FASHION PLATE: A GOTHAM BOOK EVENT and night of fashion, philosophy, and fine dining

The great Valerie Steele (left) in conversation with author Gwenda-lin Grewal about her groundbreaking book Fashion | Sense at our March 2024 Book and Fashion event.

By Cassandra Csencsitz
Photos by JD Urban @jdurban_photography

“Once, when I was a graduate student at Yale, a history professor asked me about my dissertation. ‘I'm writing about fashion,’ I said.

‘That's interesting. Italian or German?’

It took me a couple of minutes, as thoughts of Armani flashed through my mind, but finally I realized what he meant. ‘Not fascism,’ I said. ‘Fashion. As in Paris.

‘Oh.’ There was a long silence, and then, without another word, he turned and walked away.

—From “The F-word” by Valerie Steele

Our first book event of 2024 was also our first-ever fashion show, a format Gotham seemed destined for with the nave-inspired aisle that has carried so many processions over our 40 years. A très chic throng was drawn by Director/Chief Curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, Valerie Steele, and author Gwenda-lin Grewal, Onassis Lecturer in Ancient Greek Thought and Language at The New School—a fashion plate in her own right. They filled our room with beauty and brainpower in a way that felt tailor-made for Gotham today: a place where modern fine dining offers the sensory and cerebral pleasures of haute cuisine alongside elevated service and an open, grand ambiance that is rare in the current vogue.

The book behind our coming together had piqued my interest since scholar-customer and friend, NYU’s Dr. Philip Mitsis, suggested it while planning our Diogenes book event earlier in the year. Grewal’s title Fashion | Sense: On Philosophy and Fashion, which was hailed by Salman Rushdie as a “brilliant meditation…on clothing as disguise, revelation, acquiescence, transformation, identity, and second self, as the ‘bodies we put on,’” tackles a tension that has long preoccupied me as the student of philosophy and veteran of the beauty industry that I am. I too have long wondered why the worlds of style and substance often feel so polarized, mutually suspicious, even spiteful.

This deceptively superficial war inspired our event name: “Strange Hostility: The Curious Enmity Between Fashion and Philosophy.”

Fashionistas and bibliophiles skirt Gotham’s famous 40-foot bar, interacting with models clad in Risen Division jumpsuits and Worth & Worth hats.

Andrea Lauer of Risen Division created this trop chic 12th Street window display.

While Grewal does not pretend to mend the rift—or to even want to—her book’s raison d’être seems to be a dressing down of philosophy’s own unexamined vanity. Thirty years earlier Steele set the stage with her famed 1991 article for Lingua Franca, “The F-word,” in which she lays bare the poor logic behind the mind-body problem of fashion wherein academics view fashion as airheaded, frivolous, even promiscuous. In doing so Steele exposes their unintended consequence as the worst of conformists, enemies of their own free thoughts.

Grewal takes the body-phobia deeper—six feet under to be exact. Might the revulsion of fashion be the philosopher’s brand of hypochondria? Anything material, let alone actually attached to the body, positively reeks of mortality. Thoughts, on the other hand, if not eternal, are imperishable. Through this lens the philosopher’s prejudice becomes emotional, flying in the face of almighty Logic, their greatest point of pride.

Together Grewal and Steele seem to be asking the academy to get over itself and to get real. Philosophy and fashion emerge more alike than different in their quest to adorn the human condition; philosophy decorates life with inquiry and meaning, just as fashion seeks to communicate the interior self to the outside world, to elevate existence from the outside in.

However heady some of this may sound, Steele and Grewal’s evident depth of knowledge, combined with their charm and ready laughs, held us rapt and made for a speedy hour of “edutainment” before we turned to the fashion portion of the night.

