Abstract
This article provides a study of precarisation through the lens of dress work: the mundane practice of dressing the body for work. Based on intimate in-depth wardrobe interviews and analyses of workers’ narratives about their dressing practices, we develop a perspective on what insecure work feels like for workers in the interactive services and creative industries. We understand dress work as a materially mediated practice in which workers often aim to achieve a level of comfort: a state in which they are allowed to become less reflexive about their bodies. One of the ways in which precarisation makes itself known, we contend, is through the temporal logic of the interruption. The temporality of zero-hours contracts and short-term, insecure labour interrupts the achievement of comfort as workers are not allowed the time to experience their work, colleagues and spaces. The discomfort and sometimes pain of insecurity of post-Fordist labour is thus felt on the body.
German orthopaedic shoes and the working body
Patrick, a youth worker in his mid-thirties, reaches into his wardrobe to pick up a shoebox with grey German orthopaedic shoes by a brand called FinnComfort. He is all for promoting these shoes, he says. ‘I thought it was very original, and erm, it just made me laugh’. He explains that this is a trend in what he calls ‘casual fine taste’: a subculture of men interested in casual, UK oriented sartorial style. He follows blogs and Instagrammers in ‘casual fine taste’ and when they started to post about German orthopaedic shoes, he immediately liked it and bought a pair himself. He now owns several. ‘It is partly fashion, but it is also: . . . in my work I have to stand a lot, I move around a lot, I need good shoes. So after a while of wearing them, I noticed that I did, in fact, feel better. And that is important because in my job, my body is my instrument. You need to be aware of your presence, listen to your underbelly, you know.’
Patrick is interested in feeling comfortable at work. He wears FinnComfort shoes for the subcultural symbolic value, but not just: he was moved to buying them online on a quest to prevent pain in work and to be able to read his body more fully in order to do his job better. Patrick works with adolescents and young adults who are what he calls ‘sofa sleepers’. His clients are not homeless in the bureaucratic definitions of that term but do not have an actual home: they stay, quite literally, on the sofas of friends and relatives. Working with such a precarious population, Patrick feels he needs to be able to use his intuition to the full and for this purpose he needs to be in touch with what his body tells him. Patrick’s own position on the labour market is precarious in many ways too. He is on his second temporary contract with the social entrepreneur that is his employer and to whom municipal youth work is contracted out. Under Dutch labour law at the time of the interview, this means it is his last contract with this employer (employers were only allowed to give employees two temporary contracts in an effort to move employers to give more employees permanent contracts), unless he is afforded a permanent contract. Before working with this company, he worked for many other employers in similar contractual situations. It is stressful work and Patrick’s prospects are insecure: there is no way to know now at what point in the future he will be able to build a life on a little bit more stability.
Patrick was interviewed as part of a study into what we call dress work: the everyday backstage practice of dressing the body for work. Dress work is a lens through which to look at the precarisation of work. Part of precarisation, Isabell Lorey (2015) contends, is the mobilisation of the whole person (her affects, emotions, body, sociality) for labour. What is often termed ‘immaterial labour’ (Lazzarato, 1996) has its material aspects and translations. Whether in childcare or in advertisement, design or youth work, precarious workers prepare their performing bodies at work in part through dressing it for work. The design of this study was to ask precarious workers to go through the matter in their wardrobe with us and discuss work and work’s insecurities by talking about the material objects in their closet, bedroom or hallway. Using the stuff in their wardrobes was a strategy to talk about the intimate everyday preparations of the body that precarious immaterial labour expects.
Like Patrick, most of the workers we interviewed had developed strategies to approach a certain level of comfort at work. ‘Comfort’ or ‘comfortable’ (the same words are used in Dutch) were the ubiquitous emic terms in our interviews. Comfort, it soon turned out, means many things and we will go into some of these meanings below. Interestingly, though, the narratives of our interviewees revealed a certain temporality to comfort: comfort, many of them told us through talking about clothes, became more attainable when the relationship between them and their employer, colleagues and/or clients became less new. Put differently: through working in particular situations and the pedagogies at work there, workers acquire the skill to produce comfort in work through dressing. Discontinuous and insecure labour disrupts this achievement of comfort: instead of reaching a certain ‘flow’ in work spaces, this flow is interrupted as a rule. Through researching clothes and how they are used, therefore, we are able to show the discomfort and sometimes pain of precarisation.
