Plugging in through clothing: How children’s clothes influence perception and affective practices in day care

Introduction

In this article, I address the question of how clothing plays a role in constituting the self. Research in this field has concentrated on adults (Bannerjee & Miller, 2003; Woodward, 2007). This article looks, instead, at the practices of wearing clothes in children’s public day care to determine how clothes influence the everyday lives of children. I explore children’s clothes within the web of relations in which they are worn. I concentrate on how wearing clothes mediates perceptions and affects, and, in so doing, plays a role in the constitution of the self.

The study of clothes and the wearing of them involves studying not just the representations of persons, but also their constitution (Miller & Woodward, 2007, p. 343). Clothes have an active effect: they can enable, disable and orient individuals in different ways (Hockey, Dilley, Robinson, & Sherlock, 2014, p. 258). Rather than examining choices of what to wear in order to represent oneself, I focus on the practical situations of wearing clothes.

The everyday lives of both children and adults are embedded in relations with both human and non-human elements and entities. These lives are lived through in spatial locations. For the sake of analytical clarity, I analyse perception and affective practices separately, although, in practice, these two intermingle. Conceptually, I draw on Latour’s (2005) notion of plug-ins and Gibson’s (1986) notion of affordance.

The data for this article were gathered during a year-long ethnographical fieldwork in a children’s day care centre located in southern Finland, where I followed the everyday lives of two day care groups of three- to seven-year-old children.

In this article, I introduce, first, the discussions on which my analysis is based regarding clothing and its relation to the self, as well as the theoretical concept of plug-ins (Latour, 2005), which I relate to the notion of affordances (Gibson, 1986). While describing the empirical field my data are based on, I introduce children’s clothes more specifically. I have divided my empirical analysis of clothes as mediators analytically into two cases that are, in practice, interrelated. First, I tackle perception as mediated by clothing. Here, the properties of the environment meet the qualities of the clothing that may enable or hinder play or other activities. Second, I examine how clothes’ properties evoke and maintain affectual practices. In the concluding part, I return to the notion of plug-ins to discuss how our selves can be interpreted as being shaped through the wearing of clothing.

Clothes, selves and plug-ins

Clothing as a focus of research is often linked to questions of identity and identification (Miller, 2010, p. 12). The relations between self, identity and clothing can, thus, be understood as relations of representation. Woodward (2007) sees the choice that women make when deciding what to wear as being linked to the self. She notes that the self is something that women are expected to have that is related to what they actually do when wearing – and choosing to wear – specific clothes. The anxiety and burden of making the right choice for the day is part of the shaping and doing of the self. Lee (2001) notes that it is through our visibility that we are encountered by other people. Thus, practices of extending or supplementing one’s bodily appearance with clothing help to bring the personhood to the fore (Lee, 2001, pp. 174–175). Selves can be enhanced, modified or constructed anew with the help of clothing, which supports the outward, social appearance of the person. In this sense, clothes can be used reflexively to construct an acceptable image of the self (e.g. a respectable, middle-class self) (Skeggs, 2009).

Clothing is obviously not just seen, but also felt. For Woodward (2007), the self lies in the tension between societal expectations and the sensing body. Clothes incorporate this double-sidedness: they are felt and experienced, but they also function as representations of the person wearing them, whether s/he wishes this or not (see also Lee, 2001). Allerton (2007) conceptualizes this aspect of clothing as ‘super-skin’. This notion highlights the double-sidedness of clothes by referring, on one hand, to their sensual aspect as objects that are ‘lived-in by the body’ (2007, p. 37) and, on the other hand, as objects that communicate one’s identity to the outside. In this sense, clothes have both an inside and an outside.

In this article, I do not address the constitution of the self through the representational power of clothing. To study clothes not just as representations, Miller (2010, p. 23) urges us to ask how clothes feel. In analysing the wearing of the sari, Miller (2010, pp. 23–31) concentrates on the embodied experiences. In my analysis, I alter the question and ask, instead, what do clothes do? I see clothes as mediators that connect children with their world. Thus, I explore the impact of wearing clothing. This relates to the discussion artefacts have in shaping our everyday lives and practices (e.g. Barratt, 2011; Latour, 2005; Michael, 2006; Shove & Pantzar, 2005). In order to develop the argument that clothes play a role in the constitution of selfhood, apart from mere representativeness, I turn to the concept of plug-ins proposed by Latour (2005). Using this concept, I highlight the ways in which clothes, as mediators of connections, play a role in the constitution of the self through the practice of wearing them. This focus shifts the attention from representation to action.

