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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The Fashioned Body provides a wide-ranging and original overview of fashion and dress from an historical and sociological perspective. Where once fashion was seen as marginal, it has now entered into core economic discourse focused around ideas about 'cultural' and 'creative' work as a major driver of developed economies. This third edition of The Fashioned Body, the most comprehensive revision to date, revisits the classic works on fashion, dress and the body, and introduces contemporary issues and debates in the area. With new sections and revisions to all chapters, the major updates pick up on recent debates on fashion from the perspective of decolonising the curriculum, diversity, queer studies, sustainability, the environment, and digital fashion. A newly expanded bibliography of contemporary studies of fashion and dress is also included. The book continues to show how an understanding of fashion and dress requires analysing the meanings and practices of the dressed body in culture. Moreover, its central premise - that fashion is a 'situated practice' articulated through everyday dressed bodies - has become established orthodoxy within fashion studies since publication of the first edition in 2000. Remaining a seminal text in the field, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the social role of fashion and dress in modern culture.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Preface to the Third Edition
Introduction
The Fashioned Body 3.0
Conclusion
1 Addressing the Body
Introduction: Dress and the Body
Theoretical Resources
The body as cultural object
The influence of Foucault
The body versus embodiment
Merleau-Ponty and embodiment
Dress and embodiment
Dressed bodies in space
Sociological accounts of the body and embodiment
Addressing the body in the twenty-first century
Conclusion
2 Theorising Fashion and Dress
Introduction
Defining the Terms
Defining dress
Defining fashion
Everyday dress and fashion
Approaches to Fashion and Dress
Sociology and fashion
Addressing the literature on fashion
Theoretical approaches I: ‘why’ questions
Theoretical explanations: why fashion?
Theoretical approaches II: fashion and the condition of modern life
Conclusion
3 Fashion, Dress and Social Change
Introduction: Theorising Fashion and Dress: Twenty-First-Century Debates
Western Fashion History
Fashion and Social Change
The Beginnings of European Fashion
Class, status and power in late medieval and early modern European culture
Fashion in the Renaissance Court
Fashion in the Seventeenth Century
Dress, class and social identity in the eighteenth century
Fashion from the Nineteenth Century Onwards
Conclusion: Fashion, Social and Aesthetic Change
4 Fashion and Identity: From Modernity to Intersectionality
Introduction
Fashion and Identity in Modernity
Modernity: Imitation and Differentiation
Fashion as artifice
Fashion and authenticity
Clothing, class and fashioning identity
The dandy
The Romantic bohemian
Fashion and identity in contemporary culture
Class, distinction and style
Subcultural style, subcultural capital
Contemporary debates on fashion and identity: ‘race’, ethnicity and religious identities
Intersectionality
Conclusion
5 Identity: Gender and Fashion
Introduction
Sex, Gender and Sexuality
Looking Back: Dress and Gender in History
Femininity and fashion
Dress and gender differentiation
Explaining the differences – a ‘natural’ difference
Explaining the differences – ‘social’ divisions
Victorian dress reform
Working–class dress
Dress and Gender in the Twentieth Century
Challenges to gendered dress
Menswear: male peacocks and the ‘new man’
Challenges to the gender binary: androgyny and unisex clothing
Cross-dressing, unisex, and transgender challenges
Masquerade, gender exaggeration and ambiguity
Transgender politics
Gender and fashion: fashion studies in the twenty-first century
Conclusion
6 Identity: Fashion, Adornment and Sexuality
Introduction
Sexuality, Bodies and Dress
Adornment and Sexual Attraction
Power-dressing, Femininity and Sexuality
Fetishism and Adornment
The corset controversy
Transvestism
Underwear and eroticism
Adornment and Sexual Identity
Gay and Lesbian Dress and Sexuality
Conclusion
7 The Fashion Industry
Introduction
Historical Development of the Fashion Industry
An Imperfect Industry
Fashion and inequalities
Gender, Class and Ethnic Relations in the Fashion Industry
Fashion Consumption and Culture
Changing Patterns of Fashion Retail
Markets, shops and department stores
Fashion as Culture Industry: Fashion Industry from the Twentieth Century
From elite style to popular fashion
Fashion: culture industry, circuits, and networks
The field of fashion
Markets as Networks
Fashion in the Twenty-First Century
Fashion industry: twenty-first-century contemporary critiques
Sustainability
Fashion ethics
Ethics and diversity in fashion
Conclusion
Notes
Conclusion: Fashioned Bodies in the Twenty-First Century
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 3
Figure 1. Miniature of Queen Elizabeth I by Nicholas Hilliard (1547–1619), showing ...
Figure 2. Les Adieux, De Launay after Moreau le Jeune, c.1777. Eighteenth-century fashiona...
Figure 3. Hand-coloured fashion plate of two women in full (evening) dress and walking dre...
Figure 4. Photograph of Jane Morris (wife of William Morris), wearing Aesthetic dress 1865...
Chapter 4
Figure 5. Skater style. Kokulina/Shutterstock
Figure 6. French, dandified
lncroyable
(Incredible) with a well-dressed woman, dres...
Figure 7. Cyber fashion: an example of youth subcultural style. Source: Wikimedia Commons/...
Chapter 5
Figure 8. Cutaway view of crinoline costume,
Punch
, August 1856. Source: Wikimedia ...
Figure 9. Photograph by Roger Fenton of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, 1889 copy after ...
Figure 10. Amelia Bloomer (1818–1894), American reformer who wore full trousers for ...
Figure 11. Photograph of Ellen Grounds, pit worker in Wigan, with Arthur Munby, 1873. Trous...
Figure 12. Edwardian dress in the early twentieth century, showing the convergence that has...
