the images and representations of fashion become the only thing that we're actually engaging with (and trading in).
As an exaggerated example, I talk a bit in the book about certain modern A.I. platforms which have been designed to create what are, essentially, fake images. You give it a description of a garment, or you give it a picture of a garment, and it gives you an on-model photo that has no relevance to the actual garment. The photos that will eventually be taken of that outfit, at Coachella or wherever, have no relation to the garment itself, because you can make garments that look a particular way in juxtaposition to the reality of how they're constructed. Famously, obviously, a lot of Coachella outfits are from these fast fashion retailers, and they likely don't fit correctly, or hardly last out of the box, and yet they have entirely succeeded in their original purpose, which is to have a photo taken in them. So you get to this stage of fashion which is characterized by creation for images as opposed to creation for fashion.
C.E.:
Okay. We can quickly move into another concept from the book, “coworker fashion”. What would coworker fashion be in this context?
M.Y.B.:
“Co-worker fashion” ties into, and is not so different from, the term I coined “non-fashion” in the book. Once again, this is an idea which stems from a personal experience that thought about a lot and can outwards from. In Empires Over Skin, I describe a person that I used to work with, someone who dressed like you might imagine any man in the 21st Century, in an industrialized nation, would dress; he had cargo shorts, and graphic t-shirts of Marvel heroes, or whatever popular cultural property he was into, complete with beat up sneakers–all in a very indescript way. He could sink into a crowd of a thousand other men and you wouldn't be able to pick any of them apart. There was some sort of “non-ness” to his fashion. And then one day I bumped into him outside of work, and he's wearing this leather jacket, and skinny jeans.
I kind of exclaimed: “that's absurd. You've never dressed like that before”, or at least that I'd ever seen. “I've known you for years”. And he said, “oh, I dress like this all the time when I'm not at work.” It kind of hit me, in that moment, that the cargo shorts and the graphic t-shirts were a uniform, “I've got to put on my uniform to go to work.”, so he goes and pulls some cargo shorts off the rack, which is so absurd to me when I really think about it. I work in academia and research; there's no uniform. You're not required to wear something specific, say. I wear some very crazy stuff to work, and it's never an issue. It never really conflicts with anything. And yet he felt this need to dress like this... “nothingness”, to be no one. Which sort of gets to “non-fashion”, which started from the idea of being a “non-fashion subject” and wanting to dress in a way that bears no unique identity. This is where “coworker fashion” also ties back into the more familiar concept of “coworker music”, which is pretty much just this idea of people “without taste”–automatons. I spend a lot of the book within this oeuvre; I think it's a really interesting concept to explore deeper.
C.E.:
One thing that we really need to say before we have a conversation about non-fashion, directly. Let’s recap, actually. So we have been talking now about a definition of fashion which is characterized by constant change, and another way of looking at this constant change, if we come from a philosophical perspective is through the concept of–and it's another one of these words that is, as you say, haunted, and I would also need to, as I indeed need to now, spend a minute or two explaining what the word means–negativity. Negativity doesn't mean negative affect, it doesn't mean pessimism, and it doesn't mean it makes you feel bad; that's a different kind of negativity, and philosophical negativity, which, in the most simple sense involves negation. When you do something in a way that is “different” to something which came before, it obtains its unique identity through a not-operation. As you create something new, it is “negating” what came before simply by not-being that, and this idea has been popular within philosophy for quite a long time. I believe even Hegel had written something along the lines of “negativity is the engine of dialectical becoming”, or something dramatic like that. So negativity is an important thing in philosophy, and it ties into your idea of constant change. If I were to take your idea of a non-fashion, and reverse engineer an initial impression, I’d begin by thinking of fashion as being driven by constant negation, one thing after another. Would you agree with that as a take on what we're talking about here.