By the rather comically sounding term ‘plug-in’, Latour (2005) refers to ‘vehicles’ that transport individuality, subjectivity and personhood. In my reading the concept of plug-in is Latour’s explanation for a de-centred self. It attempts to conceptualize the subject in Actor-Network Theory, which has been regarded as overly object-centred (cf. Krarup & Blok, 2011). Plug-ins demonstrate how subjectivity – albeit a subjectivity that remains flat, as anything and everything does in an Actor-Network – can be addressed in an Actor-Network. The plug-in accounts for selfhood that is not located inside the ‘subject’; rather, it is composed of layers that are activated at each given event (Latour, 2005, pp. 206, 210). For the purpose of this article, the insight of plug-ins stems from their ability to connect different sites and people while simultaneously transmitting different competences and cognitive abilities (cf. Latour, 2005, p. 211).

In his treatment of plug-ins Latour (2005) examines mostly cognitive capabilities. These are activated through contact with outside objects, that is, they constitute an inward-facing process of self-formation. He does not, however, discuss in detail how the plugs are taken up by the actor. I therefore complement Latour’s notion of plug-ins with Gibson’s (1986) concept of affordance, which theorizes perception as innately meaningful. Gibson (1986, p. 127) aims to tackle those views on perception that situate meaning and value inside the perceiver and to form an alternative take where meaning is innate to the way the organism perceives the environment. The organism, as an undivided mind–body entity, moves about in the environment, and the environment facilitates or hinders its current activity (Gibson, 1986, pp. 127–129; Ingold, 2011, pp. 77–79). These effects of the environment are perceived as affordances (1986, pp. 127, 134). In Gibson’s formulation, the emphasis is on an outward-facing process of the organism’s relation to the environment.

Plug-ins and affordances have their differences that stem from the fact that they are used to capture different phenomena: Latour (2005) theorizes a flat and de-centred self, while Gibson (1986) analyses perception without any reference to the self. They also differ in terms of scale: whereas Gibson is interested in the very basics of our perception, e.g. how we perceive and invest meaning to different kinds of terrains, the world for Latour is equipped with a multitude of modern objects, whether price tags in supermarkets or articles in magazines. Affordances are fruitful in analysing the body’s relation to the environment and the ways in which different artefacts affect this relation (cf. Ingold, 2011; Michael, 2000). Plug-ins examine how subjectivity is constituted in this relation and how it is resolved and constituted anew with adaptations to new environments. Thus, plug-ins provide a way to think about the self as constituted in the practice and act of wearing clothes.

Ingold (2011, p. 77) points out that, in Gibson’s (1986) theory of affordances, the environment ‘exists only in relation to the being whose environment it is’. Thus, the environment differs from the purely physical world. In relation to the capacity of clothes to mediate relations between the person wearing them and her/his environment, it is important to note that the physical world affords certain things that are not necessarily taken up by the perceiver (Gibson, 1986, pp. 138–139). In such cases, the physical world is not turned into the environment of the perceiver. As mediators, clothes may facilitate the perception of certain things in the environment. They may also exclude the perception of others. Thus, clothing does not, in itself, open up the physical world as an environment for the wearer of the clothing; instead, it does so selectively. Hence, the relation between the perceiver and the environment is dynamic.

Before moving on to analyse the empirical material with the aid of the concepts introduced above, I will describe, in the next section, the field of my research and the clothes children wear in Finnish day care. I will also briefly explore how children’s clothes are connected to the ideals and ideas surrounding childhood, as well as the ideals of good parenting.

Children’s clothes and day care

In his now classic work on childhood history, Centuries of Childhood, the French social historian Ariès (1962) demonstrates how the conception of childhood emerged in the Western countries alongside specific material objects designed for children: toys and clothes. By analysing children’s portraits, he illustrates how the development of clothes from mini-sized copies of clothes for adults to ones designed especially for children echoed a new relation with and approach to children and childhood.

