Fashion and Identity

 

One of the most intriguing and contested notions in the humanities and social sciences is identity. Fashion is intrinsically linked to identity constructions and reconstructions: how we depict contrasts and ourselves in our daily lives. Individuals declare who they are and who they hope to become by their appearance style (personal interpretations of, and opposition to, fashion). They also state who they do not wish to be or become (Freitas et al., 1997). Appearance style is a metaphor for identification; it is a complicated metaphor that encompasses physical characteristics (such as skin color, bodily shape, and hair texture) as well as clothing and grooming practices. Because the latter are more prone to change, they are prone to fluctuating and fluid ways of viewing oneself in relation to others within the greater context of fashion change.

Overlapping Identities

Gender, color, ethnicity, social class, sexuality, age, national identity, and personal interests, aesthetic, and politics are all visually articulated through appearance style. At any given time, not all of these identities are consciously present; power dynamics influence one's consciousness of one identity or another. Privileged identities (such as whiteness, masculinity, and heterosexuality) are frequently assumed to be "natural" or "normal." However, because identities connect and overlap, their portrayal is rarely straightforward. From the standpoint of cultural studies, identities not only have histories but also futures: they come from somewhere, they are complicated and conflicting, and they allow us to express who we might become (Ang 2000).

Self-Expression

It can be difficult to express who we are and are becoming in words; appearance style appears to offer a manner of making a statement that is difficult to put into words—that is, emerging and crossing identities. In fact, it is easier to express who we do not want to be or seem like (for example, not feminine, not too slutty, no longer a child) than it is to express who we are (Freitas et al., 1997). Furthermore, one identity merges or blurs into another (for example, gender into sexuality). Furthermore, articulations of identity are frequently ambiguous. Davis (1992) contended that identity ambiguities serve as "fuel," or continual inspiration for fashion development. Among many additional possibilities within and across identities, fashion-susceptible ambivalences include the interplay of youth versus age, masculinity versus femininity, or high versus low status.

Identity in the Social Sciences

The study of identity in the social sciences and humanities has a long history, particularly in modern Western societies, of the self, personality, and subjectivity. Breward (1995) sees the middle to late sixteenth century as a period of increased self-consciousness about identity as something that might be "fashioned" individually (p. 69). Philosophers (such as Hume and Rousseau) were asking what defines one's actual selfhood during the eighteenth century, when conventional institutions were crumbling (Kellner 1994). (It's worth noting that this interrogation still assumed the subjectivity of a white, bourgeois male.) Consumers began to develop more individualized interactions with individualism, modernity, culture, and clothes in the eighteenth century as well (Breward 1995, p.112). For example, the "molly" culture of eighteenth-century London allowed males to challenge traditional manhood boundaries by experimenting with feminine dress and accessories. By the eighteenth century, consumption had closely tied identity to one's belongings, particularly among bourgeois Western women. Simultaneously, new means of expressing identifications and disidentifications in urban life emerged (for example, bohemians, dandies; Breward 2003, p. 218).

Arriving at Individual Expression

The current fashion consumer was shifting away from "exquisite artifice" and toward personalized expression (Breward 2003, p. 200). According to Crane (2000), this is a move from class fashion to consumer fashion. This was not an easy task. Fragmentation and dislocation were generated by modernity, resulting in a paradoxical understanding of what it meant to be an individual. Wilson (1985) theorizes that a modern sense of individuality serves as a wound that causes concern about maintaining one's autonomy; fashion helps to alleviate that fear while simultaneously reminding us that individuality can be subdued (p. 12).

Although clothing had been a primary means of identifying oneself (for example, by occupation, regional identity, religion, or social class) in public spaces for centuries (Crane, 2000), the twentieth century saw a broader range of subcultural groupings visually mark "their difference from the dominant culture and their peers by utilizing the props of material and commercial culture" (Breward 2003, p. 222). Gregory Stone (1965), a sociologist, argued in the 1960s that identification has numerous advantages over the more stable, psychological idea of personality, and that identity is not a code word for "self." Rather, identity is a self-proclaimed meaning that is grounded in and negotiated through social relationships. He contended that physical appearance is critical for identification and differentiation in everyday life. The "teenage phenomenon" of the 1950s and 1960s highlighted this by promoting a sense of age identity as it intersected with a wide range of musical and personal preferences—all coded through appearance trends. The late 1960s and early 1970s social movements (civil rights, feminism, gay and lesbian rights) emphasized aesthetic techniques for establishing and transgressing racialized, ethnic, gender, and sexual identities.

Anything Goes

An advanced (global) capitalist marketplace has developed an eclectic array of goods from which individuals can select, mix, and match to create their identities from the post-1960s to the present—a time labeled as everything from post-industrial to postmodern (Kaiser 1999; Kaiser, Nagasawa, and Hutton, 1991). Wilson (1992) points out that, despite modern (or postmodern) fragmentation, we do not choose our bodies, and thus "postmodern fun can never totally win the day" (p. 8). In the context of ongoing fashion change, appearance style serves to (a) oppose "older" conceptions about fixed personality or genuine self and (b) more securely fix identification (for example, ethnicity, sexuality, religion). Style and fashion provide techniques for explaining the "contradictory necessity and impossibility of identities... amid the messiness of everyday existence" as the global and local intersect (Ang 2000, p. 11).