Figure 13. A 1920s ‘flapper’, whose haircut and loose dress exemplify the new...
Figure 14. An example of trans-fashion, ‘The Groom’ from design house NARCISS...
Chapter 6
Figure 15. Advertisement for corsets, illustrating the restricted waist, considered beautif...
Chapter 7
Figure 16. Indian garment workers protest on the one-year anniversary of the Rana Plaza fac...
Figure 17. General view of the Bon Marché. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Figure 18. Runway model watched by fashion insiders. Source: photo by author
Figure 19. Instagram style mum Chloe Samwell-Smith posts regularly about her fashion style....
Figure 20. The Rana Plaza factory collapse in 2013 graphically highlights the poor working ...
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
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Dedication
This new edition is dedicated to my father, Dr Paul Entwistle
The Fashioned Body
Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory
Third Edition
Joanne Entwistle
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Joanne Entwistle 2023
The right of Joanne Entwistle to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First edition first published in 2000 by Polity Press
Second edition first published in 2015 by Polity Press
This third edition first published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4788-3 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4789-0 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022949336
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to my husband for his patience, which I frequently test! I’m grateful for his support in preparing the manuscript for submission during a family summer holiday. I’d also like to thank my girls for their patience and love during the writing of this book. In terms of the intellectual development, this book has been shaped by conversations with colleagues whose support I want to acknowledge here. Elizabeth Wissinger helped me to rethink the debates about diversity and race with regard to fashion and I also thank my colleagues and co-founders of the Critical Fashion Studies Seminar (CFSS), Angela McRobbie, Agnes Rocamora and Jane Tynan, for helping shape some of my thinking in this book. I would also like to thank Kate Fletcher for her very insightful thoughts, via email, on sustainability. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the three anonymous reviewers who helped me to decide the final form of this book by their comments on an earlier draft. Though the book remains all my own work (for better or worse), it has not been produced in a vacuum but through the support of my family and colleagues.
Preface to the Third Edition
The third edition is more substantially revised and updated than the 2015 edition, which had been refreshed with a long(ish) Preface detailing developments since 2000 but had left untouched the original chapters. Only one chapter, Chapter 7, had new material added to it. When starting this third edition I knew that a more radically revised book was required. Since many points made in the 2015 Preface have now been expanded in the relevant chapters, I have removed that Preface and absorbed some of the points made there into a single Preface to this edition.
Two reasons necessitated a substantially revised third edition. First, the continued growth of fashion studies since 2015 meant that significantly more material needed inclusion. Second, this new material required more than a citational nod, either because new conceptual terms have shifted the field of fashion, or because new ideas, theories or data have subsequently challenged the older terms and ideas first aired in 2000. I am very grateful to my editor, Mary Savigar at Polity, who agreed an extended word limit; but to make space for new material I have also trimmed some of the original chapters. I am also very grateful to the three anonymous reviewers, whose comments were not only very supportive but very instructive of some changes that need to be made: their suggestions shaped the final form of this book, directing me to reflect upon my theoretical framing and incorporate some explicit reworking of the chapters. I have done my best to take on board their constructive comments. A few things noted in the 2015 Preface that did not get rehoused in one of the chapters are worth mentioning here as they are still relevant, as I write this in 2022.
First, the landscape of fashion scholarship (or ‘fashion studies’), is vastly more expanded now than when this book was conceived at the end of the 1990s. Back then, a few classic texts such as Wilson’s Adorned in Dreams (2007, first published in 1985) joined a very meagre number of early sociological work (Simmel 1904, 1971 [1904]; Veblen 1953 [1899]; and Blumer 1969), some psychology of clothes (Flügel 1930), and some early anthropological analysis (Barnes and Eicher 1992). Since 2000 and accelerating since 2015, a veritable explosion of interest in fashion, dress and the body far exceeded any predictions or expectations I had when the book came out. This has some large part to do with the explosion of interest in consumption, material culture, and continued cultural studies on subcultures. Over the last few years many sub-fields have opened up: e.g. analyses on the fashion industry, especially sustainability, histories and ethnographies of fashion modelling. Bloomsbury expanded an already extensive fashion scholarship catalogue, building on the success of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture (first issue 1997). Their Dress Cultures series has an extensive back catalogue. Other publishing houses, notably Intellect and Routledge, have followed suit, with series on fashion and dress or journals: for example, Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty (first issue 2010) and Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion (first published in 2014), with two major interventions in the US – Fashion Studies published by Parsons School of Design, and the Ryerson University student-run Bias: Fashion Studies following the lead set. The establishment of International Fashion Studies (first published in 2014) is notable for its ‘principal aim […] to be a platform for fashion studies developed by non-English speakers’ thus recognising the need to give voice to the growing non-Anglophone scholarship, particularly in Latin America and Asia.
Other developments in the field, noted in 2015, include the emergence of fashion theory courses at universities, such as City University of New York (CUNY), which runs an MA in Liberal Studies with a Fashion Studies Concentration, and London College of Fashion (University of the Arts, London), which offers dedicated fashion theory programmes. There have also been some fashion research centres, notably in the Nordic countries, for example, the Centre for Fashion, Stockholm University (established in 2006) and a whole host of events such as the early ‘Creative Encounters’ at the Copenhagen Business School (see McNeil and Wallenberg 2012 for more details on ‘Nordic’ fashion studies). The Critical Fashion Studies Seminar (CFSS) established in 2019 is a more recent development, discussed below.