Children’s clothes are, thus, connected to ideologies concerning not only proper childhood, but also good parenting. Cook (2004) eloquently explores how the economic pursuits of retail sellers, the ideology of developmental psychology and their relation to good parenting came to shape children’s retail clothing in the US. The first step was to invite mothers to shop and make their children feel at home in shops and department stores. The dire economic situation of the 1930s helped to create a new way to sell children’s clothing: age-based groupings, in which each age segment was demonstrated to require distinct and age-appropriate clothing. The success of this age division was based on both the ideas of the retail sellers and the spread of the ideas of developmental psychology among middle-class mothers. Thus, age-segmented dress can be interpreted as the materialization of the developmental stage, which must now be taken into account. In this sense, the clothes children wear are part of a wider web of expectations concerning the good of the child. In practice, negotiations between children and adults regarding what to purchase may be complex. Children are seen as consumers in their own right by the global market, and children’s active involvement in choosing what the family purchases is significant (Buckingham, 2011; Langer, 2004).

The data for this article are based on a year-long ethnography I conducted in one day care centre in Southern Finland. Currently, 63% of Finnish children between the ages of one and six attend day care. Of these, 79% attend public day care (Säkkinen & Kuoppala, 2015). Private day care institutions provide care based on, for instance, specific pedagogies. The number of children in a day care group is based on legislation and the number of qualified staff. For the children older than three years old the ratio is a maximum of eight children per qualified staff member. The exception to this ratio are children with needs for special care and education, such as children with chronic medical conditions or delayed speech development, whose attendance reduces the maximum number of children in the group. The day care centre I studied was one intended for the children of shift-working parents, which, therefore, also provided care during the night-time and over weekends. The groups I studied included approximately 20 children and two to three staff members; however, the number of children varied widely according to the schedules of their parents.

The day care day normally consists of indoor play, instructive sessions, meal times, rest times and one or two sessions of outdoor play. Outdoor play usually takes place in the morning and in the afternoon. My fieldwork included following the everyday activities of the day care, taking part in trips outside the centre with the groups of children and attending parents meetings and group festivities. I followed the activities of two groups of children aged three to five years old and five to seven years old, respectively. During my stay, I wrote an ethnographic field diary, photographed and video-recorded material, and interviewed the staff and the children. This article would benefit from the visual material gathered during the fieldwork; however, during my negotiations of access to the day care centre, the staff strongly implied that I would not be granted access if any of the visual material were to be published.

Through the everyday rhythm of my fieldwork site, I could observe situations of changing clothes even more frequently than in ordinary day care centres, since, for instance, going to bed in the evening or waking up in the morning and changing from pyjamas to day wear usually takes place at home. Clothes were not, however, an issue I considered when starting my research. Initially, I chose this day care centre as my field site because I was interested in its nature as being in-between home and institutional care and its possibilities to offer a more detailed view of everyday embodied practices than a regular 9-to-5 day care centre. By concentrating on the transitional moments – that is, those moments when children transitioned from one pre-planned activity to the next – I slowly grew to notice the significant roles that changing clothes, taking care of them and talking about them played in the everyday life of the day care.

Though children’s clothing markets are divided into different segments according to expense, the class factor relating to clothing did not figure heavily in my studied day care centre. This might be due to the possible similar economic background of the families, since, in Finland, a place in day care tend to be allocated on the basis of proximity to the child’s home; hence, children from the same neighbourhood attend the same day care centre.

The children wore practical and comfortable clothes to day care. By this, I mean that they wore elastic shirts, skirts, leggings, sweaters and college pants for indoor activities. Since completing the day care research on which this article is based, I have also studied children in their home environments; thus, I can comfortably say that the clothing children wear to day care in Finland does not differ from the clothing they wear at home. Outdoor clothes consist usually of outdoor overalls or jackets and pants that can be worn over the indoor clothing. The northern climate affects children’s clothing in the sense that, for most of the year (spring, autumn and winter), the children need multiple layers of clothing, especially when playing outdoors. Since the longer holidays are usually situated in the summer-time, for most of the time that children spend at day care annually, outdoor clothing is needed for outside play.