M.Y.B.:
Oh absolutely. There is even a point in the book where I bring up, I can't remember his name right now, but there is a guy who has this theory of “anti-fashion”. Now “anti-fashion” is another academic fashion term for any kind of fashion that goes against the prevailing norms of fashion. But this particular theorist has this theory that this “anti-fashion” is really the engine of fashion itself because it creates the negativity which makes constant change possible. In the 1970s when punk style came about, you know, you got those distressed, worn-out jeans, and now this is a prevailing element of the world, where giant celebrities like Hailey Bieber wear distressed jeans, and there are no “anti-fashion” connotations remaining; this negativity, this “I’m not doing that”, co-produces the perpetual change. I really don’t recall the name, but let's say it's “Fred James” who came up with that theory, but I’d argue this idea of his is quite important to fashion in our contemporary moment.
Taking it another way, you have to create meaning for fashion to be fashionable. If I say that something is the latest item in fashion, regardless of whether it is a pair of sneakers or a pair of pants, those pants have to signal something. It has to be a metaphor. It has to have symbolic content. It has to say “the person who wears this is Y2K”, or that they're irreverent, they're fun, they have a positive outlook, or perhaps, alternatively, they're serious and intellectual. It has to create some sort of symbolic meaning, and to create meaning, as you say, you need this engine of negativity and contrast.
You need to be able to create a dialogue with what existed before, because if I say this new pair of pants has a particular meaning, it needs to exist in comparison to something else, which is the most common way that you hear fashion being discussed, especially for people around our age group. Even the delineation of Millennials and Gen Z relates to this, as we might think about the difference in the fit of their pants, the fit of their shirt, wearing V-necks or not wearing V-necks, the lengths of the skirts or dresses, or the amount of detailing that you do. And all of this expresses some sort of symbolic content about what you relate to and what kind of person you are.
C.E.:
Definitely, and identity itself is another example of something driven by negation, as we are always trying to assert our own identity in contrast to, or against, other people. I just thought of something that might actually be useful to talk about when it comes to fashion and negation. We could talk about, say, fashion designers, famous fashion designers. These are individuals who are organizing fashion collections and organizing the labor, and the fashion shows, and so on. Now, something that comes up in your book that touched me personally, so to speak, because it has a lot to do with music as well, which is more my background. In music we might talk about idea of sampling and remixing, but would you agree that with fashion, it's difficult to even talk about “a remix” because there isn’t really a clear (original) “mix”, there's only remix. So in a sense, everything is a remix, which means nothing is a remix.
In that sense, you can see what we're talking about with regards to negation; there is always this kind of negative recursion.
M.Y.B.:
I can say something funny to that effect, which is that this year a new creative director was appointed at Christian Dior, Jonathan Anderson, who is a very decorated designer and I’m actually quite fond of him. There was a funny dialog which happened when he was brought on, where a lot of people were saying, “oh, Dior's going to come back,” you know, “he's going to go back to the house codes”, and “house codes”, for fashion houses, are the things that are key to the brand, and its history, and its lineage.
So for Dior, that's, you know, corsets and “the new look”, which was a style he pioneered in the 50s, which is a very specific look. But it's very funny for people to say that Jonathan Anderson is going to bring back what Christian Dior did, because Christian Dior was referencing the looks of, you know, 50 years before him. He was specifically known as a nostalgic revisionist, in his own time and in the context of what he was doing.
Wherever you set the stake post, to say “we're going back to there”, if you go back there, you’ll find that they're looking even further back. Not to cite Woody Allen, unfortunately, but there's a film called Midnight in Paris and the premise is that the main characters are obsessed with 1920s Paris, and they time travel back to 1920s Paris, and find that everyone there is obsessed with 1860s Paris and want to travel back to then.
And you get that recursion a lot in fashion, because in the history of the past, say, 150 years of fashion, there's not been a lot of technical innovation outside. There have been some interesting developments, for example the athletic legging is something that did not exist 100 years ago, but we really haven't invented a lot of new fashion forms, we’re just modifying them ever so slightly, which is an important thing that I talk about in the book, about these slight modifications. To answer your question, yes, the remix element that you're talking about is sort of built into the very process of how you design these things, because no one is really inventing the forms at all; we're remixing. This, of course, ties into the intellectual property difficulties of fashion.