Another point I made in the 2015 Preface remains true. I argued then that the once low status accorded to fashion within sociology, which I experienced as a PhD student studying sociology at Goldsmiths College, has since changed. While Aspers and Godart (2013), citing Kawamura (2004a), argue that fashion is still devalued within academia, I suggest that, at least in the UK, fashion is now more generally taken seriously. Much of this has to do with developments around the ‘creative industries’: fashion, once seen as marginal, now sits at the core of economic discourse focused on ideas about ‘cultural’ and ‘creative’ work as a major driver of developed economies. No longer seen as a frivolous bit of ‘fluff’, fashion features in the policy plans of many national and local governments in the UK and around the world (Pratt 2008, 2009; Jeong et al. 2021). Although fashion remains a ‘cultural’ entity, alignment with ‘economic’ forces has enhanced its status and legitimacy in academia and in policy circles, e.g. the 2020 All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Creative Diversity (to which I contributed) included discussion of the fashion industry. Although an informal cross-party group within the UK Parliament, the APPG testifies to a growing interest in examining the importance of creative industries such as fashion to social, cultural and economic life.
The fashion industry has also come to the fore in recent years because of its many negative impacts, particularly its poor environmental practices and social inequalities. Growing concerns about the environmental cost of fast fashion have been highlighted by climate-change scholars and activists, such as Extinction Rebellion, while scandals over poor labour conditions in factories in the global South, as in the collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory in Bangladesh in 2013, highlight the urgent need for a critical, empirical study of fashion.
Throughout this rapid expansion of fashion studies in the early noughties, The Fashioned Body remained as core reading. However, while a refresh in 2015 breathed some new life into the material, there was no doubt that more recently the book was becoming outdated in the face of the scholarly developments detailed below. A substantial re-write has been necessary to ensure that The Fashioned Body is relevant to the twenty-first century as a reference point for scholars of fashion and dress and as a core text on fashion modules.
This edition, therefore, incorporates many new texts that have sprung up under the generic banner of fashion studies. Fashion studies designates a thematic area of interest rather than a discipline and captures the inter- and multi-disciplinary range of work in this area. In their excellent review essay of current sociological research on fashion, Aspers and Godart (2013) acknowledge the various disciplines close to sociology that have attempted to analyse aspects of clothing and dress, including history, philosophy, economics, geography, and cultural studies. This complex mix of fashion scholarship is evidenced in the establishment of an informal international network of Critical Fashion Studies Seminar (CFSS). This network, established in 2019 with colleagues, Angela McRobbie (Loughborough University), Agnes Rocamora (University of the Arts, London), Jane Tynan (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), and myself, aims to support a critical scholarship within fashion studies. The events held so far (curtailed by Covid-19 and occurring mostly online) have given a platform to new scholars within fashion studies – PhD students and early career scholars – from around the world. Indeed, while all the organisers are European, our speakers and attendees come from many parts of the world (e.g. India and Ghana), and much of the interest is in decolonising fashion scholarship and the curriculum and the climate emergency.
This vibrant scholarly community is actively growing a critical, post-colonial fashion scholarship that far exceeds anything I could have imagined in 2000 or 2015. Fashion scholarship continues to go from strength to strength and it is my hope that twenty-three years since the first publication of The Fashioned Body this third edition does some justice to this increasingly exciting and expanding field. I have done my best to acknowledge new debates and authors in this edition, although space prevents me from including all the excellent work I have read while preparing this manuscript. That said, I hope I have included enough new material within the significantly expanded Reference section to acknowledge recent developments and debates and capture the interest and imagination of readers and scholars who can continue to grow the field of fashion studies.
Introduction
Fashion is about bodies: it is produced, promoted and worn by bodies. It is the body that fashion speaks to and it is the body that must be dressed in almost all social encounters. Within the West, and increasingly beyond as well, fashion structures much of our experience of dress, although, as I argue in this book, it is not the only factor influencing dress in everyday life since other factors, such as sex, class, income and tradition, play their part. Fashionable dress is dress that embodies the latest aesthetic; it is dress defined at a given moment as desirable, beautiful, popular. In articulating the latest aesthetic, and in making available certain kinds of clothes, fashion provides the ‘raw material’ of daily dress, produced by a multitude of bodies operating across a variety of sites. In other words, we can define fashion and dress as follows (and this definition will be expanded upon in Chapter 2): fashion refers to the systems for the production and circulation of prevailing aesthetics in clothing, while dress refers to the daily, embodied practices of getting dressed – usefully it is both a noun and a verb. To understand fashion we need to acknowledge it is both material and discursive, concerning material things, such as clothing (and their creation/workers), as well as discourses about these things, which gives (fashion) value to them. To understand dress we need to see how individuals, located within social groups, translate the fashionable dress made available to them by the fashion system – selecting particular material things and making sense of the prevailing discursive/aesthetic ideals. In this way, fashion, to be fashion, finds its ultimate expression on bodies. We can note also how dress is part and parcel of habitual practices of embodiment. As Eckersley and Duff (2020: 36) argue, we need to examine ‘the links between habit, fashion, clothing and subjectification to extend analysis of the clothed body beyond the semiotic frames that have tended to dominate discussions of fashion across the social sciences and humanities’.
