Think back to when you were a kid. The games you played could be all about following rules, but there were other times when you or your friends made up the rules as you were playing. Now which of these two scenarios remind you the most of fashion? There’s no obvious answer to this.
In the philosophy of play, one definitionof what it means to play is about inventing rules and obstacles that make whatever it is you are doing less instrumental or efficient. Any activity can therefore be turned into a game by adding some arbitrary rule. As philosopher Bernard Suits puts it: “Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”
We started this issue of Bon wanting to see whether fashion needed a bit more playfulness. But now I can’t help thinking fashion, inits essence, is play. Fashion isn’t efficient or instrumental, even though clothes are. Instead, it really is all about unnecessary obstacles – and if the goal is protection or warmth, fashion will throw up some gratuitous ideas to take our focus off of any practicalities. This is why we react as the fashion industry becomes more and more part of the global economic system. Efficiency is now key, and it just doesn’t seem like fashion to us anymore.
Professional sports present a dilemma to philosophers of play because the attitude ofthe athletes seems far away from the attitude associated with non-professional play – even though the activity is the same. So perhaps professional football isn’t play, since theplayers don’t treat football as an end in itself.Is something similar going on in fashion?As fashion becomes more and more corporate, designers, stylists and photographers morph into efficient deliverers rather than playful creatives. In one way it still looks like fashion, but from another perspective somethinghas changed.
There are designers who resist this, andin this issue, we look at some of their stories. Jean Paul Gaultier, whose whole style seemsto be all about a playful attitude, shut downhis ready-to-wear line but still keeps theflame alive with haute couture. Walter Van Beirendonck, on the other hand, found thatit was only when he decided not to care about being commercial that his brand really tookoff. Ann-Sofie Back decided to go on holiday instead of putting on a runway show, proving that there are many ways to protest againstthe need for speed in fashion today. Then there
is the inimitable Karl Lagerfeld, who glides through it all, seemingly unaffected. Perhaps that is down to the fact that he makes it seem so much like play?

None of this really changes the fact that for everyone who wears rather than creates it, fashion is still, at its very core, play. When people are questioning the need for fashion, they are questioning the need for play. I guess they do this because they believe that fashion is capitalism in its truest state: wasteful and highly commercial. But if fashion as a personal activity is play, then it is also anti-efficient. And that sounds more like resistance to the edicts of capitalism than an embracing of them.

Daniel Björk, London, January 2016