I mean, we have spoken about this at a separate time, but if you recall I mentioned that Steve Madden did an interview this year, and someone asked him “How many shoes have you ripped off?”, and he said, “Oh, I don't even know. There have been so many.” But you can only say that in an industry like fashion, where... how would you plausibly, intellectually, defend your shoe design as a concept? How could I say “no? I came up with this idea of a heel.” How would you even convince a jury of that? It becomes too difficult, and I’d also argue that the globalism of fashion also makes it too difficult because defending copyright law becomes endlessly more difficult at that scale. Intellectual property laws are something that have held music back for a long time, and for this reason music still exists within discrete terms, as albums, recordings, because of this strong history of intellectual property law. Biz Markie lost a lawsuit in 1991, or thereabouts, and now no one's allowed to sample without clearing it with the copyright owner of the original sample, at least if you want to release music. Because of this, music is more recessed in its intensity of difference than something like fashion.
C.E.:
None of this is to say that these designers are not talented or something, because, again, we can be cynical about fashion in the sense of treating it with a deservingly critical scrutiny, but it's one of those situations where I find that brutal honesty about what these artists are not doing actually helps me to appreciate more the things they are doing. So in this sense, I feel like the cynicism is kind of beneficial. It certainly was for me. I wanted to say that, despite it sounding almost paradoxical, there is something very honest about the ubiquity of remixing of fashion, this constant negation, this constant recursion, this constant taking things you've seen and reiterating them again in a different way. All this synthesizing. I mention this because I want to make a particular point which might take a moment to get through, but it involves a famous quotation from Walter Pater, who said specifically that “all art aspires to the conditions of music.” For a while I wondered what the conditions of music were. After a while, I came to a particular set of lines in Nietzsche, where he suggested that “music” was “the best approximation of the eternal return due to its ceaseless flows of differentiation”, and “music terrorizes the rational in its inability to be reduced to an image.” Perhaps these were the “conditions of music”, or the “museness of the muses”. In the past I might have thought that fashion was “all-image”, so it didn't fulfil the conditions of music. But, as I think I told you in another conversation, I once tried to write an essay which took this idea of music and its conditions of negativity as far as I could go, and I found, or concluded, that within this own definition, dance was more musical than music. Dancing is quite literally body-languaging, which, to a theorist like Julia Kristeva, is a very succinct metaphor for semiotics and negativity, wordless communication or silent expression. As I say, I don’t come from a background of fashion, gender dysmorphia drives a lot of my decision making about how I look. Yet, I can read your work on fashion, and non-fashion, and really find my own understanding and my own world in there.
M.Y.B.:
This sort of idea, where you ask “can something be reduced to”–I guess, in philosophical terms–“a being” (here is the baggage again), a “something”–is, in a way, asking about ends. Is there a conclusive, true platonic idea at the center of something that can't be reduced away? It’s an interesting way to look at art, or media or experience because, you know, in music you might say that there's an irreducible element of the pulse, but then obviously there are 20th century composers who tried to fight against the pulse and create musical forms which didn't engage with it. With dance, you might say that the key element is movement or, you know, kinesthetic sensation, but there are dancers and performers who sort of play with non-movement in a way that's very similar. And in fashion, you might say that the irreducible form is the human body. But I think what is interesting about fashion, and its uniqueness in the economic world, is that it is almost the poster child for escaping the physical and entering a realm of pure information or pure image, which means that fashion is conceived of, designed and sold, without ever engaging with a body or ever being worn. Sometimes these fashion items aren't even intended to “properly” fit the body. Their purpose is often to be photographed as we just said in regards to Coachella outfits, but obviously the same applies to haute couture, too; these things which exist to be on the runway as images, and they're not meant to be consumed.
