The surfacing of the self: The clothing-ego

Abstract

There are many dimensions to the established importance of skin; cultural, sensory and visual, to name but a few. Here I want to address that importance as fundamentally a material one, which rests on the intimacy of skin with another material surface-that of clothing. In her evolutionary history of skin, anthropologist Nina Jablonski positions skin as our “face to the world” (2006, p. 7). In lived experience, clothing, intervening between body and world, serves as that foremost face.1 Far from being secondary, as the vernacular metaphor of the “second skin”2 would imply, clothing is primary to embodied experience: since the body is always a clothed body,3 the lived ego is always already a clothed ego. To speak of skins and egos, then, is to speak of, on and through clothing.