The practicality of the clothing relates to it being easy to put on and take off and comfortable for moving about. Such clothing allows a child to manage her/himself independently. This demand for children’s independence and responsibility has been interpreted as resting on particularly fruitful soil in the Nordic countries, where children have traditionally been relatively self-governed (cf. Satka & Eydal, 2004).

I will now turn to the analysis of my empirical cases. The first examination concerns how perception is affected, altered and enabled by clothing. I analyse the properties of clothing further by presenting cases in which the properties inherent in the clothes are not allowed to work because the clothing is not worn in a pre-planned manner.

Mediating perception through clothing

In this section, I analyse how the clothes that are placed between the body and its surroundings mediate perceptions of the environment. This is influenced by the ways in which clothes help to provide certain perceptions, while blocking others. The first basic rule for such a selection to take place through perception rests on the choice of appropriate clothing for each occasion. This choice is based on the type of activity in which a child is involved in. Very broadly speaking, appropriateness is related to preventing the child’s body from being affected by unpleasant physical experiences, such as coldness, wetness and pain.

The practice of using indoor footwear in the day care centre demonstrates how weather conditions, the built environment, the view of childhood and economic issues intermingle and, thus, affect the use of a particular set of clothing. The yard of the day care centre is covered in sand, so during the rainy and snowy seasons of spring, autumn and winter, the children are bound to carry mud on their shoes when they go back inside the day care centre. The flooring inside is plastic and, thus, easily cleaned. In order to make cleaning more efficient, the city in which the day care centre is located prohibits the use of carpets inside. However, one of the key issues in the care provided in day care is keeping the children safe from physical injuries and pain. Since the easily cleaned plastic flooring is slippery and poses a possible risk of tripping and hurting oneself, the children must wear footwear such as slippers with leather soles inside the day care centre. This differs from the practice in Finnish homes, where it is not customary to wear footwear inside.

The use of indoor footwear, thus, prevents the children from slipping on the plastic floor and possibly feeling physical pain. At the same time, it also prevents the children from perceiving the slippery nature of the plastic floors. Through the use of indoor footwear, the plastic flooring is mediated as steady ground and stripped off its slippery quality. This is demonstrated by cases when the indoor footwear is taken off, as in the following example, in which Jasmin is in the hallway taking off her clothes, including slippers, before going to take a nap:

Whereas the slippers prevent sliding on the plastic floors, socks, college pants, stockings and leggings enhance this ability, as in the play of the two girls in the following extract:

Tinja is sitting on the floor, and Silja is crawling backwards and pulling Tinja by her hands.

In the extracts presented above, the material properties of the floors come into contact with the material properties of the clothes worn by the children. Gibson’s (1986) theory of affordances explores how the environment is apprehended in visual perception. In the cases of the children taking advantage of the floors’ slippery properties, one could argue that tactile perception also plays a role in the way in which the environment is made significant. This is enabled through the qualities of the socks and stockings, which enhance the floors’ slippery quality.

The perception of the environment’s qualities through clothing also arises in outdoor play. While on a trip to a nearby playground, six-year-old Kaisa, who came to day care with her overalls on and left straight for the trip, takes off her overalls because the August day turns out to be warmer than expected. Underneath, she is wearing a skirt with no stockings. As the children slide down a metal pole in the playground, the skin of Kaisa’s thighs fasten on the pole and make her slide slower than the rest of the children:

Kaisa is sliding down the pole, too. She does not slide as fast as Anna. When Kaisa makes a remark about it, Anna says that it is because Kaisa is wearing a skirt, while she herself is wearing pants.

This case shows how the use of clothing alters perceptions of the environment. While sliding down a metal pole, the feel of the pole against one’s thighs might cause pain. The pole may also be perceived as being cold against the legs, which might cause comfort or discomfort, depending on the warmth of the weather.

