FASHION AND IDENTITY

• Clothing and the self

  • There is a very close relationship between the body and the clothes a person wears
  • The clothes are comparable to an extension of the body and have the same non-verbal communicative function as the latter
  • The body can be manipulated to purposely provide information to others through various means (such as makeup, tattoos, diets, gymnastics, piercings, plastic surgery)
  • Clothes can be chosen to voluntarily communicate certain aspects of one's personal and social image
  • Both can also convey emotions that you are not always aware of
  • These communications can also be discrepant, i.e. not perfectly congruent between what one feels and what manifests externally
• The language of clothes

  • Clothes, like the body, speak
  • Their communication can change according to the nature of the message expressed
  • The messages can be of a social or personal type
• Social messages of clothes

  • Formality / informality
  • Belonging to a social group and, sometimes, the roles played within it
• Personal messages of clothes

  • Attraction
  • Well-being or discomfort
  • Positive or negative emotions
• Clothes between individuals and society


  • Clothing stands as an effective interface between the individual and society
  • It performs two important functions: negotiation of identities and the definition of situations and contexts of interaction
• Negotiation of identities


  • Dress serves to convey (in the case of the person wearing it) or to infer (in the case of others who observe it) different psychological, social and cultural characteristics of the person
  • The dress contributes both actively and passively to creating an interaction script that will serve as a guide at the moment of social exchange
• The definition of situations

  • Clothes help define the situation in which social interaction takes place as they provide useful clues for interpreting the expected or current social context
  • The degree of formality or informality, of intimacy, of importance, the reciprocity or otherwise of the roles, the availability to action are all aspects of the interaction that are socially constructed also on the basis of the external appearance of people
  • Clothes are resources that allow, on the active side of the social scene, to construct and manipulate aspects of the context and, on the passive side, to interpret this context
• The game of identities

  • Fashion occupies a necessary space between the public self and the private self: it does not belong to either of the two but determines their relationship
  • Fashion makes possible many forms of self-presentation - from the most authentic to the most false - its essence is fundamentally playful
  • Fashion plays with identities through imitation and identification
• Imitation


  Clothes and accessories make it possible to express a different self, desired and deliberately far from the real one
• Identification


  Clothes express adherence to the models and values of a certain social group
• The lesson of Georg Simmel

  • Close link between consumption and social relations - starting point of the first sociology of fashion
  • The value of goods depends on profound social needs such as the possibility of recognizing oneself in one group and distancing oneself from another
  • Clothes are used to signal one's identity and balance two fundamental social logics: cohesion and differentiation
  • Fashion is the metaphor of the fascination that novelties exert on the modern subject and on the bourgeoisie
  • Fashion provides the modern individual with a temporary anchor in the changeability of modern life, a way to get closer to things while keeping a certain distance, and the possibility of underlining one's own irreducibility to any exteriority
  • The juxtaposition of different styles, typical of modernity, builds a space for the expression of individual originality
• Spread of fashion


  The spread of fashion takes place through imitation from top to bottom, from upper classes to lower classes (Trickle-Down effect)
• Ambivalences in fashion


  • Identification models are less clear-cut and defined, producing ambiguities and ambivalences that are skillfully exploited by fashion
  • Ambivalences in fashion always respect a playful script and are fueled by self-irony and deliberate exaggeration
  • Fashion thrives on the ambivalence of identity linked to gender, age and social class
• Ambivalences related to gender

  • Women want a more masculine look by adopting some men's dress codes
  • Men emulate the opposite sex by using a wider range of colors and more improvising combinations of clothes and accessories
• Ambivalences of status


  • The rich want to look like the poor and vice versa
• Ambivalences of age


  • Young people rediscover laces and ornaments typical of past fashions
  • Older people follow a youthful look by wearing jeans, jackets, sneakers, etc.
• Jeans


  • Faded and washed out jeans as an exhibition of poverty
  • Designer jeans as an ostentation of wealth
  • Embroidered jeans, with sequins and beads as a manifestation of femininity
  • Ripped jeans as a manifestation of youth
• Thorstein Veblen and "conspicuous consumption"


  • Consisting of "ceremonial" acquisitions, which serve to make one's social position visible
  • Conspicuous consumption ends up involving all social groups as an important tool in the competitive struggle to assert one's social position
  • Dominant groups consume not just precious goods but also very refined goods, the use of which requires a continuous "cultivation of the aesthetic faculties", which in turn requires time and money
• Veblenian analysis has a major limitation: it focuses on the fact that certain goods signal differences but does not say anything about what differences and how this happens
• Power dressing


  • Between the 1970s and 1980s, a generation of educated and independent women came forward in the Western world
  • Women's clothing becomes the subject of a dramatic change, with the introduction of comfortable suits, which adapt to contemporary life, largely lived away from home
  • Power dressing, the rigorous work dress for those who perform managerial roles, was born in this period to give shape to the female body in a specific place, the work, constituting an innovative consumption strategy for the women of the time
  • The adoption of the suit represents a strategy that declines the female staff as if they were a male body, hiding and masculizing the female curves within the jacket
  • The subtle balance between masculine (serious professional representation) and feminine is continually balanced and unbalanced by jewelry, necklaces, make-up, hair-styling
  • The feminine details are considered fundamental to obtain recognition and credibility: a too masculine representation risks being counterproductive in terms of authority