Understanding fashion requires understanding the relationship between these different bodies operating within the fashion system: fashion colleges and students, designers and design houses, tailors and seamstresses, models and photographers, as well as fashion editors, distributors, retailers, fashion buyers, shops and consumers. In other words, studying fashion involves moving from production to distribution and consumption: without the countless seamstresses and tailors there would be no clothes to consume; without the promotion of fashion by cultural intermediaries, such as fashion journalists, ‘fashion’ as the latest style would not be transmitted very far; and without the acceptance of consumers, fashionable dress would lie unworn in factories, shops, wardrobes. Thus, when we speak of fashion we speak simultaneously of many overlapping and interconnecting bodies involved in the production and promotion of dress as well as the actions of individuals acting on their bodies when ‘getting dressed’. In their account of fashion, Fine and Leopold (1993; also Leopold 1992) argue that fashion is a ‘hybrid subject’: the study of fashion requires understanding the ‘interrelationship between highly fragmented forms of production and equally diverse and often volatile patterns of demand (Fine and Leopold 1993: 93). Thus, the study of fashion covers the ‘dual concept’ of fashion as a ‘cultural phenomenon and as an aspect of manufacturing with the accent on production technology’ (Leopold 1992: 101). However, this hybridity is not generally acknowledged by the literature, which tends towards one or other aspect of fashion without acknowledging the relationships between the different elements of production and consumption. According to Leopold (1992: 101), this duality has resulted in a separation ‘in which the histories of consumption and production plough largely separate and parallel furrows’. The histories of consumption trace the rise and fall of demand of a product and link this to social developments. It tends to focus attention on individual psychology and/or the fashionable object itself, exploring it as ‘the embodiment of cultural and social values prevailing at a specified time and place’ (Fine and Leopold 1993: 93). Within this literature, production becomes passive, explained not only as a reflection of consumer or individual demands, but more often than not, as reflecting the fluctuating (and irrational) desires of women. The second study of fashion on the production side grapples with industrial history and deals also with the history of supply. This literature charts the innovations in technology, as well as the growth and organisation of labour within the fashion industry. It makes general assumptions about the reasons for growth in demand but does not look at the specifics of it, nor the specific characteristics of demand in particular clothing markets. Thus, as Leopold argues (1992: 101), the history of clothing production has made little contribution to an understanding of the ‘fashion system’. Moreover, these different bodies of literature do not connect with each other to provide an integrated approach.
Both Fine and Leopold put forward a case for a materialist analysis of fashion. They point to the need for historical specificity in the analysis of the fashion system, arguing that within the fashion system itself there are differences in the provision of clothes. There is no one ‘fashion system’ but a number of systems producing clothes for different markets. Alongside mass production, small systems of ‘made to measure’ clothing persist in haute couture and bespoke tailoring, which operate with rather different modes of production, marketing, distribution and consumption than does factory production for the high street. A full account of fashion needs to acknowledge the different practices within the fashion industry and bring together the crucially linked and overlapping practices of production and consumption. However, so far little attempt has been made by social theory to bridge the gulf between production and consumption. Sociology, cultural studies and psychology have tended to focus on the consumption side, while economic theory, marketing and industrial history have tended to examine the development of production. This book provides a summary of this literature and, in doing so, explores both the literature on consumption and production, although it considers the former in rather more detail. The reason for this lies in the contemporary significance of this work, which has grown exponentially since the 1980s in comparison to literature on production. This means that this book replicates to some extent the division between literature on consumption and production: only Chapter 7 deals specifically with the literature on production, while the other chapters focus more on the consumption and meanings of fashion. However, I agree with Fine and Leopold that this division is an artificial one and that new studies on fashion and dress need to address the interconnections between production and consumption. I therefore argue in this book that a sociological account of fashion and dress must acknowledge the connections between production and consumption, considering the relationship between different agencies, institutions, individuals and practices. Such accounts of fashion, can therefore connect it to everyday dress, while everyday dress, especially in the age of social media, feeds back to fashion: the two are also crucially interconnected.
I argue in this book that a historical division existed within the early literature, between studies of fashion (as a system, idea or aesthetic) and studies of dress (as in the meanings given to particular practices of clothing and adornment). Some of the classic studies of fashion within sociology, cultural studies, costume history and psychology tended to be theoretical in scope, seen as an abstract system with theoretical explanations that are sought to explain its apparently mysterious movements. Studies of dress, on the other hand, historically the domain of anthropology, tended to be empirical, examining dress in everyday life within communities and by particular individuals, with an original focus on non-Western and traditional communities, though this has changed in recent years, with anthropologists studying Western communities. Accounts of dress by psychologists was (and still is) limited as they tend to be individualistic rather than social in their analysis of dress practices. I give an overview in this book as to this disciplinary division between fashion and dress studies, which I argued in early editions was as problematic as the division between production and consumption. More recent studies of fashion/dress within sociology and other disciplines (e.g. geography, cultural studies) now bridges the gap between these various bodies of literature and looks at the way in which fashion determines dress and dress interprets fashion.
The Fashioned Body 3.0
I want briefly to highlight the changes made in this third edition. While the whole book has had a light facelift, there are many substantially new segments worthy of commentary here. Chapter 1 on the body is unchanged in its core substantive discussion, a decision backed up by the three anonymous reviewers, whose comments did not suggest that a substantial revision was required. Indeed, one reviewer noted that ‘Entwistle should not change the basic theoretical underpinning of the book. To do so would deprive audiences of a theoretical framework for thinking about fashion that has come to be an extremely important building block in fashion studies over the last two decades.’ However, quite rightly, it was noted that the overly white, male, European bias in the theoretical framework required some reflexive commentary and this has been incorporated into a new conclusion to the chapter.
In proposing a study of fashion/dress as situated bodily practice, the original edition set out a theoretical framework for future sociological analysis that has, over time, evolved as a key approach. Thus, as before, Chapter 1 introduces and develops the concept of situated bodily practice as a framework for bridging the gap between fashion and dress. This framework offers a way of analysing fashion as a structuring determinant on dress and opens up ways to examine how fashion is translated into everyday dress. It directs attention onto the body as the link between the two: fashion articulates the body, producing discourses on the body that are translated into dress through the bodily practices of dressing on the part of individuals. This positioning of the body at the centre of the analysis of fashion/dress allows us to examine practices and strategies from the micro-level of the individual experience of dress, through to the macro-level of the fashion industry, corporate strategies and marketing, which must keep the body in mind when designing, promoting and selling fashion. A new reflexive note has now been added to this chapter to acknowledge the fact that the theorists I refer to are predominantly white European men (notably Merleau-Ponty, Foucault and Bourdieu). While their concepts still stand (hence I have retained them), they were blind to notions of gender and race. I invite future scholars to find ways to incorporate, extend and challenge theories of embodiment through critical examination of these classic sociological theorists and concepts.
