‘Wear your identity’: Styling identities of youth through dress – A conceptual model. (original) (raw)
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‘I wear what I want to wear’: Youth, style and identity at the fashion and business Saturday club.
IFFTI Conference Proceedings, 2019
In 2016 the authors set up a Fashion and Business Saturday club at Manchester Metropolitan University, England, with support from the British Fashion Council and the National Saturday Club. The club continues to provide opportunity for 13-16 year olds to learn about diverse aspects of the fashion industry over a period of twenty weeks, in a university setting, on a Saturday morning. The sessions include creative workshops using drawing, collage and three-dimensional experimentation, alongside masterclasses from industry professionals and academics covering all aspects of the industry from design, through to product development, sourcing, costing and marketing. The club tutors quickly recognised the impact the club had on the members understanding of fashion, but also, more importantly, the impact it was having on their confidence and developing sense of self. The young people were using the club as a safe place to experiment with their personal views on fashion, their identity and their individual style. This paper analyses video interviews undertaken with the participants at the end of the first Saturday club series and compares the responses to more recent interviews with these original club members. The research evaluates the impact of early exposure to the university experience and the study of fashion, documenting the developing aspirations of potential fashion students in this age range. The findings also support the hypothesis that these creative fashion workshops have a far more valuable purpose, as evidenced in the positive impact they have on the club members ability to explore and define their identity and personal style.
The Wear Project: Identity and Clothing in Relation to Costume Design and Education
2019
Research paper presented at <i>Futurescan 3: Intersecting Identities, </i>Glasgow School of Art, 11th-12th November 2015.<br><br><i><b>Futurescan 3: Intersecting Identities</b></i><i><br></i>Edited by Helena Britt, Laura Morgan and Kerry WaltonNovember 2015<br>ISBN: 978 1 911217 08 4
The dress and the self: how dress styles express identities
2019
Clothing one's body denotes a clear intentional behaviour. Literature highlights that females purchase certain products and clothing styles to achieve their desired body shape or to hide or flatter areas of their body. Additionally, it has been found that clothing is a tool that assists consumers in achieving an ideal appearance and has the ability to alter one's mood, enabling them to either camouflage or bolster their self-confidence. This suggests that there is a link between an individual's body perception and their clothing preferences, and that clothing choice reflects the individual. Building on previous studies, this paper investigates how women express their identity through different styles of dresses, exploring what a specific type of dress can say about an individual's perception of self. A mixed methods study was conducted involving: 1. A quantitative online questionnaire, which established females' preferred style of dress and 2. Qualitative semi-structured interviews which explored how different styles of dresses create different identities. A convenience sample of 263 (phase 1) and 15 (phase 2) UK females aged 18-34 was obtained. The questionnaire data was analysed through descriptive statistics and the qualitative interviews were analysed through a process of coding. Findings indicate that different styles of dresses are used to express different types of identity. This paper contributes to the academic literature regarding fashion choice and the perception of one's self, fashion identity and the clothing selection process. This paper also provides retailers with a better insight into consumers' clothing preferences and their associations with different styles of dresses, which can inform their marketing and sales strategies.
“Because They Are Me”: Dress and the Making of Gender
South African Review of Sociology, 2017
Young people in contemporary South Africa inhabit a multiplicity of diverse, often contradictory, economic and socio-cultural contexts. These contexts offer a range of possibilities and opportunities for the affirmation of certain identities and positionalities alongside the disavowal of others. Dress-clothes, accessories and body styling-is one of the key components through which, within specific social conditions, people perform these identities. In making statements about themselves in terms of these multiple and intersecting group (or social) historical identities, the meanings soaked into people's dress simultaneously speak to the present and their aspirations for the future. This article reports on a study that explored how a group of third year students at a South African university use dress to negotiate the multiple and intersecting identities available to them in a context characterised by neoliberal democracy and market ideologies that continue to be mediated by the racialised legacies of apartheid. The study employed a qualitative feminist discourse analysis to consider 53 semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted by third year students with other students on campus as part of an ongoing project exploring gender productions and performance. The discussion focuses on student understandings of ways in which contemporary clothes and dress signal gender. The research suggests that while there are moments in which clothes are acknowledged as expressions that can reinforce or challenge inequalities structured around gender, participants are also strongly invested in neoliberal consumerist understandings of clothes as accessories to an individualised self in ways that reinforce neoliberal market ideologies and reinstate hegemonic performances of gender.
Clothing, Identity and the Embodiment of Age
Identity and dress are intimately linked. Clothes display, express and shape identity, imbuing it with a directly material reality. They thus offer a useful lens through which to explore the possibly changing ways in which older identities are constituted in modern culture. In this chapter I will address three sets of questions. First I will ask how writers have understood the relationship between clothing and identity. How has this been have been theorised in sociological, anthropological and dress studies? I will then address how such understandings or analyses relate to, or can be related to, the situations of older people. Is there something different or specific about age? Lastly I will ask whether questions of clothing and dress shed light on established debates concerning the changing nature of ageing in late modern, consumer culture. Clothing not fashion The focus of the chapter is on clothing and dress rather than fashion. By clothing I mean the empirical reality of dressed bodies; and the approaches I draw on derive from sociological and anthropological traditions that regard clothing as a form of material culture, a species of situated body practice, and part of lived experience of people's lives. This focus is important for a group like older people who are not normally encompassed within fashion studies and whose dress is often excluded from its consideration, but who still wear clothes, make choices about them. In this chapter I will largely refer to the situations of older women. This is partly because of the established nature of debates in relation to women, the body and clothing, but it reflects also the
Branded clothing and identity management among youth in a multicultural context
de Dag van de Sociologie'/Sociology Day (VVS/NSV), …, 2008
Advertisers in Flanders are beginning to discover the opportunities for marketing to specific target groups such as the growing ethnic minority population, but empirical data on this segment are lacking. Departing from the notion that consumption reflects a sense of identity (cfr. Lunt & Livingstone, 1992), clothing is not only looked at as a personal matter, but also as a collective and socially-embedded practice and a tool for self-presentation, from this perspective the relationships between identity orientations and attitude towards branded clothing are examined. First, the individual, social and collective identity orientations of both majority and minority youngsters are described. Second, attention is paid to the similarities and differences in consumer behaviour, with a focus on the attitudes towards and consumption of branded clothing. Third, the relationships between identity orientations and attitudes towards branded clothing are further explored. The results underline the importance of cultural differences in the identity orientations as well as the consumer behaviour of youth: Ethnic minority youngsters pay more attention to their looks and reputations and consequently spend more on lifestyle products than their majority peers. However, segmentation solely based on ethnic origin is not sufficient; a broader inclusive approach which takes other cultural-specific features as well as the differences and similarities between young consumers into account, is recommended.
Journal of Consumer Culture, 2013
Based on 'wardrobe interviews', this article studies how young Dutch men dress themselves. We argue that existing sociological studies of clothing have gone too far in emphasizing the symbolic aspects of clothing and have not paid sufficient attention to the role of routines and rules in daily dressing. Moreover, we find that young Dutch men dress rather inconspicuously, and are hardly interested in using clothes as a tool in 'postmodern' identity experiments. Insofar as clothing selection is a matter of reflexivity, it is primarily directed at conformity to meet social and situational requirements. Our respondents use clothing to construct coherent and authentic identities: their dress should express who they think they are. Convincing others of their unique identity is hardly desirable for these men. Finally, for most of them clothing is a negative act: they seek to avoid attracting attention through their dress. Our respondents are aware of the fact that their inconspicuous dress is similar to those of their companions, but this is a source of comfort rather than distress.