It's no secret that fashion has been one of the most influential phenomena on Western civilization since the Renaissance. It has pervaded a significant number of modern human activities and has become largely "second nature." Therefore, understanding fashion will contribute to our understanding of ourselves and our behavior. However, philosophers throughout the ages have ignored the issue of fashion, despite its importance. This may have been due to the prevailing belief that fashion, which seemed to them at the time to be the most superficial phenomenon, was not a subject of study that could rise to the level of a "deep" field of knowledge such as philosophy. However, if philosophy is a field concerned with achieving self-understanding, and if fashion is—and in fact remains—a phenomenon as influential as I claim here, then it must be considered a subject of philosophical study.