Chapter 2 details the ways in which fashion has been thought of and written about. It focuses on intellectual responses to fashion, examining how early social theorists tended to ignore the body (and by implication fashion) and when they have looked at fashion/dress, tended to disembody it. Early intellectuals writing on fashion thus concentrated on other aspects, such as fashion writing (Barthes 1985), fashion photographs (Ewen 1976; Evans and Thornton 1989; Lewis and Rolley 1997) or general theory, for instance, ‘emulation’ and status competition (Simmel 1971; Veblen 1953) or the ‘shifting erogenous zone’ (Laver 1950, 1995). There were some early exceptions to this and more recent work examines how bodies and embodiment are caught up within fashion (Granata 2017; Geczy 2016; Tseëlon 1997; Twig 2013; Wilson 2007 [1985]); Wright (1992), for example, explores the way in which fashion operates on the body.
Chapter 2 also originally set out the historically accepted definitions of fashion and dress and reviewed the literature on theories for the emergence of the fashion system in European/Western societies but, more recently, these definitions have come under criticism. Likewise, in Chapter 3, criticism as to the dominant historical narrative that fashion developed out European/Western societal conditions is now reviewed. Both these chapters now acknowledge the growing body of scholarship that has challenged the conventional fashion histories and accounts of fashion’s European origins. With new material emerging from historians, archaeologists and anthropologists providing evidence of earlier, non-Western societies expressing a fashion sensibility, it was necessary to consider these debates. For example, extending traditional research on Western fashion, dress and consumption are studies of fashion and dress in communist eastern European countries pre-1989 (Bartlett 2010; Pellandini-Simanyi 2016). Thus, while the focus of this book is still European societies and the history of fashion as it emerged in European courts, these revisions see that narrative is now contextualised and historicised to make clear that this is one history of fashion. Readers are now invited to consider this new scholarly work which was not included in previous editions.
The remaining chapters consider various substantive themes within the literature, with new works within fashion studies discussed. The re-titled Chapters 4, 5 and 6, have been substantially revised and renamed to better reflect the expansion in new studies of fashion with respect to debates about identity, class, race, gender and sexuality. To signal the obvious point that all three chapters are dealing with identity, the old Chapter 4 (‘Fashion and Identity’), newly named ‘Fashion and Identity: From Modernity to Intersectionality’, signals recent refocusing of debates from earlier fashion scholarship, which had been primarily concerned with class. It now includes a fuller discussion of religion, modesty and dress as this has been one major area of new research in recent years. Chapters 5 and 6 have also grown with the addition of new material. Debates around transgender that challenge conventional understandings of the male/female dichotomy are reviewed in Chapter 5, while the expanding literature on gay and lesbian fashion features in the discussion on sexuality.
The most significant changes in terms of new material are in Chapter 7, in recognition of many developments in scholarship critically examining the fashion industry. There is now new material on the industry that has emerged of late, specifically, discussion of digital fashion, fashion blogging and Instagram, reflecting the significant growth in scholarly work in this area. There is also a whole new section on fashion sustainability and ethics to take on board the growing literature that critiques contemporary fast fashion in terms of its poor environmental and labour relations. This discussion of ethics is extended also to include debates about fashion industry’s historic (lack of) diversity and inclusion.
Conclusion
The re-evaluation of theories and literature from earlier editions and the expansion of the book in terms of new material is meant to capture the most significant developments within the field. It is not meant to be exhaustive, however. Were I to be writing a new book there would no doubt be much more scope to develop my theoretical framework, examine in more detail new research and find and include new and emerging arguments. However, within the scope of this book – a third edition of an older book/s – these additions and amendments are meant to refresh and reframe the original arguments in The Fashioned Body written over twenty-three years ago. This edition presents an overview of the literature, within the context of my original framing of fashion and dress as situated bodily practice. It is offered as a text to assist students (undergraduate, postgraduate alike) by providing a map of early, classic works on fashion and dress, as well as indicating current thematic issues in the literature today. It definitely sparks the end of fashion studies as the preserve of white, European scholars. Fashion scholarship today, as I hope this edition highlights, is a transnational endeavour within an expanding post-colonial curriculum; and this book is offered up to future scholars in places far from London, located in many countries such as India, China and Latin America. My hope is that fashion studies will continue to extend far beyond the Anglophone world (see for example, Bartlett 2022; Stevenson 2022).
1Addressing the Body
Introduction: Dress and the Body
‘There is an obvious and prominent fact about human beings’, notes Turner (1985: 1) at the start of The Body and Society, ‘they have bodies and they are bodies’. In other words, the body constitutes the environment of the self, to be inseparable from the self. However, what Turner omits in his analysis is another obvious and prominent fact: that human bodies are dressed bodies. The social world is a world of dressed bodies. Nakedness is wholly inappropriate in almost all social situations and, even in situations where much naked flesh is exposed (on the beach, at the swimming-pool, even in the bedroom), the bodies that meet there are likely to be adorned, if only by jewellery, or indeed, even perfume: when asked what she wore to bed, Marilyn Monroe claimed that she wore only Chanel No. 5, illustrating how the body, even without garments, can still be adorned or embellished in some way.