One of the most obvious examples is the Alexander McQueen performance that I mentioned in the book where, Shalom Harlow walks on the stage with a white dress, and these robotic arms spray paint over her. It really was very interesting. I was having a discussion about this with one of my primary advisors for this book, Libusha Kelly, and we were actually arguing about the meaning of this dress, or this image, this event, and it was striking us both as such an important thing to discuss. For her, it's about sexual violence, degradation and the assault on bodily autonomy, whereas I am seeing it as this dichotomy of ecstasy and the subsumption of life into technology. But our different interpretations were so image-based. I mean, neither of us will ever wear this dress, maybe no one is ever going to wear the dress again, as it's in a museum collection at the MET now, on display. Yet, in our minds, this… dress… was of vital importance to what fashion is today. Fashion, today, is talking about this particular dress. And in that sense, you get to the idea that fashion exists today as an information exchange. That dress was everything that fashion is in the contemporary moment. Fashion moments and ideas exist primarily as these images within information channels, they exist as the confluence of symbols.
So, this takes us to the idea of “non-fashion”. If fashion is this a) perpetual change, b) the paying attention to these information channels, c) the confluence of symbols, then “non-fashion” is the attempt to constantly be wary of the sites which might have information, or signaling capacity, in them, in order to resist or negate it. Non-fashion begins as the rejection or disruption of meaning, a fashion which doesn't generate any sort of discussion. One of the examples I could give involves discourse on women’s fashion forums, or on TikTok, Facebook or Reddit, and so on. Take, for example, the idea of the demure and fashionable work adult, which plays off of this idea that, as a woman, you shouldn’t dress provocatively, or dress for attention, whatever that might entail. It goes without saying that there is misogyny at play here, and no shortage of internalized misogyny. To be an economic agent, women are supposed to negate all the symbology and meaning-generation that might come from charged feminine fashion. You're supposed to dress in a way that generates no discussion, no thoughts, no meaning, a perpetual demureness at the center of nothing.
C.E.:
Going back to what you said about trying, and failing, to keep this book from getting too philosophical. I have to say, I’m glad that you did “fail”, as the theory of non-fashion which you introduce in Empires Over Skin is, the way I see it, really valuable and worth exploring philosophical. It’s also a key part of the book, and your way of thinking, that situates you within the world of Becoming Press. You never mentioned to me that you were planning to go into this, and honestly when I saw the chapter title “non-fashion”, I was really enthused. For those who don’t know, I had a mentor and comrade who ran a publishing project called “non”, a signifier that I hope to carry in honour of my teacher. I find, from my background in philosophy, your concept of non-fashion highly intuitive, and I would like to get your take on this.
At risk of collapse, I could jump-off, as you would say, from a more obscure name, one Francois Laurelle. Francois, as I call him, coined the term “non-philosophy”, and for me, he's the person that I think of, and whose concept of “non” is the one I tend to orbit, and so this is how I see non-fashion from his perspective. Non-philosophy in Laruelle’s work does not mean “not-philosophical” or “unphilosophical”, if anything its the opposite. Laruelle is critiquing the way hegemonic social conditions have pushed philosophy over its mark, and in order to attempt to restore the balance in philosophical discourse, he names his own philosophy “non-philosophy” to distinguish it from “philosophy”. Non-philosophy is still philosophy, just not philosophy-philosophy, or, as he would perhaps say, the Capital-form of Thought. So when I get to ”non-fashion”, I would assume that it is still very much a form of fashion. Would you agree up to here? Would you recognize your “non-fashion” in my initial interpretation of it?
M.Y.B.:
Laruelle is sort of an interesting place to start the jump-off, because I'm not too familiar with him, but I understand, you know, one of his primary interests is the very jumping-off point of a philosophical gesture, right? He has a lot of interest in where the initial binaries come from and where the initial decisions and inscriptions come from. For me, the jumping-off point is Marc Auge's book Non-Places, where he talks about the idea of “a place” in anthropology, as, you know, a place that contains historical, symbolic or social meaning, and the “non-place” is a place that exists for purely functional reasons and has identity or symbolic meaning, as such. So when you think of a non-place, like airports or hospitals, the best they could ever be is a purely functional place. You go there to get through them, and achieve your end of getting on a plane or getting to the doctor, so any form of architectural or cultural complexity would simply make them more difficult or less functional. In that sense, these places and non-places are a gesture back to the beginning, the initial binary being established. So I do think there's a through line to Laruelle, because the “non-place” only exists in juxtaposition to the idea of “the place” to begin with, and as a concept which arrives from your original schism. If you suggest that there are places with “meanings”, then there could always be places with “non-meanings”.
