Social and cultural dynamics of fashion
The study of fashion covers a wide terrain, ranging from production to consumption and systems of meaning and signification
When researchers choose to focus on a particular dimension of fashion, for example production rather than consumption, or representation in the media rather than the wear and tear of material clothes, they will need to choose the appropriate methodologies and theories to carry out the research effectively and analyse the results. By providing evaluative introductions to key theorists in the context of fashion, the book provides readers with an accessible overview of relevant theories and concepts in order to help them ‘think through fashion’ more deeply and critically.
To theorize fashion means to develop propositions and arguments that advance the understanding of its logic and manifestations.
And Peter McNeil explains how Georg Simmel’s theorizing of everyday life as informed by dualism helps us understand the logic of fashion, at once fuelled by the desire to be like someone else, but also different from someone else or, to put it differently, fashion is as much about sameness as it is about difference.
the past and the present intersecting in theory
However, we now live in a time where one turn follows the other more quickly than we can keep up reading about them: the visual turn, the experiential turn, the spatial turn, the cultural turn, the performative turn, the affective turn, the material turn, and so on. This not only signifies that the term ‘turn’ suffers a huge inflation, but also that we live and think in a time of fast change, a period after post-modernism that is not yet clearly defined (Vermeulen and Van den Akker, 2010).
The problem of the linguistic turn was that it put too much emphasis on language. This point has been addressed in fashion studies. Joanne Entwistle, for example, argues that structuralism and post-structuralism have ‘effectively displace[d]the idea of embodiment and the individual and can give us no account of experience or agency’ (2000: 70). In shaking off the dominant framework of textuality and semiotics, Entwistle and other scholars of fashion enlist different schools of thought, most notably the more sociological approach of Simmel, Goffman, Bourdieu and Latour, who are discussed in Thinking through Fashion . In all their differences, such a sociological approach allows us to understand fashion not only as a signifying system, but also as an embodied practice that takes place in a collectively shared social space.
This is where we touch upon the new, or rather revived, concept of materiality, introduced as ‘new materialism’ or ‘the material turn’ (Bennett and Joyce, 2010; Coole and Frost, 2010; Dolphijn and Van der Tuin, 2012; Barrett and Bolt, 2013). These authors argue that the post-structuralist focus on language neglected the very matter and materiality of objects and the world. Barbara Bolt emphasizes the relevance of the material turn for the creative arts, including fashion, since its ‘very materiality has disappeared into the textual, the linguistic and the discursive’ (2013: 4). As Bill Brown argues, this not only holds for art or fashion, but also for our bodies and identities, which are constructed and mediated not only through signs but also materially (2010: 60). Identity ‘matters’.
The material turn reopens highly relevant issues for fashion studies, such as practice, embodiment and experience. Our agency takes place through material things and objects – such as clothes. As Appadurai argued (2013 [1986]), people’s relationship to objects is socially and culturally dependent, which in turn implies that things themselves have a social life. We mediate the social relations to objects, and social systems through which objects become meaningful (or not). Our identities function within a material culture, as we know all too well from our emotional relations to objects, whether it is a chocolate bar that soothes our anxiety, a song that reminds us of a lost love, or a particular dress that makes us feel sexy. Food, music or clothes have a value. Of course, in high capitalism the value is always financial, but, as Karl Marx demonstrated in Das Kapital (1990 [1867]), the value is mostly a surplus value because of our affective relations to material things. Matter, objects, have an intrinsic social quality. ‘Stuff’ – as the title of Daniel Miller’s (2010) book runs – does not merely exist, but is always transformed by social interaction into a certain value: ‘I shop, therefore I am’. Putting the emphasis on materiality therefore does not preclude an understanding of matter as symbolic; rather, it shows that there is a constant negotiation between the material and the symbolic.
