The Dressed Society

Clothing, the Body and Some Meanings of the World

Peter Corrigan, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780761952077, 9780761952060
• eBook ISBN: 9781473903098
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

It was traditionally said that ?clothes maketh the man?. But what codes and meanings are associated with dress in a society that consists of divisions between class, race, gender, family status and religion? Is social and cultural life still fundamentally themed by the clothes that we wear? If so, how should we read these codes and themes in order to decipher their relation to power and meaning?

This exhaustive book demonstrates how dress shapes and is shaped by social processes and phenomena such as beauty, time, the body, the gift exchange, class, gender and religion. It does this through an analysis of topics like the Islamic clothing controversy in state schools, the multitude of identities associated with dress, the Dress Reform movement, the construction of the body in fashion magazines and the role of the internet in fashion. What emerges is a trenchant, sharply observed account of the place of dress in contemporary society.

The book will be of interest to students and researchers in Sociology, Cultural Studies, Women?s Studies, Gender Studies, Anthropology and Fashion Studies.

1

Introduction: Dress in the Sensory World

This is a book about the meaningful adventures of dress in the world. Like any material object, clothing can be looked upon in terms of its brute concrete reality or as an element in some greater conceptual scheme transcending its mere materiality. For the social scientist, the relationship between the concrete and the conceptual is of central interest because it reveals in practice how we may make sense of the world in which we find ourselves – and even of the worlds that we have imagined.

But where shall we begin? With a foundational question that sociology has not, perhaps, asked often enough: how do we apprehend the world? My answer is: through data provided by the senses. Until recently, the senses had rather an unreliable reputation: famously, René Descartes (1984 [1641]: 12, 16) wrote that ‘from time to time I have found that the senses deceive, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once . . . Anything which admits of the slightest doubt I will set aside just as if I had found it to be wholly false’. For him, the ‘intermingling of the mind with the body’ led to ‘confused modes of thinking’ (1984 [1641]: 57) that would never let us get at the truth of the world. But the person plunged into the busy world of actions and events does not have the contemplative analytical time of the philosopher ‘sitting by the fire, wearing a winter dressing-gown’ (1984 [1641]: 13), and this is the person that is of interest to the sociologist (who may well be sitting by the laptop, wearing a winter dressing-gown). We must set aside Descartes, and accept that the embodied creatures of the confused modes of thinking who inhabit the streets, the squares, the stadia and the shops are the very subject matter of sociology. These people are pragmatic operators rather than philosophical analysts, but this does not mean that they are not also sophisticated navigators of the world.

Henri Bergson (1929 [1908]: 29, 34) suggests something of the sophistication of these navigators when he writes that ‘The images [i.e., any sort of sense data, not just visual – PC] which surround us will appear to turn towards our body the side . . . which interests our body . . . [perception is] reduced to the image of that which interests you’. Put more bluntly, we se(ns)e what we need to se(ns)e in a given context. We are not at all confused, even if we are wrong. Furthermore, the contemplative analytical time of the philosopher is drastically short-circuited through habit and memory: ‘The bodily memory, made up of the sum of the sensory-motor systems organized by habit, is then a quasi-instantaneous memory to which the true memory of the past serves as a base’ (1929 [1908]: 197). Our sensate bodies help us make decisions quickly and clearly. They do not operate in the transcendent realm of truth, but in the immanent kingdom of the real.

The neurologist Antonio Damasio (1994; 1999) links the senses, emotions, thoughts and actions, and shows that the intermingling of mind and body leads less to the confused modes of thinking of the Cartesian view than to sharpened modes of thinking. He observes that

The environment makes its mark on the organism in a variety of ways. One is by stimulating neural activity in the eye . . . the ear . . . and the myriad nerve terminals in the skin, taste buds, and nasal mucosa. Nerve terminals send signals to circumscribed entry points in the brain, the so-called sensory cortices of vision, hearing, somatic sensation, taste, and olfaction. (Damasio, 1994: 90–1)

