It behooves us to take them — and fashion — seriously. 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. 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. 