How Fashion Helps Individuals Manage Their Identities - Coursework Example

How fashion helps individuals manage their identities Introduction Fashion, by definition, is the practice or style, especially in footwear, accessories, clothing, body piercing, furniture, or makeup. There is a great distinction between the habitual trends in the way a person often dresses. Fashion is the prevailing behavior styles and the creations that are newest from textile designers (Warhol, 2004). Since the frequent times the term ‘costume’ is linked with the term ‘fashion’ regularly, the use of the term ‘costume’ has been narrowed down to special particular senses like masquerade wear or fancy dress, while the term ‘fashion’ collectively means the clothing, with the inclusion of study of it. Some of the trends seem to be androgynous despite the fact that the factors of fashion can either be masculine or feminine. There has been a close relationship between fashion and identity. Clothes express, shape, and they display identity. Since clothes are part of the fashion, therefore, fashion offers a lens that is very useful in exploring the probability of altering the methods in which the older identities are encompassed in contemporary culture. The relationship that exists between fashion and identity has been a theme in dress studies that has been very established, though the relationship has been given a new thrust by the postmodernism which has laced much of its emphasis on identity (Williamson, 2009). The understanding of this link has been in numerous ways, and the most prominent one being social class. Onward sociologists Simmel and Veblen have made their explorations on the way in which fashion acts as a facet of class identity, with clothing diffuses down the social hierarchy as its abandonment and adoption are by elites, and the style is taken up by the lower groups. Emulation of the competitive class is therefore perceived to be the engine of fashion. A redefinition of the account is given by Bourdieu where he carries out the analysis of the role of clothing being the marker of distinction of class where dress is a factor of cultural capital, a way in which the elites establish, reproduce and maintain the positions of power, hence reinforcing the relation of subordination and dominance. More recently, there has been a challenge offered to the dominance of class in the disguise of fashion. The step of making fashion democratic and the quick rise in the street styles have made its dynamic less major. This result into other aspects of identity being increasingly emphasized (Medina, 2009). Crane, however, presents a counter interpretation in which she argues that age has replaced the class as the engine of change in the fashion system. With the democratization of fashion in the late twentieth century, class is no longer the key driver. Currently, styles have been observed to diffuse down the hierarchy of age, as they once diffused down the class hierarchy. In this account, age ordering is still highly significant, indeed is some senses more so than in the past. What has happened is that the form of the ordering has changed, reconstituted itself. The empirical evidence for Crane’s assertion is thin (Watt, 2012). Work by Freitas and colleagues; however, does support the view that young people associate out of date clothing with older people. Clothing and the Body According to Hibbert (2000), clothing is closely linked to the body. It forms the testamentary envelope that contains the body and presents it to the social world. It is the body that makes clothes exist and we cannot understand the field of clothing and age without reference it. Over the last two decades, there has been a mass of writing on the body, and much of it influenced by post-modern and post-structuralism theorizing. Such accounts are frequently underpinned by a radical epistemology in which the body is presented as a discursive construction, knowable only in and through the discourses and practices that inscribe it (Bertino & Takahashi, 2010). Work in this vein tends to emphasize the plasticity of the body, the capacity of individuals and cultures to alter, mould, and reformulate it through cultural practices and through techniques like plastic surgery, implants, technological extensions; and this are linked to the post-modern emphasis on fluidity of identity and the malleability of the decentralized self (Roper, 2010). These approaches have, however, been subject to critique. Despite their emphasis on the body, they seem to present an oddly disembodied account in which the physicality of the body, its heavy, sensate corporeality, is lost in a fog of discourse and sign. There is little sense of the body as lived reality, of the ways it might be a generator as well as a receptor of meanings (Craats, 2009). More recently, there has been a welcome return of interest in real bodies and real embodiment informed by the phenomenological work of Merleau-Ponty and new strands of theorizing such as Critical Realism. These debates have implications for how we understand ageing and identity, for ageing has a fundamentally bodily character. This is not to say that it is not profoundly shaped by social and cultural discourses, but we need to recognize how these operate interactively with physiology (Modi, 2011). Ultimately as many critics note, aging is not optional. The body also has its limits of plasticity. Despite all the efforts of surgery, anti-ageing medicine, cosmetics and exercise, bodies still age and die. We thus need to understand ageing as both a physiological and cultural phenomenon. This has consequences for how we approach identity and dress, for some of the features of age-associated clothing arise from physiological changes. For example, the cut of clothes for older people is looser, designed to accommodate thickening waists and heavier (Jones, 2008). Age and Identity There are two contrasting interpretations, or rather evaluations, of these developments. The first is broadly favorable. By this account, consumption forms a basis for social integration and is a source of pleasure and identity fashioning, so its extension to later years acts to integrate older people into the mainstream. In relation to clothing and dress, it means the end of the old culture of age ordering, of self-effacement, and drab and frumpy dress: there is no reason why older people should not wear the same clothes, shop at the same fashion conscious shops as younger people (Vescia, 2011). For women in particular it offers liberation from what is a very negative set of messages around sexuality, appearance and self-assertion, policed by a heavily moralistic language. As we noted earlier systematic evidence for the disappearance of age ordering has yet to be gathered and evaluated, however, there exist reasons to have the thought that there have been cultural changes in this regard (Glover, 2010) The development of consumer culture also means extending to older people the same access to self-expression and identity formation that is enjoyed – it is asserted - by young. There is the argument that the transformations of post modernity have indeed produced a shift toward greater freedom in the self-construction in age, an erosion of the constraints of cultural and