New materialism claims to be ‘new’, which it is in the sense of refocusing on matter and materiality after decades of a dominant focus on text and textuality. Yet, materialism has a long and prestigious genealogy and is in fact inf luenced by several sources and disciplines (Bennett and Joyce, 2010). These theories should not be understood as being completely separated, because many of these theorists have been inspired or even set off by each other. The first is the historical materialism of Karl Marx with its emphasis on the praxis of production and labour, as is further explained in the chapter on Marx in this book. Second, Marxism has inspired a sociological approach to the culture of things as in the work of Thorstein Veblen and Georg Simmel (Brown, 2010: 62). Marxist Walter Benjamin has understood how the history of production and labour is intimately connected to circulation and consumption, and thus to ‘a history of fascination, apprehension, aspiration’ (Brown, 2010: 63). Third, the sociological approach is closely related to cultural anthropology as the discipline that has put the ‘very being of objects’ as its central topic (Brown, 2001: 9). Fourth, the Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) of Bruno Latour (2005) attributes some sort of agency to non-human actors, which helps to think about the agency of things and assemblages of human and non-human actors. Fifth, the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty has put the focus on the materiality of the human body, exploring the experience of what he calls ‘my-body-inthe-world’ (2002: 167). Sixth, the materialist branch of feminism rethinks the materiality of the human body and its gendered nature (Braidotti, 2002). And finally, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987 [1980]) evoke on the one hand a materialism of the flesh that considers the body as intelligent matter, and on the other hand add a form of empiricism that rejects the transcendental idea of reason. The convergence of those two strands produces a vital materialism combining critique with creativity. The fact that many of these theorists are discussed in Thinking through Fashion signals the importance of materialism for fashion studies. Fashion is not only a system of signification but also a commercial industry producing and selling material commodities. Fashion, perhaps more conspicuously than other cultural realms, consists of material objects and involves a bodily practice of dressing. This fact has not escaped scholars of fashion. The anthropological perspective has regarded clothes as objects in their own right or as meaningful within practices of dressing (Küchler and Miller, 2005). Daniel Miller (1998) argued for balancing theories to take on the specificity of material cultures. Ethnographic approaches are important methodologies for understanding what people wear and why (Woodward, 2007). Entwistle (2000) has argued for an empirically grounded sociology that takes the embodied practice of dress seriously. Because these diverse approaches have always been vital methodologies for fashion studies, the claim of novelty of ‘new materialism’ seems a bit singular. In that sense it may be better to speak of ‘renewed materialism’. Fashion studies is then unique in combining many different strands of theory, where the extremes of the linguistic turn have been kept in check by the necessary focus on the very materiality of fashion: its mode of production, but also the textiles, and the clothes in our wardrobe or on our body. As Bill Brown wittily writes, ‘culture itself is now appearing not as text but as textile’ (2010: 64).
Chapter 4: Georg Simmel (1858– 1918)
Having lived most of his life in Berlin, Georg Simmel was indelibly formed by the fact of his maturing in one of the great fin-de-siècle European cities. As Peter McNeil shows, Simmel’s approach to social forms played a major role in creating a model for understanding fashion that has been particularly influential in the United States of America since the 1910s, being revived in the 1950s and again in the 1980s, and continuing to resonate within many different strands of international fashion studies today. Simmel’s analysis of the endless differentiation of objects and details in his contemporary society laid a bedrock for later theorists of everyday life including Roland Barthes. He also influenced the development of North American ‘sociology of everyday life’, or ‘ethno-methodological’ sociology and social psychology. Simmel’s approach to fashion, embedded within his understanding of modernity, has influenced great writers on fashion, no matter their methodological or disciplinary affiliations. His writing style, according to McNeil, is akin to ‘Impressionism’ or ‘Symbolism’ in painting or music; he was, in fact, called ‘a philosophical Monet’ by the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács.
Notes on George Simmel:
‘one of the great influences on the development of the sociological interpretation of fashion, Georg Simmel’
It was Simmel’s attempt to understand the human condition as formed within a modern metropolis of innumerable stimuli that enabled him to generate his particular theory of the intersection of city life and modern fashion,
Simmel’s approach to social forms played a major role in creating a model for understanding fashion
Simmel’s approach to fashion, embedded within his understanding of modernity, has influenced many great writers on fashion, no matter their methodological or disciplinary affiliations. They range from the art historian Aileen Ribeiro, who refers to him in her work on nineteenth-century cosmetics Facing Beauty: Painted Women and Cosmetic Art (2011) to the cultural theorist Caroline Evans, who makes use of him in her work on the blasé air of the modern fashion model, The Mechanical Smile (2013). Recent works that attempt to write a philosophy of fashion also consider Simmel to be the foundational writer (Meinhold, 2013). The persistent influence of Simmel can be seen in the work of Gilles Lipovetsky, who crafted a wide-ranging synthesis of fashion in which he argued, now somewhat controversially, that fashion is a mainly Western and post-feudal invention (Lipovetsky, 2002 [1987]).
