We will sometime soon return to dressing for the “outside” world, to adorning and beautifying ourselves. But things will not be the same, because we will not be the same.

Covid-19 grants each of us newly heightened awareness of our bodies: how they work, how we “wear” them in society. Such changes are culturally profound and will necessarily alter fashion. It behooves us to take them — and fashion — seriously.

While fashion has acquired more gravitas in recent years (entering university curriculums, for example), anti-fashion prejudice has a long history, intertwined with sexism and misogyny. Critics and philosophers have been deriding fashion for millenniums, using it as a symbol for every manner of human weakness: duplicity, depravity, narcissism, frivolity, greed — attributes also ascribed traditionally to women. Often, fashion becomes a kind of literary shorthand, a metaphor, for the failings of the female sex.

When Plato derided democracy as a form of government too reliant on easy promises, he likened it to fashion. In “The Republic,” he compares democracy to an “embroidered robe which is spangled with every manner of flower,” whose eye-catching colors appeal “to women and children” — something unmanly, in other words, which seduces immature (i.e., female) minds.

When Euripides’ unhinged heroine Medea seeks vengeance on her husband, Jason, she turns to fashion. After Jason abandons her to marry the young and beautiful Glauce, Medea sends Glauce tainted “wedding gifts”: a silken robe and a golden coronet, both infused with a lethal and combustible poison. The bride, vain about her beauty (another feminine weakness), rushes to try on her gifts and dies in agony, engulfed in flames.

This aura of menace hovers over fashion throughout the centuries. Jean-Jacques Rousseau denounced fashion as a threat to moral society — an incitement to desire and covetousness, writing that finery is a “stranger to virtue.” In “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” by Hans Christian Andersen, excessive interest in fashion proves to be the sign of a dangerously vain and foolish leader. Karl Marx inveighed against the “murderous, meaningless caprices of fashion.” And even Simone de Beauvoir lambasted fashion for “enslaving women.”

If it’s so unimportant, why does fashion remain such an irresistible literary and philosophical motif? If it’s trivial and irrelevant, how can it also be so powerful and dangerous? Why does fashion get invoked so often only to be renounced or exiled from depictions of ideal or moral societies? Why is fashion conjured only to be repudiated?