material necessity (Maher, Bennett, Hawess, Gillen & Parkes, 2010). Fluidity and playfulness are thus extended to older people also. For women, in particular, consumption culture offers the possibility of continuity with an earlier self in the form of the women’s culture of pleasure in dress: there is no reason why older women should be exiled from this area of aesthetic pleasure. This broadly celebrations account has been subject to critique. It applies only to the well-off since integration through consumption requires income (Idman & De Leeuw, 2010). Though there are many older people with high disposable incomes, there are many without; and the uncertainty of future pension provision means that latter group is likely to grow, undermining the celebrations trajectory of future old age. Phillipson is also critical of the impact of these discursive structures on the status of older people more generally; the deinstitutionalization of the life course and the destabilization of traditional sources of identity he argues threaten to undermine the cultural and ethical basis of the liberal welfare state, and in doing so expose the less affluent to unprecedented economic and existential hazard. The postmodern dream of ageing is also predicated on good health (Moore, 2010). To sustain this dream the body needs to be able to bear the kinds of identity construction that extended middle age offers. But illness and disability disturb this basis; the pleasures of dress are likely to ebb away as this happens (Wolfe, 2012). Critiques also arise from the sense that exposure to consumption culture with its heavy emphasis on appearance and presentation sets up a set of demands in terms of which older people can only fail. Consumption culture is profoundly youth oriented. But if such youthful identities become increasingly impossible to perform, greater engagement with the sphere of appearance may only present occasions for failure, undermining confidence and well being. The spread of consumption values and expectations may thus be oppressive rather than life enhancing (Orme, 2007). Lastly there is the question of transcendence. Consumer culture is essentially materialistic: it is about the concrete, the material, the here and now of acquisition and possession. It leads us to regard our bodies as sites for intervention, encouraging us to be more focused on and in our bodies. But old age may properly be a time of transcendence and disengagement from the physical, a time to leave the body behind in the pursuit of other aspects of the self. Gerontology has tended to fight shy of such assertions, partly as a result of the declining salience of religion in western culture; but partly also from a proper sense that such language of transcendence in old age may be an imposition on older people of cultural values in which they have no personal interest. There are parallels here with the earlier discrediting of disengagement theory. But there may in fact be good reasons to embrace transcendence in later years. We know from work on chronic illness and pain that the capacity to separate the self from the body is a key element enabling people to manage bodily failure, so that bodily transcendence may be a fruitful strategy to adopt in the face of the depredations and changes of old age. In relation to clothing and appearance, why invest time, money and the self in an area where returns are likely to be diminishing and engagement only discouraging? Queen Elizabeth I is often made subject to implicit criticism for her banishment of all mirrors from her palaces as she grew old, but perhaps her strategy was a wise one (Walker & Leedham-Green, 2010) Clothes offer a field in which we can explore the cultural constitution of age. Clothes are cultural artifacts which are embedded in sets of meanings that are historical and current, shaped by economic and social forces, and reflecting current cultural and social concerns. Among these sets, of meanings are assumptions about the nature of age and its role within the social order. As we have seen, clothes have historically been age ordered, reflecting embedded assumptions about age and its role in society (Robinson & Tabberer, 2005). Age has always been a one of the key structuring principles, and we should not be surprised to find it reflected at the bodily level in the clothes that people wear. Indeed, part of the wider role of clothes, as we noted, is to render social difference concrete and visible. But these traditional forms of age ordering are increasingly under pressure. The democratization of fashion and the growth of involvement of older people in consumption are in the process of changing the nature of age ordering in dress in ways that point to wider shifts in the experience and understanding of later years. We now have what appears to be an extended plateau of late middle years, broken only by the onset of serious disability or illness, in which there is cultural continuity with earlier stages and cohorts, cemented by the common field of consumption. Clothing also enables us to address questions of the plasticity of the body and identity (Hynson, 2007). Conclusion Though clothes need to be seen as cultural artifacts, they operate in conjunction with and in response to the body so that their materiality needs to reflect the materiality of the body. In the case of older bodies this means responding to changes that occur as people age, so that the nature of clothing for older people is to some degree determined, or at least influenced, by such changes. Although we rightly focus on the ways in which the body and ageing are both culturally defined, constituted in and through discourses, embedded in cultural meanings, we need to retain a sense also of their physicality and the interplay that occurs around this. Clothes can indeed be a means of individuals to present themselves ways that are less compromised by the negative stereotypes of wider culture, embodied in frumpy, drab, self-effacing ‘older person’s’ dress. Clothes have particular significance here because of their capacity to stand alone as artifacts, separate from the individual and their body though at the same time acting as an intermediary between the body and its public presentation. Unlike the face or hair, or other aspects of the bodily appearance, they are wholly cultural productions, and they can literally be put on or off. But as we noted, this capacity to transform and redefine is limited. Clothes operate in conjunction with the body; there is interplay between the two. An old body in youthful dress is not transformed but exaggerated. Adopting youthful styles, or at least avoiding age-associated ones, can help to present the self in a less clearly age defined manner. All of this supports the view that identities are to some degree optional, but the extent of this has been over emphasized. The postmodern dream of fluidity and self-fashioning has been exaggerated, certainly with regard to old age and the role that appearance and dress play in its constitution. As many critics have commented, old age is not optional even in the land of post modernity. Reference list: Bertino, E., & Takahashi, K. (2010). Identity Management concepts, technologies, and systems. 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