A further alteration can be detected in the children’s use of overalls. During autumn, winter and spring, children in Finland wear outdoor gear that is usually water- and wind-proof. Overalls cover the entirety of the child’s body, with the exception of the hands and feet. These are covered by shoes or boots and gloves. When the child is wearing the hood of her/his overalls or a knitted cap, the only part of the body left in contact with the weather is the face. This affects the body’s perceptive capabilities, including that of thermaception, which, in turn, affects the child’s growing knowledge of the environment. The overalls influence this knowledge by diminishing the changes in the bodily state according to changes in the environment. Moreover, the perceptive ability of sight is enhanced, while the skin’s ability to react and pass information on to other organs from outside conditions is diminished. Ingold (2011, pp. 38–39, 41–42) analyses a similar case related to the construction of paved streets and the use of boots. The boots used for walking on paved streets absorb the jolts caused by the feet hitting the pavement. This leads to a situation in which the sense-perception of the feet is diminished.

Whereas Ingold (2011, pp. 38–39, 41–42) argues that the use of footwear influences a change in the perceptive power of the feet, I suggest that the use of outdoor overalls alters the perception of the environment. As Barratt (2011, p. 404) notes concerning the use of climbing shoes in rock climbing, shoes can both inhibit and expand the capabilities of the feet. In the case of the indoor footwear, and the trousers used by all the other children except Kaisa when sliding down the pole, clothing alters children’s perceptions of the environment. These changes in perception, however, do not equal diminished possibilities for action. Instead, action is altered by the same token as perception. In Kaisa’s case, if she had not taken off her overalls, she could have felt the same rush of speed as the other children while sliding down the metal pole. Whatever we wear on our bodies affects the ways in which we come into contact with the environment. Thus, clothes mediate our multi-sensory perceptions of the world (cf. Allerton, 2007; Bannerjee & Miller, 2003). The properties of the environment are perceived differently in relation to what one wears on one’s body (cf. Michael, 2000).

Though clothing itself affects how and what we perceive, the ways in which clothes are worn also play a role in perception. The diminished ability of an item of clothing to be actively involved in a pre-planned manner can be interpreted through the use of Latour’s (2005, p. 79) notion of the silencing of objects. An object remains silent if it does not affect the action or course of events. In such cases, an object is not allowed to act; it does not leave a trace on the situation in which it is present. The silencing of the water-proof property of clothing takes place in the following quote from my fieldwork diary. Here, four-year-old girl Emmi is negotiating what to wear for outdoor play with the day care teacher Lotta. It is early spring, and the snow in the yard of the day care centre has started to melt into pools. In the quote, Emmi wants to wear her gloves made of Gore-Tex, which is a water-proof and wind-proof material.

In the quote, Lotta remarks that even though Emmi has her water-proof gear on, it is not enough. Emmi, to her dismay, must also wear rain gear, and, hence, has no use for the water-proof quality of her gloves. If a child has no water-proof outdoor clothing or if the weather is very wet, she/he must put on rain gear over her/his outdoor clothing, thus adding a new layer onto the body, as in the above case. Rain gear is not popular among children because it is not breathable and, thus, leaves the body feeling sweaty. Rain gloves are also not warm enough to be worn independently; consequently, a child must also typically wear warm gloves underneath them. This package of warm gloves and rain gloves affects the way in which the child is able to grasp, touch and hold onto objects with her/his hands. Hence, the rain clothing affects not only the child’s capabilities, but also the water-proof capabilities of the outdoor gear, which are now totally silenced due to the additional use of rain gear. Here, the different sets of clothing form chains of plug-ins where the next layer transforms the effects of the previous one.

Silencing an object also affects perception. Silencing can take place as in the case above, in which the plug-in – that is, the Gore-Tex gloves – are plugged into the rain gear in such a way that the wind- and water-proof qualities cannot be activated. Here, the object affects the silencing of particular senses. However, the silencing of perceptive capabilities might also relate to habit. The chain of plug-ins that ties a child to her/his perceptive relation to the environment might cause the plug-in to be silenced in the child’s perception. Thus, the child might perceive the environment, but cease to sense the garment. Only in the absence of the usual mediating plug-in – say, the trousers when sliding down the metal pole – is the impact of the absent garment sensed. Otherwise, the plug-in that affords a certain perception of the environment is forgotten. The perception of the environment might also be disturbed because the mediating object does not function properly. Michael (2000) discusses such a case, in which boots that are meant to reduce weariness or pain might, in fact, cause them. He borrows Serres’s (1982) concept of the parasite when suggesting that, in these kinds of cases, the boots intervene in the communication between nature and the body. However, though the silencing of an object alters the perception, it does not exhaust it. Instead, another way to perceive the world might be taken up. Hence, the environment is always perceived according to the way in which the perceiver is plugged into the environment.