These sensing surfaces give rise to emotions as a primary effect, then to feelings and finally to reasoning (Damasio, 1999: 55). For Damasio, body-based emotions and feelings do not so much get in the way but rather orientate us appropriately to the salient features of the world, allowing us to think and thus act more swiftly than would otherwise be the case. The emotions do not operate in a social vacuum, but are tempered by what Bergson calls ‘habit’ and Damasio (1994: 200) expresses as the ‘cultural prescriptions designed to ensure survival in a particular society’. Emotion and habit conspire to produce the intuition that guides our everyday acts: ‘emotion ha[s] a role to play in intuition, the sort of rapid cognitive process in which we come to a particular conclusion without being aware of all the immediate logical steps . . . Intuition is simply rapid cognition with the required knowledge partially swept under the carpet, all courtesy of emotion and much past practice’ (Damasio, 1994: xii–xiii). So our senses operate in a particular scenario and lead to emotions, and feeling these emotions ‘provide[s] an automated detection of the scenario components which are more likely to be relevant’ (Damasio, 1994: 175). Our emotions may bias us, but they are trained by habit to bias us in what is, on the average, an appropriate direction (which does not mean that the direction is necessarily appropriate in a given circumstance). As Damasio (1994: xi, xvii) puts it, ‘[emotion] allows the possibility of making living beings act smartly without having to think smartly . . . At their best, feelings point us in the proper direction, take us to an appropriate place in a decision-making space, where we may put the instruments of logic to good use.’

The senses, then, are fundamental to how we grasp the world and behave in it. For the sociologist Georg Simmel (1997 [1908]: 110), ‘every sense delivers contributions characteristic of its individual nature to the construction of sociated experience.’ The focus in this introductory chapter will be on sketching what a sensual sociology might look like in the present context. As an introduction to thinking about clothing, then, I propose that we begin with the classic five senses and endeavour to work out what each can tell us about clothing in the world. Of course, the senses would not normally be of equal importance in terms of the breadth and depth of what they could allow us to understand in the case of any given social phenomenon, and the reader will quite rightly suspect that sight provides the richest data of all for our current concerns. That is not the same as saying that it is the only relevant sense. There are also higher-level logics at work such as Bergson’s ‘habits’ and Damasio’s ‘cultural prescriptions’, and we shall deal with these as well.

Hearing

What would an analysis in terms of the sense of hearing tell us? After all, clothing and accessories can and do make sounds: they may swish, rustle, creak, clink, clank and click. Such sounds may announce a presence before it becomes visible and so serve as an advance warning and aid in the preparation of the appropriate social face. Swishings and rustlings of silks and satins slide easily into the erotic imaginary, as sound here depends upon and evokes the sensual existence of the (generally female) body through the physical movement needed to create the sounds. In the words of Miss Littlestar, Dominatrix of Fun (2005), ‘What other hidden delights exist beneath the rustle and swish of silk and satin?’ A satisfied customer of Caroline B (2005) takes the time out to remark that ‘Not least is the charm of the sound of pure nylon . . . when my wife crosses her legs’. The creak of leather, the clicks of high heels and the clinking of jewellery may also slip easily into the erotic domain. The auditory dimension of clothing, although relatively limited, nevertheless exists and is capable of orientating human behaviour and imaginings.

Touch

Like hearing, touch has a strong erotic dimension. We may experience metonymic shivers of pleasure if we touch the clothing of desired others (whether they are wearing the item at the time or not), and we may find more direct delights in the sensory characteristics of the materials themselves: fur, velvet, silk, suede, leather, linen, lycra, wool, cotton and so forth, all these have different feels and are capable of evoking ranges of meanings, memories and emotions. If the latter are unpleasant, then we may seek to avoid the touch of certain coverings. Touch also has a political dimension: who can touch what, when and under what circumstances.

