ABSTRACT
Clothes can be treacherous companions, perhaps the more so because they touch us closely, because they touch our skin. Morality, as to clothes, means decency of covering, while ethics means the politics of exploitation. Martin Heidegger was not always happy in his own use of clothes: through the 1930 he increasingly dressed like a Bavarian peasant in a way that chimed with his National Socialist sympathies. When Titian painted Sacred and Profane Love, he represented sacred love by the beautiful bare body of an active-looking young woman, while profane love wears a fashionable dress, and has a stolid indoor look. Thorstein Veblen argued, in The Theory of the Leisure Class, that the principal purpose of those who bought expensive clothes was to show off their wealth by wasting it. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said, comparing man and woman in general one may say: woman would not have the genius for finery in general.
