Clothing... beyond simple protection from the elements clothing is convention, propriety, power, clothing is societies' first mandate of compliance. To walk fully nude in a major city is to rebut all of those things, deny them traction on your life, to walk fully nude is to set yourself above or beside or beyond the conventions that demand we be covered in the company of our fellows. It is a consummately bold thing to do.
Clothing... is the barrier that defeats the primal troop, breaks the feedback loops of deepest identification and empathy within the species. Clothing is isolation at the instinctive level. To walk through a major city partially nude, exposed, simply screams the loneliness of life deprived of the comfort found in the certainty of the primal troop, it is to set yourself an emotional beggar pleading for alms, pleading for any recognition of the common species. To walk a major city partially nude is a condemnation of society, an impeachment of societies' ability to provide the support which makes life worth living regardless of that societies ability to provide that which makes it possible to continue on in isolation. To walk a major city partially nude is a defeated thing, a surrender to societies siege of the soul.
Clothing... is now as was then the flag of the modern collective entities that comprise our societies when they did battle with the primal arrangements of life, fighting for recognition to support their existence. The legends of Olympus make a fine analogy for the literal truth of mankind: the collective entities, the Olympians, who wrested control of the world from the Titan's of the instinctive, the primal, who actually created the species which is and who are the corporeal cells of the collective entities presence. There was a time when a fashion statement was not simply a turn of phrase indicating a vector and tangent of social compliance, it was a most literal statement of allegiance at levels well below the political.
So, clothing is a sign of an allegiance, not to humanity as a whole, but to some group or idea which separates its adherents from others. Yeah, that sounds about right. But when one strips away the particular allegiance and dares to walk naked without shame in everyone's sight, most other humans withdraw their allegiance from the naked one. Our divisions are so deep that many folks see them as defining us--rather than as what they are, boxes and chains and jails for our souls.
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