Simmel studied the new field of Völkerpsychologie , an approach that considered the moulding of a person by a wider whole. Such an approach had been influenced by the philosophy of Nietzsche. In this method, no longer used, society is seen as a form of cultural production rather than having any fixity.
As mentioned earlier, Simmel’s work was not primarily about fashion. Rather, he was interested in the inter-linked aesthetic and social aspects of contemporary society. However, Simmel is now famous within the historiography of design for an essay entitled ‘The Philosophy of Fashion’ (1901, reprinted in English in 1904) as well as a number of essays on style and adornment. 2 Simmel was interested there in what has been called ‘sociation’ ( Vergesellschaftung ), which has been translated as ‘socialisation’, and which demands that society is not reducible to the acts of individuals (Milà, 2005: 39). Simmel tried to make sense of the new metropolis of quickening tempos and sensations of people and products that characterized the post-industrial city. Habermas (1996 [1991]: 405) notes, ‘In short, for Simmel the membranes of the spirit of the age were wide open.’ The clothing that people wore to inhabit these new city spaces intrigued Simmel, and fashion was a useful subject for him to test and also outline his propositions regarding the relationship of aesthetic and social forms. It is incredible that an 18-page essay on dress has had such impact on twentieth-century conceptions of the motive and reasons behind fashionable dressing.
Simmel felt that the middle class and the metropolis had become synonymous with fashion, as the rich and the poor occupied a different cadence of life. Even the rise of travel and the cutting up of the year into segments of time to mark the concept of vacations was, to Simmel, a sign of the heightened neurasthenia of the modern. As with so many things, this was not a completely new position; it was the argument of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé in the fashion journal La Dernière Mode in the 1870s. The latter had noted how the invention of the railway demanded a new cadence of day and even created new clothing fashions for that passage of time. Many of the concepts about fashion developed by figures as significant as Charles Baudelaire (1821– 1867) and Mallarmé (1842– 1898) passed indirectly into the sociology and critical thinking of Simmel and Walter Benjamin (1892– 1940) and continue to reverberate in the writings of contemporary fashion theorists including Ulrich Lehmann and Barbara Vinken. 3 Simmel’s writings were very influential on aspects of the ‘New Art History’ of the late 1970s and 1980s, which had a strong emphasis upon exploring the distinctive visual culture and psychology that grew up alongside nineteenth-century metropolitan life, as depicted by Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists. It could be argued that a nascent ‘fashion studies’ as opposed to dress or costume studies emerged in the period circa 1990 from this awakened interest in nineteenth-century visual culture. The women’s studies, left criticism and ‘Victorian’ studies of the 1970s and early 1980s all contributed to the development of ‘fashion studies’ and the study and rediscovery of Simmel was central to this endeavour. 4 Simmel was more or less compulsory reading for students of art history and cultural anthropology in the 1980s and early 1990s in the Anglophone world. This scholarship built upon the investigation of fashion as a part of la vie quotidienne (not yet named ‘popular culture’) developed by French theorists such as Henri Lefebvre, Georges Perec, Michel de Certeau and Roland Barthes, whose writings in the period from the 1930s until the 1960s explored the socio-politics of everyday life. (For more on Barthes, see chapter 8 in this book.)
Fashion is a part of human aesthetic experience and this fact Simmel always brought to the fore.
The association of a fashion-image culture with this new individualism was inflected in the formulation famously proposed by Simmel in the first decade of the twentieth century, in which fashion was characterized as a dual action of individualism and conformity (Simmel, 1950 [1905]: 338– 44). Such a robust summation of the modern individual who has endless choices but also tends to social conformity has been used in many studies of the paradox of fashion, of belonging and standing out simultaneously via sartorial methods and techniques.
Simmel conceived of art and society as ‘atemporal configurations in space’, and not in time (Davis, 1973: 320).
Simmel works in pairings when he approaches fashion: conformity and differentiation; the shallow surface and the deep inner meaning; the personal and the imitation; the superordinate and the subordinate to the forces of fashion, as Sellerberg (1994: 59) usefully set out. These pairings are not static binaries; ‘they counteract each other and actually stimulate each other in doing so, creating a kind of circular stimulation and Eigendynamik ’ (Sellerberg, 1994: 60). Sellerberg, who has conducted research on fashions in baby’s names, Swedish interiors and American restaurant menus, argues via Simmel that ‘the area of fashion seems to be expanding [in our time …], pairs of dualistic tendencies, presented together, function as motor forces in this respect’ (Sellerberg, 1994: 72). In her earlier short essay on food and fashion she argues that ‘fashion fixes the attention of the community on an object or process at a certain time and place’ (Sellerberg, 1984: 82). This is also the position of Gilles Lipovetsky, who in The Empire of Fashion writes of the increased diffusion of all forms of consumer fashions in twentieth-century life, from movie premieres to Coca-Cola types (Lipovetsky, 2002 [1987]).