Perceiving the environment in a certain way through the mediation of clothing does not have to change what children do. Nonetheless, clothes mediate the ways in which they are connected and plugged into the world. Moreover, clothes relate to the ways in which the physical world is turned into a meaningful environment. I move now to discuss how clothes work in mediating affective practices in the everyday life of day care.

Mediating affective practices through clothing

In this section I first explore how clothing functions in children’s peer relations. I then analyse how the properties of clothing bring together the children and the adult staff. The possibilities of the clothes to influence the action and practices of day care depend on the web of relations in which they are embedded. This section takes up the visuality and design of the clothes, which could be linked to the representation of, particularly, gendered identity. I concentrate, however, on what kinds of activities and practices evolve around the clothes.

Clothes are at the centre of action and attention in the moments when children change their clothes in order to go outside to play, when they come in, when they undress to go to rest during the day or in the evenings and again when they wake up. In these situations, it is easy for the children to comment on one another’s clothing. Of course, the appearance of the clothing is not the only thing drawing the children together. The children also play and converse together, perform chores and tasks assigned by staff members, laugh and quarrel. Clearly, clothes are not at the centre of attention in all of these cases. Nonetheless, the clothes do generate interactions among the children.

Clothes are apprehended by other people because of their visibility (Lee, 2001). Consequently, the ability to represent is one of the capacities of clothing. The children draw an active benefit from this capacity by presenting their clothes to one another and to the adults in the day care. The presenting of the clothes consists of pointing out a garment and urging a spectator to look at it. This occurs in the following extracts, in which Viivi and Jenny each approach me:

In the case of clothing worn by Finnish children, the clearest visual codes are those of gender, age and function. These can be interpreted as signifying identity. The gender division is the most apparent and is based on both the design of clothing and the choice of colours and patterns. Dark colours, such as dark blue, dark brown and black, are intended for boys, while pink, red, lilac and white are intended for girls. Gender differences are communicated through the use of prints, such as flowers and princesses for girls and cars and monsters for boys. Moreover, compared to boys’ clothes, girls’ clothes more frequently incorporate small details, such as embroidery and sequins that seem to invite the act of touching, as in the following extract. Here, the girls are changing from outdoor to indoor clothing after outdoor play.

Just as clothes mediate a certain kind of perception of the environment at the expense of shutting out another kind of perception, the appearance of clothing has a similar effect. The visual content of clothes may provoke tactile encounters, as in the above extract. The importance of the details of clothing in promoting closeness among girls can also be seen in the case of one girl who never wore girlish clothes, but instead dressed in jogging suits. The other girls never gathered around her to admire or touch her clothes. In the above example, the visual content of the clothing seems to invite touch and physical proximity. However, the visual content may also shut contact out. This might occur when clothing displays plain motifs, which do not draw any attention. For example, the clothing worn by the boys tends to display more plain motifs, such as stripes or monsters and wildlife. These motifs seem to shut out closeness, rather than invite it. This is demonstrated by Matias, who is wearing a college shirt with a big image of a mammoth on it:

The presentation of one’s clothing to others is a recurring activity among the children, almost like a standard practice of contact-making. Shove and Pantzar (2005, p. 61) point out that it is the practitioners who carry on practices, and not the producers who have, for instance, invented new products. In a similar vein, the children carry out the practice of presenting their clothes, which is a practice not necessarily even intended by the designers of the garments they wear. Thus, the clothes are taken up by the children in the practice of presentation, and the visual properties of the clothing, in particular, become the centre of this practice.

The sociological study of clothing has traditionally emphasized the connection between representation and identity (Miller, 2010, p. 12), as well as, lately, the sense-perception of wearing the clothes (cf. Allerton, 2007; Woodward, 2007). By examining how the clothes become the centre of children’s practices of presentation, I wish to pay attention to the impact that clothes have on everyday practices and activities. This opens up a further dimension for the analysis of gendered pieces of clothing. When examined in the practices centred around them in everyday life, clothes are not merely representational artefacts, but instead become objects that contribute to the possibilities of action and affection. Because of the different properties of gendered clothing, such as plainness or embroidery, clothing for different genders encourages different kinds of activities and practices. I interpret that clothes invite different acts, actions and, thus, affects based on a gendered division. This, clearly, does not dictate that children should necessarily respond to this invitation or that they could not act otherwise, if desired.