In that way fashion leads to non-fashion. If you create a way of dressing which is always perpetually generating meaning, then there will be an attempt to negate it to be non-meaning. However, because meaning is, as we talked earlier, always being generated by negativity, you are always creating new sources of meaning, new places of meaning, and new fashions, and so non-fashion must constantly adapt. One of the great examples of this comes from a book by Anouchka Grose, which talks about the “Dad of the 1970s” versus the “Dad of the 2000s”. Both of them tell you “I'm not interested in fashion.” But if you compare their outfits you'll see almost no similarity, the 1970s Dad is probably wearing a thick sweater made of heavy-knit wool and corduroy jeans, and the 2000s Dad is wearing a set of cheap khakis and collared-shirt, maybe a t-shirt underneath. And the lack of similarity between them gestures to the fact that they're constantly trying to negate fashion. They want to dress in a way that's unremarkable and undistinguishable. But to do that, they have to constantly meet fashion at its own terms, because if you're dressed in the 1970s Dad apparel now, you'd stick out as quite a fashionable or “anti-fashion-able” kind of person. You constantly have to know where the sites of meaning are and counter them. Wearing cargo shorts at a specific length is not fashionable, let’s say, but if you get very, very short cargo shorts, all of a sudden it takes on this very specific and intentional meaning, compared to if you were to wear slightly longer cargo pants which extend just beyond the knee and so start to look like capris. All of a sudden you're not the average, everyday man, now you're making some sort of commentary on gender or performing something, because you're wearing something so provocatively feminine.
C.E.:
Yeah, I totally see the through line between the “non-place” of Mark Auge and Laruelle, especially because what you're talking about now is effectively the idea that, like, by tracking the change that you see in, let's say, “male coworker fashion” over the decades, there is the same kind of perpetual change all the same. So even though there is a kind of attempt by these people to throw-off fashion, or an attempt to negate fashions, but by being unfashionable... in order to keep up with something that constantly changes, you have to be paying a lot of attention to it. Because it's literally moving on every time you look away.
I don't know if it's a good moment, but there's always this sort of amazing anecdote that I find a kind of jewel of Jean Baudrillard’s theoretical work, and of course, I don't remember exactly which book it was in, but you can definitely find where I derived this idea from in Victoria Grace's book Baudrillard’s Challenge. Just to clue anyone in, Baudrillard is another media theorist or philosopher, or non-philosopher, if you like, who was active in the same period as Jacques Lacan, who is himself famous for the saying La femme n’existe pas! — “the woman does not exist”. In contrast to this, Baudrillard responds, “well, actually, if anything, men don't exist…” and his reasoning is that, if “man” places itself in opposition to everything else, asserting itself as the positive end of the dualism, well, the “everything else” which is retroactively called “woman” is really an attempt to identify, to name, the indeterminate Real itself, which is impossible. In order for “man” to maintain its opposition to “woman” which is in constant flux, man must struggle—I think Baudrillard uses an erectile dysfunction pun at some—against the temptation to let go, and, effectively, become woman (again), and in doing so, dispelling the binary.
I can see a through-line between this analysis and the idea of male coworker fashion as an attempt to negate and resist fashion, especially women’s fashion. Women’s fashion, so to speak, changes so much that Men’s fashion either has to “keep up” or it becomes trapped in a very limited range of acceptable forms. Between this, Baudrillard and Laruelle, I can really see the value of this theory of non-fashion. At one point, my instagram name was “the end of men’s fashion”, I for one feel devastated by Men’s fashion, and the memories I have of going to look for sneakers at the store, going to the Men’s section, and feeling repelled by everything I saw. I remember seeing baby pink Air Max once, and how sad I felt that I couldn’t go over to the Women’s shoe section and buy the shoes I actually wanted. I’m “invested”, so to speak, in seeing men’s fashion change… I remember the day I saw the first male ASOS model with silver nail polish—silver nail polish was my thing for years. I’d never seen anyone “like me” on a commercial fashion website. I can rationalize now that my phobia of non-chalance is, in part, connected to my distaste for what I feel is dishonest. Keeping up the non-chalance is hard work, making the whole performance disingenuous. I wasn’t allowed to elaborate on my look, under the pretext that men don’t put effort into that, but this was always said through gritted teeth.