This article aims to recognise the politics and the materialities of work and dressing by building on sociologies of fashion, work on precarisation and work on the materialities of comfort. We are more interested in dress practices than in fashion per se, though the two are of course intricately linked (Entwistle, 2015). Much of sociology’s attention to clothing and fashion has historically looked at dress as a form of communication, at dressing as processes of distinction and identification, often along the lines of gender, race/ethnicity and class (e.g. Crane, 2000; Simmel, 1957). This present study focuses on the matter of clothing and of the fit between these materialities and contemporary work’s requirements (building on works in material culture such as Miller, 2010 and Woodward, 2007; cf. Sweetman, 2001). Based on intimate in-depth wardrobe interviews and analyses of workers’ narratives of discomfort, pain and the new world of work, we ask: (1) How are items of clothing used in achieving comfort at work? (2) What is the temporal logic of comfort? And (3) What does this teach us more broadly about precarisation?
The materiality of immaterial precarious labour
From the precariat to precarisation
In sociology, perspectives on precarisation have become tightly related to the concept of the precariat. For Guy Standing (2011), one of the voices on this issue receiving the most attention, the precariat is a ‘class-in-the-making’, consisting of vastly different groups of people across the globe that nonetheless share a lack of basic (labour) security. Standing’s perspective has become influential in part because of the way in which sociologists like Mike Savage (Savage et al., 2015; see Skeggs, 2015 for a critique) have included it in their class analyses. While Standing’s conceptualisation of the precariat as a class is largely instrumental (for a political project of creating new forms of security like a universal basic income) and he acknowledges its conceptual shortcomings and the necessity of flexibility when it comes to defining this group, in Savage et al.’s interpretation, precariousness is in fact a property of a particular class, a class at the very bottom of a new UK class structure in which seven classes are represented. The term precariat travelled from social movements and EuroMayDay protests in Southern Europe to sociologists’ vocabulary through various translations that have now rid it of the original calls for new forms of organising, searching common ground across the classes.
For the German theorist Isabell Lorey (2015), the point of looking at precarity is precisely to study the politics of governmental precarisation and to find such common ground. In her Foucauldian and Butlerian approach, the central concern is how we are all governed by insecurity and what that means for the (im)possibility of politics. Lorey distinguishes three dimensions: precariousness (following Judith Butler, 2003) is ‘the term for a socio-ontological dimension of lives and bodies’ (Lorey, 2015, p. 11); precarity is the (political) ordering of precariousness so that some are left more precarious than others; and governmental precarisation ‘relates to modes of governing . . . [that] means not only destabilisation through employment, but also destabilisation of the conduct of life and thus of bodies and modes of subjectivation’ (p. 13).
Our study builds on this work and focuses on one location in which such destabilisation of bodies and modes of subjectivation can be felt and researched: the mundane practice of dress work. Our approach also builds on the idea that precarisation is not just felt in a class that we can call the precariat, as if governmental precarisation does not also govern groups that do not qualify as the precariat, such as highly educated academics or creative industry entrepreneurs. In fact, the precarisation of workers in creative industries and academia are recently much studied (see for example Cannizzo, 2017; Gill & Pratt, 2008; McRobbie, 2016). Precarisation impacts most of us, however unevenly, and understanding it in this breadth is imperative. We focus, therefore, on workers that navigate precarious employment in the creative industries and interactive services. Precarious employment for us here means that their work is discontinuous and highly insecure (a more extensive description of our respondents is provided below).