Thus, clothes, in themselves, do not cause things to happen, cause the environment to be perceived or cause relations among people to be constituted. What clothes need in order to be effective is to be plugged into the chains of plug-ins that allow them to have an effect on what is going on. In this event, clothes may evoke, take part in, or carry on everyday practices (cf. Shove & Pantzar, 2005). This is precisely the case when considering the instances of the adult staff helping the children dress and undress. Here, the relation consists of the body’s capabilities, the ideal organization of child–adult relations, the structure of the day care day and the requirements of the labour market, as well as the properties of the clothing.

The youngest children need help in dressing, particularly with gloves, clothes with laces or ribbons that need tying and rain gear during winter-time. In the older group, the girls need help when they are wearing dresses that have zippers or buttons at the back, since they cannot reach these by themselves. The unspoken rule in the day care is that the adult staff help the children when they need it. Helping with dressing is one such instance. The 24-hour society is reflected in the everyday life of the day care centre in the form of the demands of the children’s parents’ jobs, which result in the children’s irregular hours in day care. As one staff member pointed out, the day care centre seems, at times, to be a railway station because of the constant coming and going of children. In this almost chaotic flux of everyday life, aiding with clothing poses a break for the adult staff and a chance for the child and the adult staff member to converse one-to-one. These are the instances during which the child’s feelings and emotions are discussed without these being a planned part of the activity at hand. Here, also, the child’s home is a normal topic of conversation. Thus, the situations of changing clothes can be interpreted as affective encounters between the staff and the children. The relationship between child and adult that opens up during these encounters is one of caring. The clothes, as objects with particular properties, such as buttons at the back, help to maintain the affective everyday practices of clothes’ changing situations in day care (cf. Shove & Pantzar, 2005, p. 48). As the design of the clothes is gendered, so too may be the action, and hence experiences, revolving around them.

Moreover, the clothes provide a way to be specifically plugged into these practices. Miller (2010, pp. 23–31) analyses the practice of wearing the sari and notes that it requires a particular manner of wearing in order for it not to fall and uncover the body beneath or catch fire while cooking. In the process of learning how to wear it, the movements of the body are affected, and new ones are acquired. The sari, thus, poses a specific way for the body to be plugged into everyday life. So, too, do the patterns and design of children’s clothing, which provide different ways for the children to be connected with other people. Here, the connections work as plug-ins for affective relations, which help to define the sense of the self of the child. Moreover, based on the differences in clothing intended for boys and girls, they offer gendered ways to plug in. As in the case of affordances that are not necessarily picked up by the perceiver (Gibson, 1986, pp. 138–139), the plugs need not be activated.

In this sense, the design of clothing mediates, quite practically, the affectual practices of everyday life and relations among people. If clothing is seen in relation to the identity of its wearer (cf. Woodward, 2007), the representation that clothes communicate to the outside becomes one of importance (Lee, 2001). As Hockey et al. (2014) point out in their analysis of footwear as memory objects, changes between pairs of shoes contribute to different affordances. Consequently, shoes and clothes contribute to the activation of different aspects of an individual’s identity in everyday life. In this article, I have not touched upon the relation between individual and identity as afforded by clothing. Rather, I have argued that gendered clothing has other effects besides affording identity. As clothes mediate action, they play a role in the constitution of gendered affectual experiences. In the conclusion of this article, I will discuss further how clothes shape and enable our perceptions and influence our affective practices, thus connecting us to other people. I see these as parts of the constitutions of our selves.

Conclusion: What do the clothes do?