I was so happy to find this idea within Baudrillard’s work, because it kind of took my notion of performativity in Judith Butler’s work and became a powerful image of “male performativity”. A kind of non-performativity, a great deal of effort to act disinterested. Sorry for this elaboration, but I can finish, at least, on something funny, because, and I think I’ve told you this joke already, but this idea of the performative male is somehow moot. All males are performative, performance is what it means to be male.
M.Y.B.:
First things first, I had a funny thought going back to your Baudrillard thing, which is that they should do a game show for Baudrillard scholars, where they put up a quote and you have to say what book it's from, because every Baudrillard book is the same book written slightly different. I swear. I've read 15 Baudrillard books and I couldn't tell you what part is from what any of them are. If you were to read something from America, which is extensively about America, and it's like any quote of this could really come from The Gulfway Did Not Take Place, or The Transparency of Evil, all what an interesting writer in the sense that you could write the same book so many times and still be interesting, but Baudrillard aside, I do think that there is something to what you're saying.
Going back to negation if you look to the hypermasculine forms on social media, such as Andrew Tate or Asmond Golds, or whoever else. They generate most of their meaning of what it means to be a man through negation. Most of Andrew Tate’s posts on Twitter/X are “men don't do this”, and “men don't do that”. It's constantly the creation of an other which requires their existence. There's never a positive assertion of what men do other than in juxtaposition to other kinds of things, which is a very interesting position to be in, because that binarism is, I guess, fundamental to the idea of difference to begin with.
If we turn to another of your French boys like Jacques Derrida, you know fashion is a rather unique binarism, or at least, in its contemporary mode has developed in an interesting, unexpected way, because the binarism at the heart of fashion really used to be “the rich vs. the poor”, you know, the rich were fashionable, and that existed as a binarism, against the poor (and unfashionable). Your extensive collection of silks and fine garments existed to differentiate you from the practical garments of the peasantry. But now, because it's so easy to make complicated garments cheaply because of primitive accumulation and the total subjugation of the third world, a new dichotomy has arisen, between the individual and the other, that is, the individual vs society. There is the demand to perpetually restate your individuality by separating yourself from the other.
Andrew Tate, for example, release a new season of clothing every three-weeks, which is new, and most up-to-date description of masculinity. Oh, “masculinity does this now.” It's laughable. When I think about it, I can even remember that there is an old clip of Andrew Tate before he became famous, in which he is saying that “if men didn't drink sparkling water, they're not real men.” Which is so funny because I think now he is saying the exact opposite, and among men it is now believed that drinking still water is more masculine. It’s just skinny jeans vs. baggy jeans. They're talking about what kind of little beverage they like to drink, and yet, somehow, it’s just the new fashion statement for what it means to be masculine.
C.E.:
Sorry—I'm laughin; it’s all such a vivid and desperately sad situation, which I have clearly attempted to distance myself from. Luckily I know very little about these characters—
M.Y.B.:
You have to get your screen time up. Clearly.
C.E.:
Well. I assure you, I have hella screen time, but I’m watching—anyway. There is not too much time left, and there is still one more leap I am hoping to make if you’ll humour me. I'm not sure I've done the best job of guiding us to this point, but, it ties back into what we've been saying about non-fashion, as well as this idea of constant change, and then also with what I was saying about music, musical conditions, and “approximations of the real”. Perhaps I can say that, if I once thought, as Nietzsche did, that “music best approximates the eternal return”, would you say that fashion is a “better approximation”?