Taste

Sensory taste in the case of dress seems to belong almost entirely to the erotic universe. Edible bras, briefs and panties seem to compose the world of edible clothing, to judge by what is advertised on the Internet (e.g., Caperdi Trading, 2005). Taste here may be a way of metonymically devouring the other in a most intimate way, but the status of the body of the other may not be quite as straightforward as it appears at first bite. If the relationship to the body in its brute reality was the prime aim, then edible underwear should soak up the flavours of a specific body and deliver those tastes through the act of consumption. But the body does not seem to be so directly transmissible, because I could find no advertisements that proposed anything other than pre-flavoured underwear for both men and women: for example, cherry, passion fruit, pina colada, strawberry and chocolate, pink champagne, mai tai (Sex Toys, 2005). If there is no time, desire or opportunity for edible clothing to pick up body flavours, then we have a rather coy metonymy at work: we consume symbolically without having to deal with the taint of the real. The specificities of peculiar bodies can be disregarded, and one can displace the tastes of intimate flesh into ‘safer’ flavours representing culturally sanctioned pleasures in the gustatory sub-domains of desserts and cocktails. These tastes can imaginatively be mapped on to any bodies or collections of bodies that we like. It is all very clean. But if edible clothing is worn for a while, then what presumably is tasted is the intermingling of specific body and general (pre-existing) non-body flavours. A given body is here marked by something coming from outside the immediate shroud of intimacy, and that makes it a body in a particular collective. The brute reality of the body is not here disregarded as it was earlier, but is rather accepted as part of a conglomeration of matter and concept: the social body. It is all very elemental. Taste in the gustatory sense may not be a large dimension of dress, but it certainly makes certain social practices possible.

Smell

What can the sense of smell contribute to an understanding of clothing? Obviously it can function as an indicator of levels of acceptable and unacceptable cleanliness for the wearer and others, it can broadcast news about where we have been lately as clothing fibres absorb odours from their surroundings, and it can be made to carry meanings we want it to carry (or hope it will carry) by the calculated use of scents. One could easily imagine a future where the smell of clothing could be manipulated technologically for the creation of certain atmospheres, and there is some evidence that this is already possible (see Eng, 1999). To judge by advertisements for soap powders and the like, though, the currently most desirable clothing smell is ‘fresh’. This is presumably another way of saying ‘clean’, and it is cleanliness that is highly desired and respected in our hygienized societies. Here, the native scent of a particular body is likely to be interpreted as signalling a degree of uncleanliness and concomitant unacceptability. Smelling ‘fresh’ is a way of making one’s bodily presence inoffensive to others, and is perhaps the nearest we can get to smelling of nothing at all except cleanliness. But anything beyond this risks the disruption of the community solidarity of the clean by a specific bodily presence. Perfume draws attention to the body of the wearer, and imposes itself on the company inescapably. It is ‘dirty’ in the Mary Douglas (1966) sense of ‘matter out of place’ in those contexts where the peculiarities of individual bodies are not supposed to matter (most workplaces and public spaces, for example). But in circumstances where it may be appropriate for individual bodies to be present to others in their own way, such as meetings between lovers, then individual perfumes or even natural body odours may be more acceptable than the degree zero of the fresh. Although perfume bans such as those in Canada (McLaren, 2000) may have been predicated on notions of multiple chemical sensitivity, our analysis suggests that there is something more fundamentally social at stake: the status of appropriate body in the world.

The power of clothing to retain smell makes it possible for the presence of a wearer and their relevant qualities to be evoked even when that person is no longer at the scene. This could be a specific loved one who may be away or who may even be deceased, but it could also be a person or category of person who has never been met by the one holding the clothing. One example of the latter can be found in the notorious trade in the unwashed underwear of (particularly) schoolgirls in the burusera shops of Japan: ‘items that have been worn for extended periods without laundering and those that retain certain, er, discharges are said to command a higher price’ (Schreiber, 2001). Clearly part of the erotic imaginary, such trade has recently been regulated in Tokyo: ‘Secondhand clothes stores are allowed to buy items such as school uniforms and underwear from children, only with their parents’ permission’ (Anonymous, 2004). Smell is a sense that links us with others in an intimate way not only because given odours are attached to given persons (or categories of person, in the case of anonymous Japanese schoolgirls) but because smell undercuts our more analytical senses: it is ‘primitive’, forcing itself onto our minds without the degree of careful processing we can give to the meanings of sights or sounds. We cannot easily hold it at a discriminating distance. This characteristic, indeed, is what can make it so invasive. An ‘overpowering’ smell overpowers these other senses and that is what makes it ‘overpowering’ in the first place: it fills our consciousness in a way that seems to lie outside our control.

