Eco, U. (1995) “Lumbar Thought” in Faith in fakes : travels in hyperreality. London: Minerva.
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A garment that squeezes the testicles makes a man think differently. Women during menstruation; people suffering from orchitis, victims of hermorrhoids, urethritis, prostate and similar ailments know to what extent pressures or obstacles in the sacro-iliac area influence one’s mood and mental agility.
But the problem of my jeans led me to other observations. Not only did the garment impose a demeanour on me; by focusing my attention on demeanour, it obliged me to live towards the exterior world. It reduced, in other words, the exercise of my interior-ness.
I thought about the relationship between me and my pants, and the relationship between my pants and me and the society we lived in. I had achieved heteroconsciousness, that is to say, an epidermic self-awareness.
Women has been enslaved by fashion not only because, in obliging her to be attractive, to maintain an ethereal demeanor, to be pretty and stimulating, it made her a sex object, she has been enslaved chiefly because the clothing counselled for her forced her psychologically to live for the exterior.
the blue jeans that fashion today imposes on women are a trap of Domination; for they don’t free the body, but subject it to another label and imprison it in other armors that don’t seem to be armors because they apparently are not “feminine.”
A final reflection – in imposing an exterior demeanour, clothes are semiotic devices, machines for communicating. This was known, but there had been no attempt to illustrate the parallel with the syntactic structures of language, which, in the opinion of many people, influence our view of the world. The syntactic structures of fashion also influence our view of the world, and in a far more physical way than the consecutio tempomm or the existence of the subjunctive.
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