Otto Von Busch

Vital Vogue Otto Von Busch

- What if we understood fashion as a bioelectrical energy and as a form of flirting? - What if fashion is not so much about clothes, but primarily a cognitive interface between living organisms, hungry for connection and love? - How would such shift in perception change our approach to fashion and sustainability? The psychoanalyst, political theorist, biologist and pioneer of body therapies Wilhelm Reich framed a groundbreaking synthesis on the biosocial aspects of life. Reich never discussed fashion, but taking designerly inspiration from his work, this book argues fashion can be understood as a biological as much as social phenomenon; when fashion works at its best, we feel it in our bodies. The agency of fashion is not in the system, but in your body. Fashion is the organismic pleasure and excitement of growth and expansion, an energy sparkling with life, a form of biosocial flourishing, or more precisely: a vital vogue. In this book, von Busch reimagines fashion as an energy, a biosocial event of mutual flirting and growth, putting focus on fashion as a biological phenomenon and thus radically challenging more traditional perspectives in fashion studies. With this shift in perspective, also new approaches to sustainable fashion become apparent, that put the intensity of aliveness at the focus, beyond austerity or circular business-as-usual.(Second edition, October 2018)