ONLINE DOSSIER: ANA MARTA GONZÁLEZ, LAURA BOVONE »IDENTITIES THROUGH FASHION: A MULITDISCIPLINARY APPROACH«
González, Ana Marta, and Laura Bovone. Identities Through Fashion: A Multidisciplinary Approach. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2012.
» The simplest type of definition is that fashion is a form of material culture related to bodily decoration.« (p. 1)
»One indication that fashion is not a trivial and ephemeral phenomenon is the way in which fashionable clothing and accessories are and have been used to express and shape personal and social identities.« (p. 2)
»In premodern and modern societies, members of the upper class and later the bourgeoisie used fashion to indicate their social position or the position to which they aspired. Identification with social class influenced the way individuals perceived their identities and their relationships with their social environments.« (p. 2)
»In postmodern societies, fashionable styles reflect the complexity of the ways people perceive their connections with one another.« (p. 2)
»Lipovetsky (1987) perceives this so-called ‘empire of fashion’ as liberating for the individual who obtains the capacity for self-expression. By contrast, Baudrillard (1970) views the individual as being trapped in a consumer society where fashion, along with other cultural goods, is useless and ultimately meaningless.« (p. 2)
»Laura Bovone provides a useful definition of identity. She distinguishes between personal identity (what makes an individual unique) and social identity (what makes an individual similar to others in her social group). « (p. 3)
»In modern societies, individuals used fashion to construct unique selves, but, in postmodern societies, they prefer to avoid commitment to a specific identity, so as to remain free to experiment with alternative identities.« (p. 3)
»Lipovetsky overemphasizes the level of hyperindividualism that supposedly elevates the role of fashion while Baudrillard overstates the extent to which the individual lacks a coherent sense of self that could provide a basis for selecting among fashions and consumer goods.« (p. 3)
»gaps between clothing and identity« (p. 67)
»Simmel (1911) skilfully highlighted the pendulum movement of differentiation and imitation as the core of fashionable behaviors, where the periodical clothing renewal of an elite may be extended also to larger population segments.« (p.69)
»Haute couture creates new trends and produces a few articles of clothing made to measure, and industrial production then tries to imitate it; they refer to two clearly differentiated classes.« (p. 69)
»In order to properly analyze fashion consumption, it is necessary, on the one hand, to pay attention at the micro-level—that is, to examine the situated and incorporated practices involved through the sociological approach. On the other hand, it is necessary to reassess the interactive dynamic of the actors involved in the mechanisms of the production of meaning, and here cultural studies becomes the dominant context. « (p. 70)
»So the objects we choose are not only fundamental to understanding aesthetic sensitivity, but also, in general, the system of values (McCracken 1990). Therefore, they are not the tools of a generic expressiveness or a generic submission to production dictates, of authenticity rather than conformism, but rather opportunities to place ourselves socially via a situated practice, to communicate to the outer world our belonging or exclusion, or even our ambivalence and instability.« (p. 71)
»The problem of identity is not a problem of appearance. However, I can only approach another person and his/her identity through appearance—words, actions, glances or dress, which, to some extent, might also be considered as personal narratives, or accounts of the self (Davis 1992; McCracken 1990)—and the other person will know me in the same way.« (p. 71)
»The individual ordinarily expects to exert some control over the guise in which he appears before others. For this he needs cosmetics and clothing supplies, tools for applying, arranging, and repairing them, and an accessible, secure place to store these supplies and tools—in short, the individual will need an ‘identity kit’ for the management of his personal front. (Goff man 1968: 28–9)« (p. 72)
»Fashion choice is a means for reflecting on oneself, for recovering one’s independence with respect to an ultra-socialized model of oneself to which should correspond an ultra-socialized way of clothing oneself. Our obsession for changes, our desire to differentiate ourselves from the others, but most of all from what others would more obviously expect from us, is, according to Goff man, the actual sense of fashion, which provides us with the tools for controlling the image others will have of us.« (p. 72)
»When an individual enters the presence of others, he will want to discover the underlying facts of the interaction, that is, the actual outcome of the activity of the others, as well as their innermost feelings concerning him. Paradoxically, the more the individual is concerned with the reality that is not available to perception, the more he must concentrate on his appearance. (Goff man 1959: 249)« (p. 72)
»Therefore, we can conclude (with Alvira 2004) that if we are to distinguish between outer and inner identity, it is also true that any inner identity becomes social, relates and communicates itself through the outer identity. If I cannot have but very partial access to identity through appearance, then the body is the basic means for drawing the interiority or the thoughts of the other, and it is impossible to leave out clothing and consider it as an irrelevant accessory.« (p. 73)
»‘Fashioning the body becomes a practice through which the individual can fashion a self’ (Finkelstein 1998: 50).« (p. 73)
»The problem of identity is a problem of indeterminateness, which begins when identity is considered as something to be achieved—not a fact, but a task.« (p. 74)
»If the modern ‘problem of identity’ was how to construct an identity and keep it solid and stable, the postmodern ‘problem of identity’ is primarily how to avoid fixation and keep the options open. (Bauman 1996: 18)« (p. 74)
»The modern individual is a moving individual, a rising bourgeois, a worker who wants to improve himself in comparison with his parents. In any case, the modern individual remains ‘a pilgrim’, as Bauman (1996) writes, and achieves his socially acknowledged goal without the mind being diverted by glittering things and opportunities. Modern identity is not stable, but its mobility is oriented. The process of identity individualization is only starting.« (p. 74)
»Avoiding classification, dressing like nobody else, as Polhemus (1995) remarks, is the only way to feel authentic. As a matter of fact, just as with identity, even the choice of dress is increasingly less legible ‘in contemporary, fragmented societies . . . where lifestyles, age cohorts, gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity are as meaningful to people as social class in constructing their self-images and in their presentation of self’ (Crane 2000: 2).« (p. 74)
»For many people, the body becomes the object of the same cares and conscious efforts that in the past were devoted to one’s spiritual edification or, more frequently, to one’s career. In an image society, the body becomes a project, a basic requirement for achieving any success or pleasure (Featherstone 1991a). Clothing takes part in this project, and even becomes osmotic with the body itself (more evidently if we refer to permanent marks such as piercing, tattoos, etc.); it contributes to the dignity of the self, avoids embarrassing situations and mediates among different social solicitations. According to Davis, dress is “a kind of visual metaphor for identity and, as pertains in particular to the open society of the west, for registering the culturally anchored ambivalence that resonates within and among identities.” (Davis 1992: 25)« (p. 75–76)