A Theology of Fashion?

A theology of fashion?  Why bother with such a trivial subject you ask?  

Perhaps its not all that trivial.  
Perhaps, if your response is similar to the one above, we do well to consider why it is seen as trivial.

During my trip down to Iowa in October to speak at Dordt's Christian Evasion of Popular Culture conference, I bumped into Bob Covolo who is doing work at Fuller Seminary on the topic of fashion.  Unfortunately I was so exhausted after my paper I did not have an opportunity to hear his paper.  After reading an article someone posted on the new black dandies in higher education, I decided to look Bob up on the interwebs and found this great article on Cardus.

Bob's article surveys a variety of approaches toward fashion and encourages the church to engage in thicker readings and engagements with fashion.  

Fashion has always been a sort of guilty pleasure for me. As an artist, clothing has always been another form of expression for me, but has always been subverted by the typical sorts of critiques that Bob alludes to coming from the church.  I suspect that fashion, like the visuals arts, are often seen as trivial, and utilitarian in nature (one for covering the body, the other for Evangelism). 

I think Bob is on track with the breadth of questions that fashion raises for church.  But, I keep coming back to...what seems to me is a avoidance and escapist sense of materiality (including the human body itself).  Perhaps its just remnants of my own Dordt paper coming out, but the whole Gnostic escapism thing really could resonate with why the church devalues things like fashion and the arts....they are fleeting, of this world, and distract us from our spiritual duties, until we can leave this place behind.  If we dont take bodies seriously, how much less of an emphasis do we place on those things we put on our bodies and around us in our homes and such?  But that being said, there are resonances (at least in my mind) between our fields.  However, I suspect that Bob is up against even tougher critics that rely upon biblical prooftexting