Appearance: Its Social MeaningBy Lorne Tepperman In his classic sociological work Asylums, Erving Goffman notes that the first step taken by a total institution, suchas a prison or mental hospital is to re-socialize an inmate, by separating the inmate from old identities and identifiers.1Interestingly, this process begins by changingthe inmate’s appearance—for example, by forcing the inmate to wear an institutional uniform, while removing allindividual identifiers such as jewellery or personal assets. Often the inmate is forced to wear a generic hairstyle, whichis another way of regimenting the body andeliminating individuality. The loss of one’s own clothing signifies the loss of an old identity and social status. Theadoption of an institutional uniform represents entry into a low-status community of identical inmates or subjects. Inthis real sense, the old maxim is true that “clothes make the man” (or woman). Humble clothes make humble people.Consider the humble uniforms worn by members of the Salvation Army—a religious organization devoted tourban good works, originally involving the moral uplift of fallen people. Winston notes that the popular image of Salvation Army women changed during the period1880-1918, due in part to their adoption of plain, unfashionable clothing, which enabled them to enter public placessuch as saloons to do their work without criticism.2 So dressed, Salvation Army women practised spiritual warfare onestablishments that promoted sin and vice. Their uniform, dramatically severe, came to represent traditional serviceand old-fashioned virtue.The connection between appearance, clothing, and self has been known and commented on for a long time.The nineteenth-century Scottish novelist and essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote about clothing metaphorically in his comicwork Sartor Resartus. There he used clothing to stand in for all symbols of self. People use clothing and other items related to their appearance to construct their personal identities within the context of their daily lives. However,personal identities are linked to social identities. Clothes define our place, role, and position in the social order.Carlyle believed that “clothes present us to ourselves and to the world” as we negotiate our freedom of dressed self-expression.3In turn, society affects both what we reveal and conceal of our bodies.4 Social pressuresconstantly undermine our choice and reduce the basic right of self-expression. As a result, clothes never reveal thewhole self, since they may be imposed on us or we may use clothes to conceal ourselves. However, given some choicein how we dress, the choices we make tell the world who we think we are, and who we want to be.Not surprisingly, appearance norms are gendered—like manyother social norms. Not only are men and women judged by different appearance standards; they also wear differentkinds of clothing, according to their different social roles and statuses. Take pockets: 1 Irving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor,1961).2 Diane Winston. “Living in the Material World: The Changing Role of Salvation Army Women, 1880-1918,” Journal of Urban History 28(2003), 4: 466-87.3 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (Boston, Mass.: Ginn and Company, 1896).4 William J.R. Keenan, Dressed to Impress: Looking the Part (Oxford: Berg, ed. 2001).
historically, pockets on women’s clothing have been smaller and fewer than pockets on men’s clothing. For women,pockets have been decorative, for men practical. Even today, men and women use their pockets differently (that’s whywomen carry purses), and pockets play a part in the construction of gender.Underwear is also gendered, though usually unseen except by their wearers and intimate acquaintances. Men’sunderwear tends to be sturdy and plain. Women’s underwear tends to be flimsy and decorative, as though it was ondisplay as part of the mating game. When middle-class women began to wear underpants in the early 1800s, their”drawers” were feminized by fabric, ornamentation, and an open crotch.5 Such open drawers on respectable, supposedly passionless women presented female sexuality as both erotic and modest. In the twentieth century,however, women demanded crotches in their drawers, to establish their sexual propriety. Women increasingly chose towear closed drawers during a period ofwomen’s greater public presence and feminist activism. This change symbolically closed the gap between men andwomen.Even today, the type of underwear known as “lingerie” is particularly invested with meanings of femininity,sexuality, and pleasure.6 Mass-market lingerie, sex toys, and other “personal” products are sold to women through theuse of particular strategies and images. The processes of choosing and buying lingerie involve identifications of gender,sexuality, and sensuality, even though the garments themselves are rarely if ever worn in public. Moreover, they holdimplications of class (and classiness). The class connotations of mass-market lingerie are used by working- and lowermiddle-class women to distinguish themselves from higher- class women who are thereby defined as pretentious,boring, or tasteless.Fashions, then, declare a person’s gender and class, and they also declare ethnic origins. In multicultural urban areas, women’s fashion choices are closely tied to issues of self- definition. For example, young Asian and white women living in urban, “multi-cultural” areas in the United Kingdom express their differently sexualized and racialized femaleidentities through styles of appearance and tastes in clothing, hairstyles, and cosmetics.7 In doing so, they are makingstatements about who they are and how they differ from conventional United Kingdom style and culture.As we saw with degradation ceremonies in total institutions, whenpeople in authority want to control people, they try to control their modes of dress. This has been evident in the historyof fashion in fascist countries, and it is true of dress codes for school children in our own society. Paulicelli notes thatItaly under the fascist dictator Mussolini used fashion to discipline the social body–especially women’s bodies—and tocreate an identifiable national style.8 The issue of school uniforms in our society—a practice of imposing dress codes toregiment people’s 5 Jill Fields, “Erotic Modesty: (Ad)dressing Female Sexuality and Propriety in Open and Closed Drawers, USA, 1800-1930,” Gender & History 14 (2002), 3 :492-515.6 Merl Storr, “Classy Lingerie,”‖Feminist Review 71 (2002): 18-36.7 Helen Malson, Hariette Marshall, and Anne Woollett, “Talking of Taste: A Discourse Analytic Exploration of YoungWomen’s Gendered and Racialized Subjectivities in British Urban, Multicultural Contexts,” Feminism & Psychology12 (2002) 4: 469-90.8 Eugenia Paulicelli, “Fashion, the Politics of Style and National Identity in Pre-Fascist Italy,”‖Gender & History 14 (2002) 3: 537-59.
self-expression—brings up a variety of issues that include safety, egalitarianism, social inclusion, andmarketing that encourages students to dress competitively.9Left on their own, and unless required to wear uniforms, young people develop clothing aspirations very early inlife. Even before adolescence, at ages 8 to 12, children begin making product decisions and building knowledge aboutdifferent products and brands.10 A desire to conform to appearance norms influences their shopping behaviour,especially with regard to clothing purchase criteria and shopping independence. As preadolescents age, they acquire more of the norms and information needed to make informed clothing decisions. Conformity concerns influence howchildren shop, whom they shop with, and what they purchase.Clothing is an expression of both individual and collective identity even among 10 to 11 year olds.11 Relaxing theenforcement of school appearance norms (i.e., a dress code) allows pupils to use clothing to gain recognition, forgecommon bonds, and share interests within peer group cultures. It also, however, serves to distinguish and separatethose who fit in with social expectations of dressing in popular fashions, and those who do not. Certain items and brandnames—for example, Doc Martens—acquire a specific, symbolic value for purposes of conformity or rebellion. Pupilswho conform to the school dress rules may satisfy the formal requirements of their institution but run a high risk of beingstigmatized and excluded by theirpeers.Our tendency to conform to appearance norms, learned fromchildhood onward, largely continues throughout life. This results in a widespread interest in “fashion.” |
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