Unlike the theorist of conspicuous consumption, Veblen, Georg Simmel did not entertain the possibility that fashion might advance towards an ideal. His sociology studied interpersonal relations rather than quantitative measures in order to conclude how objects attain value. Observing the historicism of the design culture around him, Simmel (1997: 215– 216) theorized how ‘the individual constructs his environment of variously stylized objects; by his doing the objects receive a new centre, which is not located in any of them alone’. In a key essay, ‘The Problem of Style’ (1908), Simmel (1997: 68) argued that objects and surroundings must be stylised in order to make a ‘person the main thing’. Frédéric Vandenberghe (1999: 63), in a study of Simmel and Weber as founders of sociology, noted that ‘the Simmelian spirit is the “ esprit de finesse ”, the spirit of subtlety, refinement, tact, delicacy, and perceptivity […]. For Simmel nothing is too trivial.’ Simmel is also influential in the field of fashion studies for another essay, ‘Adornment’ (1905). In the original German the latter had a secondary title (printed much smaller) ‘Exkurs über den Schmuck’, an expression that has been translated differently as adornment or jewellery, clearly meaning rather different things. To Simmel there can be no fashion in a pre-industrial society. He argues that fashions are always ‘class fashions’ and have the ‘double function of holding a given social circle together and at the same time closing it off from others’. In a fragmented modern life, ‘the pace, tempo and rhythm of gestures is fundamentally determined by clothing’. On the so-called ‘neurasthenia’ of modern life he wrote: Changes in fashion reflect the dullness of nervous impulses; the more nervous the age, the more rapidly its fashions change, simply because the desire for differentiation, one of the most important elements of all fashion, goes hand in hand with the weakening of nervous energy. This fact in itself is one of the reasons why the real seat of fashion is found among the upper classes. (Simmel, 1957 [1904]: 547)
In ‘Adornment’ Simmel offers the following significant, because so often repeated, explanation for the female attachment to fashion: The fact that fashion expresses and at the same time emphasizes the tendency towards equalization and individualization, and the desire for imitation and conspicuousness, perhaps explains why it is that women, broadly speaking, are its staunchest adherents […]. The relation and the weakness of her social position, to which woman has been doomed during the far greater portion of history, however, explains her strict regard for custom, for the generally accepted and approved forms of life, for all that is proper […]. But resting on the firm foundation of custom, of what is generally accepted, woman strives anxiously for all the relative individualization and personal conspicuousness that remains. (Simmel, 1957 [1904]: 550) Simmel then goes on to use what we would today call the notion of fashion as a ‘voice’ or ‘agency’ for women, a concept that is widely deployed in contemporary historical studies of women and fashion. He writes of the emerging individualism of the late middle ages in Germany: ‘Women, however, took no part in this individualistic development: the freedom of personal action and self-improvement were still denied her. She sought redress by adopting the most extravagant and hypertrophic styles in dress’ (Simmel,1957: 551). Simmel’s notion that when a woman is silenced she might express herself through clothing has been used by a great many historians interested in fashion and gender. However, it does not explain the etiolation in male dress that also characterized the Middle Ages, unless one were to conclude that courtiers were also without power and therefore used clothing as a form of expression. In Simmel’s day it was not uncommon to see ancien-régime and post-revolutionary societies analysed in rather more simplistic ways than they actually functioned. This has a major impact on how we might interpret dress – as custom or fashion.
