Anthropology of Clothing and Fashion Consumer Society ANTHRO 3331 Dr. Kedron Thomas !Blue Jeans in the World Economy Outside of China and South Asia, half the population is wearing blue jeans on any given day Globally, people wear jeans 3.5 days per week 62 percent of consumers say they love or enjoy wearing denim!Blue Jeans in the World Economy Of consumers surveyed: 31 percent own 3 or 4 pairs of jeans 29 percent own between 5 and 10 pairs of jeansWhy Blue Jeans? Companies could make more money on clothes that: • Go out of fashion • Change more over time • Are worn less often • Do not wear wellMiller and Woodward: Methods • Questionnaire • Observation • Life Histories • Casual ConversationSilence Community People don’t talk to each other on the street, but they express community membership through material goods displayed outdoorsSilence Commodity People don’t talk about how they dress and why. “The relationship people have to clothing throughout the life course is largely embodied and material, and subsequently difficult to verbalize.”What challenges and obstacles do these facts present in the course of their fieldwork?Pierre Bourdieu French anthropologist and sociologist Jeans are part of the “background” of culture. Material objects such as clothing, and especially blue jeans, become significant through practice rather than via self-conscious strategies and actions.What about you? Are clothes part of the “background” or “foreground”?How to study clothing: Semiotic Clothing is a reflection of something about the person or an act of representation.How to study clothing: Material Culture Studies Clothing is “an active agent or instrument … a means by which people accomplish various tasks.”Clothes are objects through which people: • Represent themselves to others • Interpret those around them • Make themselves into individuals • Identify with and build relationship to others • Negotiate gender, status, etc. • Negotiate everyday life and life crises“In modern society, we live almost entirely through goods that we do not make.” - Miller, “Consumption and its Consequences”“We … evolve new and complex forms of exchange and difference that employ objects to construct a changing but widely held sense of how people should act and of the kinds of relationship they should have with each other.” - Miller, “Consumption and its Consequences”Consumption as a moral obligation Consumption-based identities Consumption and human nature Consumer SocietyConsumer Citizenship “Shopping is usually experienced as a moral project based on expressing one’s concerns for others rather than oneself.” - Miller, p. 46 “If one thinks as an accumulator and a consumer competing with others for scarce resources, educating other people’s children might place your own in a competitive disadvantage.” - George Lipsitz, “Learning from New Orleans”What is so interesting about jeans?Jeans can be (at the same time) always in fashion, particularly in fashion, and anti-fashion.Jeans neatly represent Simmel’s point that people move between conformity and individuality. They draw attention to temporal and contextual aspects of Simmel’s theory.Jeans are ubiquitous. They are not just about global homogenization. They are cosmopolitan and unique at the same time.Structures of Common Difference You are unique … just like everyone else.“Jeans go even further than other clothing in terms of being different and simultaneously the same, since they start to represent both being in fashion but also the garment that [people claim] not to care about.”Jeans and Generations 1) People born at the same time. 2) Affinity and memory about music and clothing. “The point is not that all the people … were necessarily wearing the same kinds of clothing at the same time, but rather that they showed a common reference point through their sense of what was normative with respect to that period.”Jeans go on your body … Or do they? “For many women the changes … are much more related to their bodies – the ‘problems’ they see themselves as confronting or coming to terms with.”Jeans go on your body … Or do they? “As is evident … it isn’t always a case of finding jeans to fit her body; more often she has a sense that her body needs to change shape in order to go with jeans. Jeans are both the measure of her body and sometimes the reward for getting her body shape right.”What do we learn about gender from the study of blue jeans?Gender norms Socialization into how boys and girls “should” look and act Gender differentiation “Tomboy” identification depends on positioning oneself in relation to “boys” as different from “girls” Gender complementarity Building identity in complementary relation to how someone else enacts genderMarked Unmarked Female Male Other Self Different Same Remarkable Ordinary Affected NaturalJudith Butler, Gender Performance Gender is constituted through its enactment. It is not a category that naturally or inherently pertains to persons.Judith Butler, Gender Performativity The ways we act, speak, dress, etc., bring us into being as gendered subjects.Performative Speech I now pronounce you man and wife. It’s a girl!Performative Speech I’m a