In "WSJ Magazine" (November 1912), we find a photograph ad for Brunello Cucinelli, the Italian clothing design and manufacturing house. The ad photo pictures an international collection of five young people, walking toward the camera in a line along the elevated pedestrian walkway. The walkway stretched in the background distance toward the archaeological relic of a Medieval hilltop village, Bagnoregio. The formal and casually formal garments they are wearing are the subject of the advertisement.
The models are attractive: two young men - one black, looking down toward his feet as if selecting his step with care, with closely cropped hair wearing brown outer garments, one European white with a five-day shave moustache, his eyes looking to his right, wearing a earth pebble double breasted jacked with white button down shirt and brown tie and chocolate brown slacks. Three young women: one European white with shoulder length black hair, a white open weave sweater, and dust colored slacks, one American white, red lipstick, light brunette hair, apparently shoulder length, swept over her back, one Chinese, with dark black hair framing her intense face, a white overcoat clinched at the waist with a brown belt, and wearing a gray feathery thigh high skirt, her legs in body stocking.
The only text for this advertise is a line, an English translation of Hegel's description of the state from his Philosophy of Right. "The State is the actuality of the ethical idea."
The full Hegelian paragraph containing the text is:
"The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea. It is ethical mind qua the substantial will manifest and revealed to itself, knowing and thinking itself, accomplishing what it knows and in so far as it knows it. The state exists immediately in custom, mediately in individual self-consciousness, knowledge, and activity, while self-consciousness in virtue of its sentiment towards the state, finds in the state, as its essence and the end-product of its activity, its substantive freedom."
I gloss this philosophy this way: Freedom is the ultimate ethical idea, toward which history moves. The (political) state is the material embodiment of that idea, self-consciousness of the individual realizing itself, (I suppose) much as a sculpture is the material embodiment of the sculptor's self-consciousness, representing his freedom of expression.
In the ad, it is not the political state that the ad is talking about. Rather, the text references the individual who creates her/himself as a substantive embodiment of their idea of themselves in an act of freedom. Fashioning her/himself out of fashion. So the impermanent and transitory - fashion - is the embodiment of the permanent ideal - freedom.
To which I must say, young people, choose your political leaders more carefully than your clothes, or your embodiment of yourself will be the actualization of the collective created by party rulers. For in the real world, the State has become most notably the embodiment of collective destruction of the individual's freedom.
Or, see the design company's website.
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