Simmel then announces his famous maxim that brings together fashion, individualism and conformity in a special pairing: ‘It is peculiarly characteristic of fashion that it renders possible a social obedience, which at the same time is a form of individual differentiation’ (1957: 548– 549) Simmel comments in this essay at length on the demi-monde (a difficult to translate concept of the literal ‘half-world/society’ – upper sex-worker or courtesan and also actress grouping) of mid-to-late nineteenth-century Europe. Here he perhaps recalls the fascination regarding the fine levels of distinction of dress fashions and social caste made possible in a modern city as outlined by Baudelaire and Mallarmé many decades earlier: The fact that the demi-monde is so frequently a pioneer in matters of fashion, is due to its peculiarly uprooted form of life. The pariah existence to which society condemns the demi-monde, produces an open or latent hatred against everything that has the sanction of law, of every permanent institution, a hatred that finds its relatively most innocent and aesthetic appearance in the striving for ever new forms of appearance. In this continual striving for new, previously unheard of fashions […] there lurks an aesthetic expression of the desire for destruction, which seems to be an element peculiar to all that lead this pariah-like existence, so long as they are not completely enslaved within. (Simmel, 1957: 552) This would seem to contradict a part of his thesis regarding class fashions, as many courtesans, who were not of the upper echelon, set fashions that were in turn copied by the fashionable women accepted within society. It is this section that Elizabeth Wilson (1985: 138), in her famous work Adorned in Dreams , takes to infer that Simmel means that ‘the deviant, the dissident and the outsider’ create the ‘iconoclasm, the outrage and the defiance of fashion’ in modern culture, which is perhaps not exactly what he intended, but is an imaginative reading of Simmel and one that illustrates his continuing relevance to fashion studies. Later in the essay, Simmel talks of the wider dissemination of fashion since the Revolutionary period. He writes (1957: 556): The frequent change of fashion represents a tremendous subjugation of the individual and in that respect forms one of the essential complements of the increased social and political freedom […]. Classes and individuals who demand constant change, because the rapidity of their development gives them the advantage over others, find in fashion something that keeps pace with their own soul movements. Finally Simmel suggests that fashion is not irrational, which is a major statement about something generally characterized as facile or feminine: ‘Thus fashion is shown to be an objective characteristic grouping upon equal terms by social expediency of the antagonistic tendencies of life’ (1957: 558). This statement is extremely pertinent for fashion studies, as it suggests that fashion may be studied in these terms.
Blumer, in a passage that would be echoed later by the cultural philosopher Lipovestsky and also by the cultural historian Daniel Roche (1994 [1989]), using very different methods, argues that fashion is a positive good: ‘Yet the facts are clear that fashion is an outstanding mark of modern civilization and that its domain is expanding rather than diminishing […]. Fashion introduces order in a potentially anarchic and moving present ’ (Blumer, 1969: 288– 89). Blumer’s perceptive last note is: ‘The recognition that fashion is continuously at work is, in my judgement, the major although unintended contribution of Simmel’s analysis’ (1969: 290). The success of Simmel is that he considers fashion to examine another and wider process, and this is an approach that is in fact shared with a great deal of history and social studies around the time, for example Werner Sombart on the topic of ‘luxury’ (1967 [1913]). In suggesting that fashion was not facile but could be subject to analysis, indeed that fashion revealed critical perspectives concerning the process of becoming a modern subject in a modern society, Simmel’s approach was one that permitted a space for a vibrant and growing fashion studies to emerge.
Chapter 9: Erving Goffman (1922– 1982)
Goffman’s seminal The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life , and more specifically his notions of front and back regions, props and performance, offer useful tools for an understanding both of individuals’ everyday engagement with fashion and of the division of labour and specialization through space that characterizes the fashion industry. In this chapter Efrat Tseëlon looks at Goffman’s analysis of the dramaturgy of the social self to reflect on the role of fashion within it and the idea of fashion as communication. Goffman identified the kernel of social behaviour as a collective endeavour to avoid shame, loss of face and embarrassment. Combining a micro analysis of everyday behaviour together with insights based on a variety of empirical and fictional sources, he distilled the tacit rules and codes that structure Western society, interrogating their boundaries through their breach. The chapter provides empirical evidence to support the thrust of Goffman’s dramaturgical thesis with regard to clothes, without falling into a common misconception of attributing authenticity to backstage and manipulation to front stage. Identity is created through performance, and clothes are a key tool in this process of self-construction. Clothes can be seen as ‘props’ central to the way individuals as performers negotiate their relations to others in various social settings, as Tseëlon discusses in relation to the idea of professional appearance. Although Goffman’s study is mostly concerned with individuals’ work of self-presentation, Tseëlon argues that it can be extended to organizational and institutional practices such as those at play in the field of fashion.
Goffman has carved a new discipline, the study of everyday face-to-face interaction, by blending methodological micro data with conceptual macro insights. In his signature style of fieldwork, he fused statistical data with anecdotal evidence and literary texts like novels, biographies or memoirs. He thus created an original discourse of the individual and the collective. His methodological approach focused on the minutiae of lived experience and thus appealed to the general public. This approach analyses large-scale social forces by means of the systematic investigation of small-scale interactional domains.
