What’s So Bad About Immodesty?

The Sword and the Shaving Brush

Towards a Biblical understanding of fashion

By Timothy Bartel

Part VIII – What’s So Bad About Immodesty?

This incarnational approach can now be applied to the second problem of fashion, that of modesty. If clothing is not made to hide the body, but image it forth, then it seems that issues of morality and modesty may be used as a sort of frame for the art of fashion. They will be the boundaries of what may be imaged forth appropriately. God did not create clothing to hide the body, but to cover nakedness, which made man ashamed. Modesty might then be called that quality of dress and demeanor that seeks to minimize nakedness (and thus shame), while providing a frame for beauty and splendor of fashion. Immodesty is not so much immoral because skin is shown, but because it throws off the delicate balance of the image and the imaged. Immodesty is not just immoral; it is ugly.