lecture
how does anthropology study clothing?
costumes?: clothing as a visual metaphor for culture. the representation of culture through dress
‘dress’ is “an assemblage of body modification and/or supplements”
‘fashion’ » societal preoccupations with clothing, style and how they intertwine with identity, everyday life, inequality, difference
the scandal of nudity
clothing is serious
clothing as a second skin & frontier
clothing as a second, social skin
“decorating, covering, uncovering or otherwise altering the human form in accordance with social notions of everyday propriety or sacred dress, beauty or solemnity, status or changes in status, or on occasion of the violation and inversion of such notions, seems to have been a concern of every human society of which we have knowledge”
clothing and inequality
clothing as a boundary within society and between social classes
“the system of bodily adornment as a whole (all the transformations of the ‘social skin’ considered as a set) defines each class in terms of its relations with all the others. the ‘social skin’ thus becomes, at this third level of interpretation, the boundary between social classes”
fashion and social inequalities
“fashion plays a more conspicuous role in modern times, because the differences in our standards of life have become so much more strongly accentuated, for the more numerous and the more sharply drawn these differences are, the greater the opportunities for emphasising them at every turn”
how does fashion work? time and exclusion
class distinctions and the temporality of fashion
“just as soon as the lower classes begin to copy their style, thereby crossing the line of demarcation the upper classes have drawn and destroying the uniformity of their coherence, the upper classes turn away from this style and adopt a new one, which in its turn differentiates them from the masses; and thus the game goes merrily on” (Simmel, 545)
the timing of fashion makes it exclusive
“as soon as an example has been universally adopted, that is, as soon as anything that was originally done only by a few has really come to be practised by all - as is the case in certain portions of our apparel and in various forms of social conduct - we no longer speak of fashion. As fashion spreads, it gradually goes to its doom.” (Simmel, 547)
“as soon as the social consciousness attains to the highest point designated by fashion, it marks the beginning of the end for the latter.” (Simmel, 547)
unity, segregation and the self
how do we feel comfortable in our own clothes, in our social skin?
uniqueness can be a lonely experience
individualities, imitation and fashion
imitation gives to the individual the satisfaction of not standing alone in his actions
whenever we imitate, we transfer not only the demand for creativity, but also the responsibility for the action from ourselves to another
a shared experience of difference
“from the fact that fashion as such can never be generally in vogue, the individual derives the satisfaction of not knowing that as adopted by him it still represents something special and striking, while at the same time he feels inwardly supported by a set of persons who are striving for the same thing, not as in the case of other social satisfactions, by a set actually doing the same thing.” (Simmel, 548)
the problem of what to wear (Hansen)
an anthropological concern w/ clothing as an experience of tensions and contradictions
a surface of conflicting values:
“dress readily becomes a flash point of conflicting values, fuelling contests in historical encounters, in interactions across class, between genders and generations, and in recent global cultural and economic exchanges.” (Hansen, 372)
the experience of embodying/wearing those tensions:
“our lived experiences with clothes, how we feel about them, hinges on how others evaluate our crafted appearances, and this experience in turn is influenced by the situation and the structure of the wider (Woodward, 2005). In this view, clothing, body, and performance come together in dress as embodied practice.” (Hansen, 373)
hijab & subjectivities in London
only one of the options:
“how individual decisions to wear hijab may come about through exposure to a hijab wearing lifestyle which is just one of a large repertoire of ways of being open to both Muslims and non-Muslims in London who may or may not take it up for their own personal reasons.” (Tarlo, 140)
the agency of the hijab:
“whilst the hijab prevents certain interactions, it also enables and encourages others.” (Tarlo, 151)
how if the hijab perceived by others?
patriarchy
oppression
victimhood
ignorance
tradition
barbarism
foreign-ness
fundamentalism
threat of violence
why do women wear hijab?
modesty
privacy
protection from the male gaze
rejection of consumerist values
religious duty
sense of community w/ other Muslim women
resistance to the pressure to conform to an unrealistic body image
why are jeans so ubiquitous?
jeans do not tell you who you are
“jeans can create that level playing field, one that relieves them of the burden of identity, at least with regard to one particular facet of appearance” (122)
“jeans allow [people] to shed the burden both of creating identity for themselves and of being identified and potentially stigmatised by others” (145)
why do people want to be released of the burden of identity?
an escape from the burden of identity
“most migrants, and especially younger migrants, feel that if anything, the pressure is on them to represent some kind of identity (in contrast to the rest of the population), while wearing blue jeans represents some sort of escape from such questions” (135)
the promise of sharing a common outlook
“I find that people notice you for what you wear rather than who you are as a first impression”
“everybody looks good in jeans, below a certain age, under fifty. And nobody is going to criticise you because of your choice” (97)
do our clothes shape who we are?
clothing is serious stuff: identity, subjectivities, self and society
clothing as a second, social skin
a surface with social meanings
clothing as an embodied experience of tensions and people’s attempts to navigate them
clothing and the politics of visibility and invisibility