Cosmetics: Carter on Clothing and Purpose in Animals, Humans, and Machines

This paper explores dress historian Michael Carter’s reading of evolutionary theories of clothing. A large part of Carter’s work is concerned with questioning any functional account of clothing; he is more interested in the destiny of the superfluous, the impractical, the excessive. This interest in the “useless,” the counter-evolutionary, is the source of Carter’s critique of clothing as communication as it appears in Barthes. As ideas of adornment and decoration are well-established paths to follow in dress studies, I’d like instead to rezone them via Carter’s excursions through Darwinism—for Carter, clothing is a trans-species practice, common to fauna and flora, so to speak, not just humans—and so through questions of purpose, adaptation, and variety in material culture; above all, the question of what things are “for.” Carter’s work has much to say about the “purpose” (or lack thereof) in our material modelling of the world, what he calls “cosmetics.” Notions of purpose and adaptation in 19th Century evolutionary discourse were also used to draw parallels between biological and artificial (machine) “life.” As the borders between the natural and the artificial continue to blur, these parallels and Carter’s take on them provide insights into the current debate around generative AI creativity. Can we speak of machine ornament, machine cosmetics?