Clothing, style and fashion are humankind's answer to the bling in birds; birds which, however colorful, have no change of clothing, or one at most in a whole year! And no chance in hell to compete.
And yet:
How many years of a Civilizational (not financial or economic) Meltdown, would it take humankind to return to the cowhide and sheepskin of yesteryear, with bemused birds watching all the while?
So, who's smarter now?
A decade and a half ago, Cecil Helman suggested, in his book titled Culture, Health and Illness, that humans have a set of "symbolic skins" which, enveloped within a series of concentric circles or "bubbles" of space and distance, help to construct, and reconstruct, the boundaries of the biological body of any one individual. There were five such skins, he indicated: Clothing, houses, cars, urban or suburban outer limits, and nation-state boundaries. And there were four circles of space and distance: Intimate, personal, social and public distance.
The main point I want to make here in regard to Helman's idea of clothing as skin, though, is that to equate clothing with skin is to mix oranges and apples, and to fumble the insight (which is both in our possession and stares us in the face) loaded in the age-old phrase: "birds of a feather".
Remember, birds have both skin and feather. Humans have skin and a relative paucity of hair, feather's cousin. Clothing, even in the form of cowhide and sheepskin, plus anything else besides, is more feather than skin -- indeed, simply feather rather than skin. So, arising from all the foregoing, the only other and final point I want to make, and which was obvious from the very start, is that clothing is humankind's pale imitation of, and answer to, birds' feathers. Our only advantage, while summer and tropical weather last and spinning wheels spin, we can all adorn our bodies, as Africa for so long has, any which way we want -- as Fisher's pictures demonstrated with such great effect.
University of Nairobi
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