In this chapter I explain the most important concepts that Goffman introduced in the study of human behaviour that I can apply to the study of dress and fashion. Goffman’s approach, I argue, is unique in focusing neither exclusively on social structure nor on individual behaviour. His analysis of social life is based on cultural observation, that is to say, he takes into account both cultural production and behavioural regularities. He does so by observing individual behaviours. As I show below, his concepts have allowed for what I call the wardrobe approach , which studies the unique everyday clothes of individuals whose meaning is part of the individual’s set of experiences, interactions and vocabulary. This stands in contrast to the focus on social structure in studies of dress that I call the stereotype approach , which involves a study of iconic dress, ritualized dress and over-coded dress (Tseëlon, 1989, 2001). This includes museum pieces, designer dresses, uniforms and clothes that are identified with certain lifestyles or social groups, from gothic style to ball gowns. In terms of fashion research, then, an approach that follows Goffman fits between costume history and materiality, or between consumer behaviour and participant observation.
In Relations in Public he observed that ‘even quite formalized codes, such as the one regulating traffic on roads, leaves many matters tacit’ (1971: 126). Take for example how we dress in the privacy of our own home; even then we choose what to wear by taking into consideration social demands and expectations. Those implicit codes and unspoken norms are at work when we unintentionally overdress or underdress. They are grounded in a moral system designed to save the face of all participants in the interaction. This moral system reflects the needs of the self to be recognized and sustained, and is based on mutually binding codes of obligations to self and other. These ground our confidence and trust in the social world by lending to it a quality of predictability, solidity and order.
The laws of the interaction order that Goffman articulated are actually quite visible in the realm of fashion. In Dress, Law and Naked Truth (2013), Watt makes an analogy between law and fashion. He notes that the ordering of bodily appearance arranges us for purposes of protection and projection.
Researchers appropriating Goffman’s work to the study of clothing and appearance have mostly drawn on the famous book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), in which he introduces the notion of performance . Here he puts forward his notion of self-presentation and the dramaturgical metaphor that guides his analysis of the theatre as a framework for meaningful human action. Goffman posits that when an individual enters the presence of others, he or she is trying to influence the definition of the situation, and the impressions others make of him or her by presenting himor herself in a favourable light.
The conception of embarrassment as a master motivator presupposes the notion of an audience. Indeed, for a public self to be activated by a particular audience, the audience needs not necessarily be present. Research has indicated that imagined audiences are just as effective in influencing people’s self-presentations. Goffman (1963a) distinguished different kinds of situation with a different set of involvements and audience: encounters, social occasions and social gatherings. He argued that social expectations achieve different aims with different types of audience. When one is among acquainted people one preserves intimacy, among the unacquainted one achieves trust. While Goffman did not single out fashion and personal appearance as a topic in its own right, he referred to clothing as part of the elements that constitute the ‘personal front’ of the actor; these include insignia of office or rank, racial characteristics, size and looks, or body language (1959: 23– 24).
In his analogy of social life as a theatre Goffman distinguished between back stage, where preparations for a performance take place, and the front stage as a performance. Such distinction can easily lead one to believe that front stage is a public mask, and back stage is where the ‘real face’ is revealed. In fact, for Goffman one is not more authentic than the other. Both are different kinds of stage, with different expectations, and played to different kinds of audience. Goffman was also the first to outline the dynamics of the disciplining of the body as a façade of the self. By demonstrating the ground rules of bodily presentation required to make a claim for a certain kind of identity, Goffman put body and appearance centre stage.
Importantly, Goffman’s use of the theatrical metaphor questioned the idea of fixed identity. He articulated a performative perspective by providing a dynamic definition of identity not as a state of being but as acts of doing . (See in this respect also the concept of performance in chapter 17 on Butler.) Identity is the result of a social product formed and perpetuated through the repetition of behavioural scripts in an interactive social process. As such, it does not ‘exist’ in individuals: ‘it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented’ (Goffman, 1959: 252– 53). Identity is thus located ‘in the pattern of social control that is exerted in connection with the person by himself and those around him’ (Goffman, 1961b: 168). In other words, Goffman’s actors do not possess an essence behind the performance; they are their performance.
