Listening to philosopher Emanuele Coccia speak, you’d think he belongs more in a Voltaire play, or perhaps a chiaroscuro Renaissance painting, than in modern life. But his Instagram shows him in oversized glasses, and features cars, computer keyboards and other newfangled contraptions that place him firmly in the 21st century.  

A doctor of medieval philosophy, Coccia has more recently focused on the theory of fashion. He’s produced a photo book with the Dutch fashion photographer Viviane Sassen, and is currently working on another with Alessandro Michele, his friend and the creative director of Gucci. Where are the intersections between his two worlds? 

Stephanie d’Arc Taylor: What is philosophy to you? 

Emanuele Coccia: Etymologically, the word philosophy contains the idea that knowledge is not produced by a school but by love, by passion. It’s strange to look at the collection of texts we consider philosophy. You have literary books like Plato or treatises on economics like Marx or poems like Lucretius. The form of expression is constantly changing. The only way to define philosophy is that it’s a knowledge that is different from others because of the way it arises. You’re so obsessed by the desire to know something and the love for something, that the knowledge you acquire doesn’t belong to you anymore. Like a lover doesn’t belong just to themselves anymore, but also to their lover. Philosophy is knowledge under the power of love. It’s a New Age definition, maybe, but it’s the only possibility. 

SDT: What is art? 

EC: In antiquity, there was a division of activities we now know as art. The liberal arts were the technology of freedom. The people who partook didn’t have to work to survive. These were activities that were supposed to intensify your freedom. The other activities—painting, theater, sculpture—were called the mechanical arts and were done by slaves. These arts were not allowed to be practiced by free men until the Renaissance. At that point, some artists claimed that by manipulating matter physically you can, in a way, intensify your freedom. The definition of art is exactly that. 

SDT: What drew you to the fashion world?

EC: When I moved to France for the first time, I became close friends with Azzedine Alaïa and Carla Sozzani, the sister of the former director of Vogue Italia. From there I came in contact with a lot of fashion designers and photographers, and this changed everything for me. In Europe for a long time fashion wasn’t considered an important part of culture. When I teach fashion classes at universities, people look at me as if I am stupid or frivolous. Nothing evokes a stronger emotion in me than a good catwalk. It’s animated artwork. Fashion is the laboratory of new moral identities. A garment is the most universal artifact that we produce. Everyone wears clothes all day every day. Everybody has this artifact to express their identities. Fashion is the space of self production.

SDT: What does it mean that humans are the only animals to wear clothes?

EC: Insects change their skins through metamorphosis. When a caterpillar changes into a butterfly, it’s also a form of fashion; evolution is a phenomenon that is very close to fashion. If you think of a peacock’s tail, the pattern has been chosen by the female, on the basis of an aesthetical judgment. 

SDT: Philosophically speaking, how does fashion describe the world? 

EC: Fashion doesn’t just describe the world, it also produces the world. It’s an impulse to change what you wear and simultaneously make comments on social norms. Every time we witness a new entry in fashion it means the world is now changed. Look what happened with the introduction of the miniskirt or the tuxedo jacket. It’s opening up a new possibility. In fashion you can’t just represent yourself, you have to change something every time, otherwise you’re just a sartorialist. Good designers forever change the way we look at our daily life. A garment is the first contact between us and the outer world.

Let’s take, for instance, Alessandro Michele, the director of Gucci. The very first collection he designed in 2015 was heralded as the first true gender fluidity in fashion. Consider the bow tie in that collection. Historically this is a very important tie: It’s supposed to be the tie that the mistress of Louis XIV took from the body of the king and put on herself. Michele produced shirts for men with that same tie. Through this he said now men are obliged to take the symbols of power from the feminine silhouette. This was the deconstruction of a centuries-old system.