M.Y.B.:
What is very interesting is, when you think of “approximations of the real”, whether it's through science, or, as you say, if you imagine music as an “approximation” of some non-conscious experience of “things-in-themselves”—people do seem to treat music as an intense psychological experience, and I do think each of these things, music, art, dance, and so on, carry a trace of the real in them, as you might think of it, but this is partly because the “real” is experienced through the five senses, or six if you count the kinesthetic sense. The eyes, the ears, the sensation of your kinesthetic body moving, each of these appeal to a sense of the thing-in-itself in any given sense. So I don't tend to think of them as different in that sense. I tend to think of music, fashion and art as sort of a continuous stream of different ways of expressing these kinds of things, which ties into how a lot of fashion designers think of themselves, which is not necessarily trapped within the medium of fashion, but as opposed to that sort of blending multiple modalities.
I can elaborate on this through the example of, say, Jun Takahashi, the creative director of UnderCover, who one of my favorite designers, and goes by the credo “we don't make clothes, we make noise” because he thinks of himself in the lineage of musicians and expressing some sort of existential and intense feelings and political expression through clothes, the same way that punk bands did. And then you go to people like John Galliano or Yohji Yamamoto. They situate themselves in the lineage of visual artists and, you know, cultural figures. I think music and dance and other mediums are perhaps more recessed by their belief that these other things must be separate. They think of themselves as “I am a musician”, whereas fashion designers have approached it in a more multimodal sense. In this sense they allow themselves this becoming-in-renewal which is really true to the human experience of being a creative or expressive person. Fashion designers in this sense, I think, have maybe superseded other people to get more intense expressions of themselves. You look at Alexander McQueen, he thought of himself as a fashion designer, but also a director, a performance artist, a spectacle, a living artistic expression, in the same way that we might also attribute to Nietzsche, another who thought of himself as a medium of expression, that he himself was the becoming. I'm not sure that I can think of too many musicians who really view the world like that.
C.E.:
I think because we're almost finished with the time, I propose that we try to wrap up here. While I agree with your answer, in the last question I was thinking about whether we could close on some sort of elaboration on the subtitle, as the way it is written foregrounds the verb, to fashion, to fashion something, to bring something forth. I was, in a way, trying to tempt you towards the area of cosmotechnics, world-building and externalization.
M.Y.B.:
First of all, the document that contains all the possible variations of the title and subtitle of this book could be another book of its own. There really was, if you recall, a point where I had 100 titles, and I was handing people a spreadsheet to look at and select the one they liked most. At one point the book was going to be called “Will We Be Beautiful?”, but I couldn’t shake the thought of people saying, “damn, why is she always asking questions?”, so this option became the title of the final chapter. Title aside, the subtitle was perhaps even more difficult because I wanted to communicate what the book was in a very literal way. Where the title is able to be metaphorical and poetic, and where a title can be a bit more of a non-sequitur, the subtitle had to be more illustrative. As you know, we eventually landed on “how we fashioned our world”, and I can try to summarize why the verb “fashioning” is interesting to me, and how it relates to the book overall.
When you think of fashion, in the way that I have discussed in the book, it really begins in the industrial revolution. There's a quote from Engels in the book where he says “the Industrial revolution happened because we wanted to make cotton garments.” If you want to think in terms of world-building, I think this is an interesting place to begin. The very world that we live in, the buildings, the society, and so on, is a world designed and structured for the creation of fashion, as if established specifically for fashion to emerge. I live in a high rise skyscraper, something which is only really possible through the technological revolutions that first existed to spin cotton, and to harvest it more efficiently. All of these things sort of extend from our clothing and how we want to represent and exist in a social experience.
So when we say fashion, we are very much talking about ourselves, and really to the point of the whole book, more than expressing anything about ourselves, per se, when wearing clothes and dressing ourselves, we rather express something about everyone else, all of society and the position we take within it. Every piece of clothing you wear is a reflection of everyone you've ever met and everything you've ever done, and in that sense, and that sense only, I could say that you fashion yourself, and you make your gesture towards fashioning the world.