In fashion studies, Goffman’s approach paved the way for the perspective of clothes as ‘lived experience’. My own empirical and conceptual research into some of Goffman’s main ideas featured in my book The Masque of Femininity: The Presentation of Woman in Everyday Life (Tseëlon, 1995), which is an homage to Goffman, and is similarly focused on the mundane details of ordinary experiences. Using individual and group interviews, laboratory, real-life experiments, and questionnaires that covered exhaustively a full range of sartorial behaviours, I created the wardrobe approach . This approach privileges ordinary clothes instead of historical costumes or designer garments. It studies the meaning of clothes and the reasons for choosing which clothes to wear, from the point of view of the wearers. Drawing on ‘Symbolic Interactionism’ I took on board the notion of meaning as socially constructed and negotiated through interaction. Symbolic Interactionism is a micro-sociological theory that views people as acting toward things based on the meaning those things have for them. These meanings are derived from social interaction. My approach thus opened the door to a branch of research that was process-based. I developed this approach of looking ‘from the inside’ at the accounts of users, in contrast to the then prevailing ‘stereotype approach’, which looked ‘from the outside’ at the accounts of experts, such as art and costume historians, curators, designers and certain social scientists. The stereotype approach was essentially object-based and attributed meaning to clothes in habitual ways on the basis of some group characteristics, but disregarded use, individual context and interpersonal meaning. Goffman’s distinctions between types of audience, and types of situational rule, provided useful tools for interpreting the data in some of my studies. In these studies participants communicated detailed opinions and practices relating to how and why they choose and wear clothes, and what meanings the clothes have for them. In Goffman’s terms, ‘Encounters’ are situations where dress would be either secondary, or at the forefront, such as in a job interview or a date; in ‘Social occasions’ behaviour is monitored with clear protocol enforced by either dress code or conformity; and ‘Social gatherings’ are looser meetings where ‘generalised others’ are present and dress has no consequence as long as it is within an acceptable range. The first two situations, encounters and social occasions, are a source of higher appearance awareness than social gatherings. For example, the atmosphere of trust and security versus being judged and exposed explained the amount of effort and attention women devoted to their appearances. Women cared more about their appearance in the company of strangers than with family or friends, although they also cared when alone. Typically, situational anxiety was a function of the formality of the rules, influencing the relationship between the women and others in the situation they were dressing for. In general, the dimension of on-show/ off-show was more important than any other factor in isolation. On-show refers to a feeling of being observed, scrutinized and judged. Off-show refers to a sense of being unmarked, safe and invisible. (See also Erlich’s ethnography of personal care products, 1987.) Thus, being in a stressful situation or with unfamiliar people whose judgement has consequences elicited more clothing consciousness than being in a relaxed context, such as exists in situations with few rules, when surrounded by one’s friends or by strangers who don’t care. Clothes were used to bolster confidence in contexts where women felt they were being judged or evaluated. These sometimes coincided with being in the company of unfamiliar people, generalized others or significant others. In the company of a familiar audience where women felt accepted and relaxed, they were not as concerned with their appearance, but even willing to experiment and be daring. Other factors appeared to be related to the reciprocity inherent in relationships. For example, women would be adjusting their dress to not offend an elderly relative or to not embarrass a guest by overdressing.
Woodward (2007) complemented the wardrobe approach by adding an ethnographic dimension to clothing choice. Having observed women making their clothing choices from their wardrobes, she specifically focused on the decisions that go on behind the scenes of public presentations. Her findings confirmed that one cannot fully understand what people wear without looking at the process of selection, and what is rejected is as illuminating as what is selected in the ‘back stage’.
The essence of self-presentation according to Goffman (1959: 81) is that ‘to be a given kind of person is not merely to possess the required attributes, but also to sustain the standard of conduct and appearance that one’s social grouping attaches thereto’. This applies to verbal and non-verbal forms of self-presentation. It can be seen in the expectation, in professional contexts, that people who claim certain credentials (e.g. professional competence) would dress the part (with a smart suit, or designer outfit) and would avoid dressing in certain ways (unkempt, scruffy).
Additionally, a close reading of Goffman shows that according to the dramaturgical account, every individual has a repertoire of possible coherent self-displays. For the most part custom, convention and habit, coupled with context and audience bring out an appropriate pattern of displays from the repertoire. The discrepancy between different performances on different stages serves the needs of depicting oneself in a way that sustains the face of self and other.
