The Sword and the Shaving Brush
Towards a Biblical understanding of fashion
By Timothy Bartel
Part IX – Look Good and Sin Not
How does one take the body-imaging activity of clothing into consideration when choosing clothes to wear? A wise man, when asked by a student about clothing, once said: “find what looks good on you and wear it.” This is both the best advice I have ever heard about clothing, and the most dangerous. It is good advice because it takes seriously the fact that fashion images body, and when imaged successfully, the body is revealed as attractive. Clothing does not hide a body behind its cloth, but draws the qualities of the human form in its fabric for the world to see. Why would such a mentality be dangerous? Most basically, the well-clothed human is dangerously attractive. As mentioned above it is the well dressed who are considered the most attractive of the young, and not just because the young are shallow. The shallow are awed by beautiful art, yet stop at mere admiration of the medium. They are not wrong that the medium images forth beautifully, yet they are wrong to think that it is only the medium that holds beauty. They forget, as Sayers might say, the Word in awe of the flesh and so in ignorance undo incarnation. They forget that the body is more than clothing.
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