The Fashioned Body

Fashion, Dress and Social Theory

Joanne Entwistle

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780745689395
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industria tessile e della moda
• Index: Business

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. With a new preface and new material on the evolving fashion industry, this second edition gives a clear summary of the theories surrounding the role and function of fashion in modern society. Entwistle examines how fashion plays a crucial role in the formation of modern identity through its articulation of the body, gender and sexuality. The book offers a much needed synthesis between the literature on fashion and dress, and the sociology of the body, offering an updated critique of the issues raised in the first edition. Entwistle shows how an understanding of fashion and dress requires an understanding of the meanings acquired by the body in culture since it is the body that fashion speaks to and which is dressed in almost all social situations and encounters. She argues that while fashion refers to a specific system of dress originating in the west, all cultures 'dress' the body in the same way, making it a crucial feature of social order. Drawing on the work of theorists, the book offers insights into the connections that need to be made between the body, fashion and dress. The Fashioned Body will be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the social role of fashion and dress in modern culture.

1
Addressing the Body

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 which do not conform, bodies which 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 the means by which 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 even 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 recognizable 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’. Indeed, 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 which 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 all the 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. Wright’s analysis of clothing (1992) acknowledges the way in which dress operates on the body and how clothing worn deliberately small (such as leggings or trousers that do not meet the ankles) works to emphasize particular body parts. However, in general, studies of dress neglect the way in which it operates on the body and there remains a need to consider dress in everyday life as embodied practice: 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 recognizes 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 which 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 which 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 poststructuralist 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 requires drawing 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 is in contrast to approaches that assume what Chris Shilling (2012, see also Shilling 2006) refers to as the ‘naturalistic body’. These approaches, for example, sociobiology, 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.

Turner (1985) gives two reasons for this academic neglect of the body. First, social theory, particularly sociology, inher...