Dress is a basic fact of social life and this, according to anthropologists, is true of all known human cultures: all people ‘dress’ the body in some way, be it through clothing, tattooing, cosmetics or other forms of body painting. To put it another way, no culture leaves the body unadorned but adds to, embellishes, enhances or decorates the body. In almost all social situations we are required to appear dressed, although what constitutes ‘dress’ varies from culture to culture and also within a culture, since what is considered appropriate dress will depend on the situation or occasion. A bathing-suit, for example, would be inappropriate and shocking if worn to do the shopping, while swimming in one’s coat and shoes would be absurd for the purpose of swimming, but perhaps apt as a fund-raising stunt. The cultural significance of dress extends to all situations, even those in which we can go naked: there are strict rules and codes governing when and with whom we can appear undressed. While bodies may go undressed in certain spaces, particularly in the private sphere of the home, the public arena almost always requires that a body be dressed appropriately, to the extent that the flaunting of flesh, or the inadvertent exposure of it in public, is disturbing, disruptive and potentially subversive. Bodies that do not conform, bodies that flout the conventions of their culture and go without the appropriate clothes are subversive of the most basic social codes and risk exclusion, scorn or ridicule. The ‘streaker’ who strips off and runs across a cricket pitch or soccer stadium draws attention to these conventions in the act of breaking them: indeed, female streaking is defined as a ‘public order offence’ while the ‘flasher’, by comparison, can be punished for ‘indecent exposure’ (Young 1995: 7).
The ubiquitous nature of dress would seem to point to the fact that dress or adornment is one of how bodies are made social and given meaning and identity. The individual and very personal act of getting dressed is an act of preparing the body for the social world, making it appropriate, acceptable, indeed respectable, and possibly desirable also. Getting dressed is an ongoing practice, requiring knowledge, techniques and skills, from learning how to tie our shoelaces and do up our buttons as children, to understanding about colours, textures and fabrics and how to weave them together to suit our bodies and our lives. Dress is the way in which individuals learn to live in their bodies and feel at home in them. Wearing the right clothes and looking our best, we feel at ease with our bodies, and the opposite is equally true: turning up for a situation inappropriately dressed, we feel awkward, out of place and vulnerable. In this respect, dress is both an intimate experience of the body and a public presentation of it. Operating on the boundary between self and other is the interface between the individual and the social world, the meeting place of the private and the public. This meeting between the intimate experience of the body and the public realm, through the experience of fashion and dress, is the subject of this chapter.
So potent is the naked body that when it is allowed to be seen, as in the case of art, it is governed by social conventions. Berger (1972) argues that within art and media representations there is a distinction between naked and nude, the latter referring to the way in which bodies, even without garments, are ‘dressed’ by social conventions and systems of representation. Perniola (1990) has also considered the way in which different cultures, in particular the classical Greek and Judaic, articulate and represent nakedness. According to Ann Hollander (1993) dress is crucial to our understanding of the body to the extent that our ways of seeing and representing the naked body are dominated by conventions of dress. As she argues, ‘art proves that nakedness is not universally experienced and perceived any more than clothes are. At any time, the unadorned self has more kinship with its own usual dressed aspect than it has with any undressed human selves in other times and other places’ (1993: xiii). Hollander points to the ways in which depictions of the nude in art and sculpture correspond to the dominant fashions of the day. Thus the nude is never naked but ‘clothed’ by contemporary conventions of dress.
Naked or semi-naked bodies that break with cultural conventions, especially conventions of gender, are potentially subversive and treated with horror or derision. Competitive female body builders, such as those documented in the semi-documentary film Pumping Iron II: The Women (1984), are frequently seen as ‘monstrous’, as their muscles challenge deeply held cultural assumptions and beg the questions: ‘What is a woman’ s body? Is there a point at which a woman’s body becomes something else? What is the relationship between a certain type of body and “femininity”?’ (Kuhn 1988: 16; see also Schulze 1990; St Martin and Gavey 1996). In body building, muscles are like clothes but, unlike clothes, they are supposedly ‘natural’. However, according to Annette Kuhn, muscles are rather like drag, for female body builders especially: ‘while muscles can be assumed, like clothing, women’s assumption of muscles implies a transgression of the proper boundaries of sexual difference’ (1988: 17).
It is apparent from these illustrations that bodies are potentially disruptive. Conventions of dress attempt to transform flesh into something recognisable and meaningful to a culture; a body that does not conform, that transgresses such cultural codes, is likely to cause offence and outrage and be met with scorn or incredulity. This is one of the reasons why dress is a matter of morality: dressed inappropriately we are uncomfortable; we feel ourselves open to social condemnation. According to Bell (1976), wearing the right clothes is so very important that even people not interested in their appearance will dress well enough to avoid social censure. In this sense, he argues, we enter into the realm of feelings ‘prudential, ethical and aesthetic, and the workings of what one might call sartorial conscience’ (1976: 18–19). He gives the example of a five-day-old beard, which could not be worn to the theatre without censure and disapproval ‘exactly comparable to that occasioned by dishonourable conduct’. Of course, such norms are subject to change (historically and across cultures): in 2022 the so-called ‘hipster’ beard of the early noughties is still a mainline trend and does not look ‘dishonourable’ to the contemporary eye. But the point remains that appearances matter. Clothes are often spoken of in moral terms, using words like ‘faultless’, ‘good’, ‘correct’ (1976: 19). Few are immune to this social pressure and most people are embarrassed by certain mistakes of dress, such as finding one’s flies undone or discovering a stain on a jacket. Thus, as Quentin Bell puts it, ‘our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul’ (1976: 19).
