For some, fashion has a whiff of shallowness to it. Thought is profound, says the received wisdom, but clothes are superficial.

For example, I was once invited onto a television program about fashion. As the token philosopher, I suspect my job was not to share my sartorial tips (‘geek chic’), but to give my eyes-over-bifocals professorial contempt for beauty and clothes.

Friends and colleagues will agree that I’m no ambassador for fashion or style. Torn cheap jeans shorts and a Marvel Hulk t-shirt usually win over a Rhodes and Beckett shirt and fitted Levis.

But it is absurd to pretend my clothes are alien to me. They convey a casualness that softens my professional profile; they speak to pop culture tastes, and wariness of academy formality. To deny this is what the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called ‘bad faith’: refusing responsibility for my own existence.

And every item in my wardrobe was designed, produced, distributed, purchased, and is now worn by a paying consumer. This is the point of Meryl Streep’s sharp monologue from The Devil Wears Prada, as she chastises her blithe assistant. “It’s sort of comical how you think you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry,” she deadpans to a doe-eyed Anne Hathaway in a cerulean jumper, “when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.” Those who are wary of fashion’s influence are still touched by its industry.

Alongside the rag trade is clothing’s social currency. As the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu noted in his book Distinction, so many of our tastes and habits speak to economic class and social status. Food, music, accent, gestures, couture or bargain bin jumpers: they arise from social distinctions, and reproduce these within us. While we are not mindless automatons, argued Bourdieu, even spontaneous splurges and improvised outfits usually obey unwritten social laws.

And this is not just a French quirk. In Accounting For Tastes, Tony Bennett and colleagues demonstrated how many of Australia’s everyday choices are marked by socioeconomic standing. “The care of the body,” they write about beauty and fitness, “is both more intensive and more extensive as one’s educational level rises.”