Fashionising Philosophy: The Translation of Philosophical Texts into Fashion Campaigns

Abstract

This paper examines the translation of philosophical thought into contemporary fashion imagery, focusing on how philosophical texts are transformed into semiotic resources within luxury fashion campaigns. Drawing on Roland Barthes’ theory of fashion semiotics and Stuart Hall’s notion of trans-coding, the study conceptualizes this process not as faithful interpretation but as transformation, whereby philosophy is converted into visual, affective, and mythological forms. The analysis is situated within recent debates in fashion philosophy and cultural theory. Through two comparative case studies—Saint Laurent’s As Time Goes By campaign (2024) inspired by Marcel Proust, and Gucci’s Aria campaign (2021) referencing Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, Walter Benjamin, and Jean Baudrillard—the paper demonstrates how fashion mobilizes philosophy as symbolic capital. Saint Laurent translates Proustian temporality into a regime of restraint, slowness, and interiority, constructing philosophy as an atmosphere of intellectual elegance. Gucci, by contrast, stages philosophy as excess, citation, and desire, transforming theoretical texts into fetishized signs within a hyperreal visual economy. By integrating Barthes’ concepts of denotation, connotation, and myth with Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital, the paper argues that contemporary fashion does not merely borrow from philosophy but reshapes it into wearable mythologies. In doing so, fashion reveals both the power and the limits of philosophy’s circulation in image-driven consumer culture.