This basic fact of the body – that it must, in general, appear appropriately dressed – points to an important aspect of dress, namely its relation to social order, albeit micro-social order. This centrality of dress to social order would seem to make it a prime topic of sociological investigation. However, the classical tradition within sociology failed to acknowledge the significance of dress, largely because it neglected the body and the things that bodies do. More recently, sociology has begun to acknowledge dress, but this literature is still on the margins and is relatively small compared with other sociological areas. A sociology of the body has now emerged that would seem germane to a literature on dress and fashion (see Shilling 2007). However, this literature, as with mainstream sociology, has also tended not to examine dress. While sociology has failed to acknowledge the significance of dress, the literature from history, cultural studies, psychology and so on, where it is often examined, does so almost entirely without acknowledging the significance of the body. Studies of fashion and dress tend to separate dress from the body: art history celebrates the garment as an object, analysing the development of clothing over history and considering the construction and detail of dress (Gorsline 1991; Laver 1969); cultural studies tend to understand dress semiotically, as a ‘sign system’ (Hebdige 1979; Wright 1992); or to analyse texts and not bodies (Barthes 1985; Brooks 1992; Nixon 1992; Triggs 1992); social psychology looks at the meanings and intentions of dress in social interaction (Cash 1985; Ericksen and Joseph 1985; Tseëlon 1992a, 1992b, 1997). All these studies tend to neglect the body and the meanings the body brings to dress. And yet, dress in everyday life cannot be separated from the living, breathing, moving body it adorns. The importance of the body to dress is such that encounters with dress divorced from the body are strangely alienating. Elizabeth Wilson (1985) grasps the importance of the body in terms of understanding dress and describes the unease one feels in the presence of mannequins in the costume museum. The eeriness of the encounter comes from the ‘dusty silence’ and stillness of the costumes and from a sense that the museum is ‘haunted’ by the spirits of the living, breathing humans whose bodies these gowns once adorned:
The living observer moves with a sense of mounting panic, through a world of the dead … We experience a sense of the uncanny when we gaze at garments that had an intimate relationship with human beings long since gone to their graves. For clothes are so much part of our living, moving selves that, frozen on display in the mausoleums of culture, they hint at something only half understood, sinister, threatening, the atrophy of the body, and the evanescence of life. (Wilson 1985: 1)
Just as the discarded shell of any creature appears dead and empty, the gown or suit once cast off seems lifeless, inanimate and alienated from the wearer. The sense of alienation from the body is even more profound when the garment or the shoes still bear the marks of the body, when the shape of the arms or the form of the feet are clearly visible. However, dress in everyday life is always more than a shell, it is an intimate aspect of the experience and presentation of the self and is so closely linked to the identity that these three – dress, the body, and the self – are not perceived separately but simultaneously, as a totality. When dress is pulled apart from the body/self, as it is in the costume museum, we grasp only a fragment, a partial snapshot of dress, and our understanding of it is thus limited. The costume museum makes the garment into a fetish, it tells of how the garment was made, the techniques of stitching, embroidery and decoration used as well as the historical era in which it was once worn. What it cannot tell us is how the garment was worn, how the garment moved when on a body, what it sounded like when it moved and how it felt to the wearer. Without a body, dress lacks fullness and movement; it is incomplete (Entwistle and Wilson 1998).
A sociological perspective on dress requires moving away from the consideration of dress as object to looking instead at the way in which dress is an embodied activity and one that is embedded within social relations. When this book was first written there were few accounts of how dress operates on a phenomenal, moving body and how it is a practice that involves individual actions of attending to the body with the body. This chapter considers the theoretical resources for a sociology of dress that acknowledges the significance of the body. I propose the idea of dress as situated bodily practice as a theoretical and methodological framework for understanding the complex dynamic relationship between the body, dress and culture. Such a framework recognises that bodies are socially constituted, always situated in culture and the outcome of individual practices directed towards the body: in other words, ‘dress’ is the result of ‘dressing’ or ‘getting dressed’. Examining the structuring influences on the dressed body requires taking account of the historical and social constraints on the body, constraints that impact upon the act of ‘dressing’ at a given time. In addition, it requires that the physical body is constrained by the social situation and is thus the product of the social context as Douglas (1973, 1984) has argued.
Becoming a competent member involves acquiring knowledge of the cultural norms and expectations demanded of the body, something Mauss (1973) has examined in terms of ‘techniques of the body’. Goffman (1971) has described forcefully the ways in which cultural norms and expectations impose upon the ‘presentation of self in everyday life’ to the extent that individuals perform ‘face work’ and seek to be defined by others as ‘normal’. Dressing requires one to attend unconsciously or consciously to these norms and expectations when preparing the body for presentation in any particular social setting. The phrase ‘getting dressed’ captures this idea of dress as an activity. Dress is therefore the outcome of practices that are socially constituted but put into effect by the individual: individuals must attend to their bodies when they ‘get dressed’ and it is an experience that is as intimate as it is social. When we get dressed, we do so within the bounds of a culture and its particular norms, expectations about the body and about what constitutes a ‘dressed’ body.
Most of the theorists I discuss do not specifically relate their account of the body to dress, but I have aimed to draw out the implications of each theoretical perspective for the study of the dressed body. The main discussion focuses on the uses and limitations both of structuralist and post-structuralist approaches, since these have been influential in the sociological study of the body: in particular, the work of Mauss (1973), Douglas (1973, 1984) and the post-structuralist approach of Foucault (1977, 1980) are pertinent to any discussion of the body in culture. However, another tradition, that of phenomenology, particularly that of Merleau-Ponty (1976, 1981) has also become increasingly influential in terms of producing an account of embodiment. These two theoretical traditions have, according to Crossley (1996), been considered by some to be incommensurable but, as he argues, they can offer different and complementary insights into the body in society. Following both Csordas (1993, 1996) and Crossley (1995a, 1995b, 1996), I argue that an account of dress as situated practice can draw on the insights of these two different traditions, structuralism and phenomenology. Structuralism offers the potential to understand the body as a socially constituted and situated object, while phenomenology offers the potential to understand dress as an embodied experience. In terms of providing an account of the dressed body as a practical accomplishment, two further theorists are of particular importance, Bourdieu (1984, 1994) and Goffman (1971, 1979). Their insights are discussed at the end of this chapter to illustrate the ways in which a sociology of the dressed body might bridge the gap between the traditions of structuralism, post-structuralism and phenomenology.
