Fashion as a tool for the reinterpretation of the past: The case of Romanian folk costume as inspiration for designers and consumers

This article examines the ways in which fashion reinterprets the past through clothing. Descriptor of evolution, fashion has played an important role in defining attitudes and emotions throughout time. I aim to deconstruct the so-called ethnic style by analysing the Romanian traditional folk costume and its contemporary adaptations as a fashion piece, but also as a token that stimulates memories, emotions and experiences. Therefore, the deconstruction is based on the relationship between ethnic style and nostalgia, a powerful, reactive emotion that stimulates introspection and encourages creativity in new and innovative ways. The past becomes a constitutive factor for ethnic style ‐ being a source of information and inspiration.

BLAMEWORTHINESS AND TIME

Reactive emotion accounts hold that blameworthiness should be analyzed in terms of the familiar reactive emotions. However, despite the attractions of such views, we are not persuaded that blameworthiness is ultimately a matter of correctly felt reactive emotion. In this paper, we draw attention to a range of little-discussed considerations involving the moral significance of the passage of time that drive a wedge between blameworthiness and the reactive emotions: the appropriateness of the reactive emotions is sensitive to the passage of time in ways that attributions of blameworthiness are not. There are a number of ways in which reactive emotion accounts might attempt to accommodate the moral significance of time, however. We consider the most important of these but ultimately find them wanting. Accordingly, we conclude that the prospects for the reactive emotion accounts are bleak. Our argument, if successful, has a range of implications for legal theory, most importantly in providing a novel moral basis for statutes of limitations and in shedding light on new avenues in the theory of criminal law generally.