In his essay on ‘Role Distance’ Goffman clarifies that he does not endorse an ideological judgement about the authenticity of behaviour encompassed by the: vulgar tendency in social thought to divide the conduct of the individual into a profane and sacred part […]. The profane part is attributed to the obligatory world of social roles; it is formal, stiff, and dead; it is exacted by society. The sacred part has to do with ‘personal’ matters and ‘personal’ relationships – with what an individual is ‘really’ like underneath it all when he relaxes and breaks through to those in his presence. (Goffman, 1961a: 152) In contrast, Goffman argues that managed behaviour is not necessarily deceptive, and off stage is not the same as ‘lack of stage’. It means ‘a different kind of stage’. In fact, all behaviour is staged: to a present or imagined audience.
Most of this scholarly work, whether by Goffman or by his impressionmanagement spin-off, did not deal with clothes as such, except as aids in face-to-face interaction. For Goffman, ‘the disciplined management of personal appearance’ or ‘personal front’ (clothing, make-up, hairdo and other surface decorations) is a mechanism to signal various aspects of the self (Goffman, 1959: 25). Part of my own research addressed Goffman’s theory as a whole as an original unique theory, and looked at its validity on its own terms through clothing research data. The question I addressed was ontological. Seen via clothes, is the Goffmanesque actor an honest person trying not to lose face, or a deliberate manipulator? My research was designed to compare Goffman’s original model with impression management. I translated the issue of behavioural self-presentation to clothing self-presentation, in particular the role of sincerity and effort. Specifically, I looked at the following hypotheses: 1) 2) 3) Efforts in presentation in front of a familiar audience would suggest insincerity. Efforts to present an improved image towards a less familiar audience would suggest duplicity. Consciously paying attention to appearance would suggest intentions to present or conceal a false image. The first hypothesis showed that in general women paid most attention to appearance when with unfamiliar others than when alone, or with family. But a closer inspection of the results shows that the mediating variable is comfort (psychological and physical) versus exposure (see Table 9.1). Attention to appearance is not limited just to those who do not know us well. Making an effort with appearance was seen as a currency in intimate interaction. In fact, respondents may make more effort when around people they know well as they feel secure in this situation, and have the confidence to do so.
The second hypothesis showed women’s desire was not to dress in a way that departs dramatically from what they ‘are’ as exemplified by ‘I wouldn’t want to pretend to be something I wasn’t’ (Tseëlon, 1992a: 510). They want to project a summary image rather than a false image to unfamiliar people. The third hypothesis showed that conscious attention to appearance is a function of insecurity. In situations of visibility, women used clothes to boost their confidence, whether dressing the part, or in expensive clothes. I argue that Goffman provides the rhetoric of self-presentation in amoral terms while impression-management interprets self-presentation in immoral terms. For Goffman the term ‘public’ refers to a condition of visibility. For impression-management it signals a potential for duplicity. In fact, the dramaturgical framework does not imply that sincere behaviour needs to be ‘spontaneous’. For Goffman it can be stage-managed and planned. As Goffman himself put it: ‘While people usually are what they appear to be, such appearances could still have been managed’ (Goffman, 1959: 77). Concerned with the mechanics of creating an appearance more than with the relationship between appearance and reality, Goffman stressed that while all dishonest behaviour is ‘staged’, not all ‘staged’ behaviour is dishonest. In other words, Goffman’s account is not of the psychology of deception but rather the semiotics of drama . More recent self-presentation work using Goffman’s model found that even on Facebook people do not just present an ‘improved self’. Even in a culture of digital self-portraits (‘selfies’), people lack total control of the images that can be snapped and displayed online (e.g. being tagged in somebody else’s pictures on Facebook). Further, Birnbaum (2008) and Wong (2012) reported that seeking social support was the main motivator of Facebook users. In fact, high disclosure can reveal highly personal, sensitive and potentially stigmatising information (Nosko et al., 2010).
Goffman’s method of meticulous observation of behaviour and cultural products, and of attending to deviant and extreme behaviours that challenge everyday order, established him as a forerunner of ideological critique. It is an intellectual tradition that seeks to unearth the implicit assumptions and explicit techniques that make possible social interaction on the mundane level of everyday behaviour. He established face-to-face interaction as an arena of study, which, however banal, is not trivial but central. Goffman’s approach provides the methodological and conceptual tools for combining micro (the wardrobe approach) and macro (the stereotype approach) analysis. By fusing together insights from a variety of sources – behaviours (observations, interviews or questionnaires), cultural practices (studying written rules and protocols, challenging rules, analysing ritualized behaviour), cultural products (media, fiction, popular culture) – the Goffmanesque approach facilitates the study of the social meanings of fashion as a process that is individual and collective.