Theoretical Resources
The body as cultural object
All the theorists discussed in this chapter can broadly be described as ‘social constructivists’, in that they take the body to be a thing of culture and not merely a biological entity. This contrasts with approaches that assume what Chris Shilling (2012, see also Shilling 2007) refers to as the ‘naturalistic body’. These approaches, for example, socio-biology, consider the body ‘as a pre-social, biological basis on which the superstructures of the self and society are founded’ (2012: 41). Since the body has an ‘obvious’ presence as a ‘natural’ phenomenon, such a ‘naturalistic’ approach is appealing and indeed it may seem odd to suggest that the body is a ‘socially constructed’ object. However, while it is the case that the body has a material presence, it is also true that the material of the body is always and everywhere culturally interpreted: biology does not stand outside culture but is located within it. That said, the ‘taken-for-granted’ assumption that biology stands outside culture was, for a long time, one of the reasons why the body was neglected as an object of study by social theorists. While this is now an object of investigation within anthropology, cultural studies, literary studies, film theory and feminist theory, it is worthwhile pointing out the ways in which classical social theory previously ignored or repressed the body, since this may account, at least in part, for why it has largely neglected dress.
In his early intervention into the sociology of the body, Turner (1985) gives two reasons for this academic neglect of the body. First, social theory, particularly sociology, inherited the Cartesian dualism that prioritised mind and its properties of consciousness and reason over the body and its properties of emotion and passion. Further, as part of its critiques of both behaviourism and essentialism, the classical sociological tradition tended to avoid explanations of the social world that considered the human body, focusing instead on the human actor as a sign-maker and a maker of meaning. Similarly, sociology’s concern with historicity and with social order in modern societies, as opposed to ontological questions, did not appear to involve the body. As Turner argues, instead of nature/culture, sociology has concerned itself with self/society or agency/structure. A further reason for the neglect of the body is that it treated the body as a natural and not a social phenomenon, and therefore not a legitimate object for sociological investigation.
However, there has been growing recognition that the body has a history and this has been influential in establishing the body as a prime object of social theory (Aldersey-Williams 2013; Bakhtin 1984; Elias 1978; Feher et al. 1989; Kalof and Bynum 2010; Laquer and Gallagher 1987; Laquer and Bourgois 1992; Sennett 1994; Sims 2003). Norbert Elias (1978) points to the ways in which our modern understandings and experiences of the body are historically specific, arising out of processes, both social and psychological, that date back to the sixteenth century. He examines how historical developments such as the increasing centralisation of power to fewer households with the emergence of aristocratic and royal courts served to reduce violence between individuals and groups and induce greater social control over the emotions. The medieval courts demanded increasingly elaborate codes of behaviour and instilled in individuals the need to monitor their bodies to produce themselves as ‘well mannered’ and ‘civil’. As relatively social mobile arenas, the medieval courts promoted the idea that one’s success or failure depended upon the demonstration of good manners, civility and wit and, in this respect, the body was the bearer of social status, a theme later explored in the culture of the day by Bourdieu (1984, 1994) in his account of ‘cultural capital’ and the ‘habitus’. The impact of these developments was the promotion of new psychological structures, which served to induce greater consciousness of oneself as an ‘individual’ in a self-contained body.
Along with histories of the body, anthropology has been particularly influential in terms of establishing the legitimacy of the body as an object of social study (Benthall 1976; Berthelot 1991; Featherstone 1991a; Featherstone and Turner 1995; Frank 1990; Mascia-Lees 2011; Polhemus 1988; Polhemus and Proctor 1978; Shilling 2012; Synnott 1993; Turner 1985, 1991). Turner (1991) gives four reasons for this. First, anthropology was initially concerned with questions of ontology and the nature/culture dichotomy; this led it to consider how the body, as an object of nature, is mediated by culture. A second feature of anthropology was its preoccupation with needs and how needs are met by culture, an interest which focuses in part on the body. Two further sets of concerns focus on the body as a symbolic entity: for example, the body in the work of Mary Douglas (1973, 1979b, 1984) is considered as a primary classification system for cultures, the means by which notions of order and disorder are represented and managed; in the work of people like Blacking (1977) and Bourdieu (1984) the body is taken to be an important bearer of social status.
For the anthropologist Marcel Mauss the body is shaped by culture, and he describes in detail what he calls the ‘techniques of the body’, which are ‘the ways in which from society to society men [sic] know how to use their bodies’ (1973: 70). These techniques of the body are an important means for the socialisation of individuals into culture: indeed, the body is how an individual comes to know and live in a culture. According to Mauss, the ways in which men and women come to use their bodies differ since techniques of the body are gendered. Men and women learn to walk, talk, run, fight differently. Furthermore, although he says little about dress, he does comment on the fact that women learn to walk in high heels, a feat which requires training to do successfully and which, as a consequence of socialisation, is not acquired by the majority of men. (See Okley 2007 for an application of Mauss ‘techniques of the body’.)
Douglas (1973, 1979b, 1984) has also acknowledged the body as a natural object shaped by social forces. She therefore suggests that there are ‘two bodies’: the physical body and the social body. She summarises the relationship between them in Natural Symbols:
the social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived. The physical experience of the body, always modified by the social categories through which it is known, sustains a particular view of society. There is a continual exchange of meanings between the two kinds of bodily experience so that each reinforces the categories of the other. (1973: 93)
