We move through the world dressed — every day, without much thought, we make dozens of small decisions about how visible we want to be. What to wear on top, what to leave off, what to match and what to let clash. Most of these choices happen so automatically we don't register them as choices at all.

Georg Simmel, writing in 1904, noticed something quietly radical about this: clothing isn't just self-expression. It's a way of managing attention itself — how much of it we want, how much we can bear, and where the line falls between disappearing into a crowd and standing apart from it. He wrote that following convention makes us invisible — "its acceptance by any one individual does not call attention to him" — while even a small departure from it is "immediately noticed." Attention, in other words, isn't something that just happens to us. We're constantly, quietly negotiating for it, or negotiating our way out of it 

Text: FASHION, Georg Simmel 1904

Date: Sunday, September 27 at 2pm

Location: Ames Family Atrium at the Cleveland Museum of Art  with Aditi & Rob

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