Sight

None of the senses so far encountered provide as many possibilities for fine distinctions and meaning-making as the sense of sight, which is primary to an understanding of clothing. Appearances parade before us in often pre-formulated arrays, providing us with (more or less) instantly navigable social worlds. The social order is a dressed order: occupation, class, age group, sexuality, gender, region, religious affiliation, activity, sub-group membership and so forth are all announceable and readable through appearance. Natural phenomenologists, we generally take the world to be as it appears to announce itself to us. We will be skilled, subtle and swift readers of differences that are significant to who and where we are in the world at the time, and less skilled and somewhat rougher readers of appearances that orientate to categories more remote from our concerns. We operate by trusting our instant readings. As Marshall Sahlins (1976: 203) remarks:

‘Mere appearance’ must be one of the most important forms of symbolic statement in Western civilization. For it is by appearances that civilization turns the basic contradiction of its construction into a miracle of existence; a cohesive society of perfect strangers. But in the event, its cohesion depends on a coherence of a specific kind: on the possibility of apprehending others, their social condition, and thereby their relation to oneself ‘on first glance’.

Indeed, Frédéric Monneyron (2001: 20, 39, 47) believes so much in the power of appearances to create reality that he grants changes in fashion the power to bring about changes in society: designer creations change the image of the body and therefore the behaviours that are possible for the body (e.g., the availability of trousers for respectable women makes huge social change in the workplace possible). Sociologists would no doubt mutter something about social change making fashion change possible in response, but there may be a dialectic that has been overlooked: social change may lead to fashion change, but fashion change confirms the social change and brings it into the realm of the thinkable, the practicable and the embodiable for the greater public. It makes social change more real and less challengeable.

This trust in appearances has led to attempts to control and manipulate them, from the sumptuary laws of the medieval period that prescribed specific dress for specific classes to the claims to identity staked by those who wish to be taken as other than they are – or who simply wish to close any gap between who they think they are and who they appear to be. Indeed, the emulation of the appearances associated with higher social classes, and the subsequent changes made by the latter in order to retain a distinguishing difference, was considered by Simmel (1906) to be the very driver of fashion change in clothing. But such imitation does not have to be socially upwards: as Crane (2000: 14) has remarked, ‘Since the 1960s, the “bottom-up” model, in which new styles emerge in lower-status groups and are later adopted by higher-status groups . . . has explained an important segment of fashion phenomena.’ But this may just be a case of higher classes including ‘lower’ items as part of a much broader repertoire than those with lesser amounts of the various sorts of capital that it can manage. This is one way in which class distinction can be maintained in democratic societies where everyone has a claim to equality: have not only a number of items common to all classes, but also have ever-widening collections for those higher and higher up the economic and cultural scale. The analyses of Bennett et al. (1999) suggest that this process is what structures consumer practices generally in Australia, a country known for the ideological power of notions of egalitarianism and mateship.

Mostly, though, emulation is likely to be horizontal: we want to (or may be required to) look like everyone else in our part of classified social space, as Bourdieu (1984 [1979]) has so convincingly shown in his study of distinction. Goblot (1925) catches the situation well in his phrase ‘la barrière et le niveau’: the ‘barrier’ separates us from different social groups (we appear different from them) while the ‘plateau’ unites us as members of the same group (we look the same as they do). I prefer to render ‘niveau’ as ‘plateau’ rather than as the more literal ‘level’, because I do not wish to imply that a hierarchy is necessarily involved in difference. Goblot’s concepts are clearly also applicable to social differences other than class, and to sub-barriers and sub-plateaux within larger barriers and plateaux. Although there may be minor modulations o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Dress in the Sensory World
• 2 The Dangers of Dress: Utopian Critiques
• 3 More than the Times of Our Lives: Dress and Temporality
• 4 The Fabricated Body: A New History
• 5 Gift, Circulation and Exchange I: Clothing in the Family
• 6 Gift, Circulation and Exchange II: Clothing and Fashion in Cyberspace
• 7 Conclusion: A Hermeneutics of Dress
• References
• Index