In Search of Unintentional Truth

Abstract

Fashion in the form of a dialectical image is to be redeemed from the realm of phenomena, for it exposes truth that originally belongs to the sphere of Plato’s Forms or Ideas, which is nothing but a Platonic redemption, saving phenomena and the representation of Ideas at the same time. Fashion as a dialectical image finds its strongest vindication when it is interpreted as the representation of nowtime (Jetztzeit), catching the dialectic at a standstill, in which the mediations between the individual and the collective and between what has been and what is now are crystallized in a lightening flash. The main thrust of this argument hinges upon Walter Benjamin’s epistemology, which distances truth from knowledge, calling upon us to hark back to pre-Kantian philosophies.