In the beginning of this article, I stated that I would look at how clothes influence the everyday lives of children in day care. I further noted that I would examine the question What do the clothes do? To give a short, rough answer, I would say that clothing affects children’s possibilities for action and perception. Clothes mediate perception and evoke and help to carry out affectual practices, thereby creating connections between people. Obviously, my analysis has been selective, and its focus on clothes has excluded other aspects that affect everyday life in day care. This has been a conscious choice, however. I have sought to focus on a very mundane and obvious part of children’s lives and of human existence: that is, being clothed. By offering an analysis of the impact of clothes on perceptions and everyday affections, I have sought to move on from the analysis of clothes as representations of identity, status or class. Though these are important aspects of the study of clothes, clothes in themselves enhance, diminish and expand our capabilities of perceiving the world and connecting to others. In short, they alter our ways of being.

With respect to the constitution of the self in which the clothing takes part, I apply Latour’s (2005) concept of plug-ins. In light of the cases being discussed in this article, I understand plug-ins as providing us with experiences from the world. The plug-in differs from any other mediator in that it is a vehicle for the self, that is, a tool that draws together the de-centred parts of the self. The physical world offers certain affordances, whether or not they are perceived by the human being (Gibson, 1986, pp. 138–139). While the notion of affordance grasps the ways in which the organism faces outward to the environment, the direction of the plug-in is contrary and focuses on the way the outside objects come to form selfhood. Hence, perceiving could be a case of plugging in, but plug-ins need not be solely about perception. The physical world is turned into an environment by the perceiver and this environment offers possibilities to connect or plug in, and hence, establish the self. When one plug-in ceases to exist, another appears, whether it is rain gear or dresses with buttons down the back.

In this way, clothes transmit from our environment and connect us to it. In his treatment of plug-ins Latour concentrates on cognitive capabilities that are activated at each event. Following Latour’s reasoning I have examined perception and affective experiences, which emerge in the relations between the actor and the physical and social environment. Latour pays no attention, however, to how the plugging in happens concretely. Here Gibson’s (1986) notion of affordance offers a possibility to complement Latour’s formulation by analysing the relation of the body to its environment. While Latour does not discuss perception at all, I propose that it is one of the key ingredients in establishing possibilities for plug-ins. Meanwhile, the notion of plug-ins may serve to complement the theory of affordances by offering a more dynamic view of the environment as a site for ever emerging new possibilities for plugging in; this is lacking in Gibson’s (1986, pp. 18–19) treatment of affordances as unaffected by evolution or the organism inhabiting the environment (Ingold, 2011, p. 78).

Plug-ins actively shape the ways in which our selves come to be. Clothing is by no means the only aspect responsible for constituting the self. Instead, this article has proposed an angle from which the self can be interpreted as mingling with artefacts – in this case, clothes – that move in diverse relations that generate effects. The concept of the plug-ins demonstrates how subjects (if one wants to call them that) are caught in the web of relations with ‘objects’ and how different sides of subjectivities are activated and, thus, come to exist in connection with the objects.

The plug-in is an analytical tool to detect our multiple, overlapping and chained connections that form us as subjects. In practice, the borders of the plug-ins might not be easily detectable. For a plug-in to truly work, I suspect, the borders of the plug-in must vanish into the chain or assemblage of which it is a part of. In this manner, we can interpret the example of children playing at being a human floor cloth, presented earlier in the article. The clothes make a certain kind of action possible by taking up and activating a particular property of the environment that is transmitted to the experience of the child, making it possible for the child to build up play around the property. Here, it does not matter where the border lies among the piece of clothing, the foot and the floor, since all are required for the play to be possible (cf. Barratt, 2011).

As I am writing the conclusion for this article, the Finnish children’s clothing brand Reima® has just launched an activity sensor for children that is to be fastened onto the child’s outdoor jacket. ¹ The activity sensor records the child’s bodily movements, which can then be transmitted to the screen of a mobile phone or tablet. This new piece of clothing is marketed to parents who, with the aid of the sensor, will be able to know how much their child moves and at what times. The child’s physical activity can be measured against goals that the adult sets for the child, and the child can see the progress of her/his physical activity situated in a virtual world. Through this sensor, the child’s relations to the environment, to her/his own body and to her/his parents are arranged in a new way. New chains of plug-ins are created. Clothes with such new and advanced properties may lend themselves more easily to academic analysis on the effect of clothing than the clothes we are accustomed to wear. I think, however, that there is no decisive difference between what the sensor garment and a ‘traditional’ garment does. Each embeds us in the world in which we live, altering our perceptions, experiences, actions and affects.