fashion
Fashion, once characterized as the 'F word' of academia, became a topic of expanding interest in anthropology in the mid-1980s since when unprecedented numbers of anthropologists have sought to understand processes of social, cultural and historical transformation through the study of changing dress forms and practices. The location of dress on the borders of the body, facing both inwards and outwards; its capacity to mould the body whilst being detachable from it; its portability; and its place in complex chains of production, distribution and consumption have made it a rich medium for studying the symbolic and material dimensions of self-formation, cultural interaction, human—object relations and processes of globalization.
Anthropologists have on the whole been less concerned with definitions of fashion than with understanding dress practices within a comparative cross-cultural and transnational framework. Some use the term fashion to refer to the distinctive system for the production, marketing, representation and wearing of clothes that emerged in the modern West, and has since extended its reach around the world with the global spread of capitalism. However, many anthropologists use the term more widely to refer to changing tastes in dress and the processes of comparison, emulation and differentiation that encourage or discourage change in different historical and cultural contexts. Some argue that if the quest for self-enhancement through clothing and adornment is universal, then so too is fashion. Whatever the definition employed, most contemporary anthropologists agree that the assumption once commonly made by dress historians, sociologists and earlier generations of anthropologists that clothing traditions in small-scale pre-industrial societies were static and unchanging is unfounded, reproducing untenable dichotomies between modernity and tradition, the global and local, the West and the rest.
Engagement with history has been central to new anthropological approaches. Studies of transcultural encounters in nineteenth-century Africa and Asia highlight how ideas of civilization and modernity were embodied in the clothing and dress codes of imperialists and missionaries who intervened in local dress practices through trade, sumptuary regulations and education. Such studies explore how ideas of power and resistance were played out through the bodies of colonizers and colonized, demonstrating how local peoples appropriated foreign fashions to varying degrees as part of individual and collective strategies of self-definition and as a means to enhancing efficacy and power (Comaroff 1996). Whilst most earlier anthropologists tended to assume the passivity of colonized peoples on whom Western dress and ideologies were imposed, many contemporary anthropologists, whilst still acknowledging unequal power relations, point to the agency of local peoples whose actions and tastes in fashion often eluded the intentions of colonizers.
Anthropological studies of global fashion circuits demonstrate the many ways ideas of tradition and fashion are articulated and reworked. They trace, for example, how apparently traditional dress and textiles such as Scottish tartans or Indian home-spun cottons emerged at particular historical junctures as 'invented traditions', redefining regional and national identities and ushering in social and political change. They also demonstrate the strategic implementation of the classification 'traditional' by local groups as they adapt regional dress to suit cosmopolitan tastes for the indigenous, the exotic and the ethnic. They trace the multidirectional flow of ideas as designers in the West incorporate elements of Eastern fashions, contributing to the re-popularization of Japanese kimonos, Korean hanboks, Indian Salwar kamizes and Vietamese ao dais amongst Asians back home and in diaspora, some of whom also participate as designers and producers of Asian chic. Some anthropologists interpret this as a form of self-Orientalism by which cultural differences become reduced to a performative fashion statement of Asianness; others see it as a sign that previously marginalized communities have become significant actors in the global economy by creating, wearing and marketing new hybrid Asian-inspired designs (Niessen et al. 2003).
The global spread of the fashion industry and the distribution and compartmentalization of production, marketing and consumption have also attracted attention from anthropologists who point to the dramatic structural inequalities which underpin the system, linking one person's freedom to dress fashionably to the hidden labour of workers in China, Vietnam or East London (Schneider 2006). Fashion's other histories have also been explored in the context of thriving markets for second-hand clothes in South Africa and India (Hansen 2004) and in studies of British women's ambivalence towards the clothes in their wardrobes, a considerable proportion of which lie dormant and unworn (Woodward 2008). Such studies challenge common assumptions about the ephemeral nature of fashion garments, tracing their life cycles in relation to human life cycles, ideas of distributed personhood, materiality and transformations in value. Taken together these other stories deflate and subvert the narratives of confidence and glamour associated with the discourses of high fashion in the West.
Concerns about the ethics or morality of fashion are by no means restricted to anthropological debate. Dress is a powerful medium through which conflicting ideas of morality, ethics and aesthetics are played out, whether in the context of public performances such as fashion shows or in the context of public institutions and private spaces where ideas of appropriateness and desirability are debated between friends, employers, family and over the internet. Comparative studies of Muslim women's dress practices around the world reveal how new fashionable forms of Islamic dress are emerging which simultaneously challenge and reproduce ideas of fashion (Tarlo and Moors 2007). New designs in headscarves and long outer garments perceived by some feminist scholars as epitomizing female oppression are, from the perspective of their creators and wearers a means of expressing identity, piety and faith through fashion. Such examples warn against attempts to read fixed meanings into dress, recalling the importance of the multiple contexts in which garments circulate, resonate, and take on divergent meanings.
EMMA TARLO
See also: body, consumption Further reading
Comaroff, J. (1996) 'The Empire's Old Clothes: Refashioning the Colonial Subject', in D. Howes (ed.) Commodities and Cultural Borders, London: Routledge. Hansen, K. T. (2004) 'The World in Dress',
Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 369-92. Niessen, S., A.M. Leshkowich and C. Jones (eds)
(2003) Re-OrientingFashion, Oxford: Berg. Schneider, J. (2006) 'Cloth and Clothing', in C. Tilley, W. Keane, S. Kuchler, M. Rowlands and P. Spyer (eds) Handbook ofMaterial Culture, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Tarlo, E. and A. Moors (eds) (2007) 'Muslim
Fashions', Fashion Theory 11(2/3). Woodward, S. (2008) Why Women Wear What They Wear, Oxford: Berg.
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