To complement Grewal’s book, I had envisioned a fashion-immersive experience and ran straight to Andrea Lauer, a protean costume and set designer whose work can be found from Broadway, to her line of sustainable jumpsuits, Risen Division, to the lights that sail over Gotham. With suits named for trailblazers like Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde, Andrea’s brand embodied the mind-body dialectic at hand, while her cast of models and actors turned Gotham into a visual feast. The jumpsuited troupe was crowned by Worth & Worth hats by Orlando Palacios, a friend of the author, while finishing touches were provided by SteamLine Luggage’s new range of sustainable Italian-made accessories along with the skinny ties of Monsieur Luxe Privé by PingPong Khumwan.

It was a consummate thrill for me to see Gotham filled with intellectual glamour, to unite worlds that should rightly enhance rather than preclude each other. And while I have experienced the Steele-Grewal brand of academic anti-style, my own preoccupation about this “curious enmity” has been from the other side of the aisle.

Over my decade-plus as a writer in the cosmetics industry, beauty’s rejection of intellectualism was a pain point that inspired me to double down on the vital power of the liberal arts. On the fashion side of things, I encountered a knee-jerk revulsion of art and high culture, as if the liberal arts were a pointless private club nobody cool would even want to be in. From college-educated managers who’d never heard of Hamlet to assistants who “instructed” me that punctuation didn’t apply to social media, my culture wars were the photo negative of Grewal’s experience in the unkempt philosophical circles. The snobbery of the impeccably dressed was a dismissal of intellectualism as uncool, irrelevant, in a sense, outmoded.

Food for thought

So who’s more right? As in most cases, the rub lies in extremes, and there are plenty of arguments to be made on both sides. Time and money being limited, the philosopher will prioritize work over looks. And god knows you don’t need to know Hamlet or punctuation to succeed in life. Grewal might reach bedrock when she says,

“Take the person who wears the same outfit everyday: the proverbial jeans and hoodie…its nondescript character proclaims either ‘don’t look at me’ or ‘don’t look at my look.’ It is either a protest or a disappearing act, but what it cannot be is not a choice.”

To be clothed at all is to say something and, moreover, offer an immediate psychoanalysis. Nowhere is this more amusingly demonstrated than when the Devil Wears Prada’s Miranda skewers Andie, worth quoting at length, for making the grave error of mistaking aesthetic disregard for depth:

ANDY: It’s just that both of those belts look exactly the same to me. But I’m still learning about this stuff…

MIRANDA: This… “stuff”? Oh, okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you.

You… go to your closet, and you select… I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back, but what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean.

You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that, in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns, and then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent, wasn’t it?… who showed cerulean military jackets…And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.

However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room… from a pile of “stuff.”

If only defenders of the liberal arts could have our own Miranda!

The end of Grewal’s foreword reads:

“But again, dear reader, beware of judging my looks too quickly. I am not writing a ‘philosophy of fashion,’ but rather, illustrating a parallel between ‘philosophy and fashion.’ Philosophy has missed something in its sidelining of fashion—that conspicuous nothing, that egregious idling, that poetic power in which philosophy itself also partakes. Fashion is no small lacuna in philosophy’s wheelhouse, nor is it merely a meaningless member of a larger set. The plot of this book is driven by the thought that our coverings reveal truths about ourselves and the cosmos we inhabit—not only our clothes, but also our thoughts and the fashion in which we style them. Fashion is somehow everything.”

She has me convinced. Fashion is, in a word, psychology, and psychology, if not everything, seems to be the main event on this mortal coil. It is an honor to be uniting people and ideas at Gotham where I am dedicated to glamorizing great books to the mutual benefit of fashion and philosophy.

—Cassandra Csencsitz

*I covered the stage adaptation of the famous 2006 movie for American Theatre magazine during its world-premiere run in Chicago in 2022. In thrilling news, it is making its way to Broadway in 2025 via London in 2024 with music by Elton John, lyrics by Shaina Taub, a book by Kate Wetherhead, and starring Vanessa Williams as Miranda Priestly. Fasten your Hermes belts!