Immaterial labour and clothing as material culture
Part of precarisation is that contemporary labour ‘demands the whole person’ (Lorey, 2015, p. 5) and mobilises passion (Cannizzo, 2017; McRobbie, 2016) and love (Weeks, 2017). This is so because much labour today is at least in part ‘immaterial’: a service, idea or knowledge is what is exchanged. For Maurizio Lazzarato, immaterial labour is the labour that ‘produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity’ (1996, p. 133): a smile of a waitress, the creative spark of a designer, the listening ear of a nurse. But of course, and as Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt made clear, immaterial labour becomes material somewhere: the materiality of most work is, indeed, ‘stubborn’ (Gill & Pratt, 2008, p. 9). Dress is one such location. Rather: contemporary labour is mediated through material objects such as skirts, jackets and shoes. Preparing for work, like any social practice, is always materially mediated: we use garments, closets and mirrors. Part of the privatised search for security in times of precarisation can therefore be expected to be found in the material preparation of the body for work. By looking at dressing as a materially mediated practice, we develop an innovative perspective on the navigation of insecurity in this labour market, one that supplements and further deepens our understanding of the workings of contemporary insecurity and inequality. To look at the politics of dressing, in our approach, is therefore primarily to look at everyday dress practices under precarisation and not the politics of communications of identities.
To be sure, when a theatre director’s assistant dresses in the morning, she concerns herself with these categories and with communicating identity in a more or less reflexive manner (whether outfits were ‘feminine enough’, for example, was a recurring concern). However, she can only do so through using particular objects whose material properties are important and too often overlooked in sociological analysis: a reading of what materials would be required during the day (the weather, whether it would be a sitting-down day or a standing-up day, whether she would need to travel by bike, etc.) was, in our respondents’ narratives, very much front and centre in everyday dress work. Our perspective here is, therefore, inspired by studies in material culture (Hansen, 2005; Miller, 2010; Miller & Küchler, 2005; Woodward, 2007; cf. Sweetman, 2001).
We maintain that a focus on how workers clothe their bodies is an excellent lens to study precarisation more widely. Clothing mediates the relationship between the individual and the (work-) environment (cf. Woodward, 2007). For many jobs in the contemporary economy, standardisations of the ‘presentation of self’ such as uniforms are no longer possible. Instead, many engage in a continuous interpretation, especially in labour markets in flux: without long-term, stable employment, this calibration is continuous. We look at the communicative aspects of clothing: the way clothes signify a status or identity to our respondents, but we make sure to also focus on the material aspects such as fibre, fit, warmth and weight in an effort to ‘invoke the tactile, emotional, intimate world of feelings’ (Miller, 2010, p. 41). Doing this enables us to more fully study the unpaid, reproductive and often affective labour that is dressing the body for work and the everyday politics of precarisation. Dressing for work is definitively an act of assessing the symbolic aspects of clothing: workers engage in the act of thinking through what they communicate to fellow workers, employers and clients. Even comfort can be a question of these forms of communication (Holliday, 2001). But it is not just that: focusing on these symbolic aspects would be, in the words of Daniel Miller, to reduce ‘clothing . . . to its ability to signify something that seems more real – society or social relations – as though these things exist above or prior to their own materiality’ (Miller, 2005, p. 2). Garments themselves, Miller contends, have agency: they are ‘part of what constitutes and forms lives, cosmologies, reasons, causes and effects’ (p. 2). Patrick’s shoes (from our introduction), for example, enable him to feel his body better and feel comfortable: the material quality of the sole, the sturdy leather and good fit open up this possibility for him, in addition to connecting to a subcultural repertoire of ‘casual fine taste’. It is this material mediation that is our focus here: we look at the materiality of immaterial labour in the performative bodies and the collections of objects used for these performances of workers in contemporary urban economies.
Comfort: A practical achievement and learned competence
Our particular focus is on the achievement of comfort. This focus comes almost entirely out of our interviews and observations. Our respondents used the word ‘comfort’ regularly and cited it as a main goal in dressing for work (we will elaborate on this below). This reminds us very much of how respondents in a qualitative study by Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward (2012) referred to denim as comfortable. Miller and Woodward conclude that it is not the material properties of denim as a fabric or indigo as a colour that make it comfortable, but also the way in which it makes people fit in, the way in which jeans often can make people forget they have a body at all (2012, p. 82). This forgetting of the body is also suggested by Sara Ahmed in her study on diversity-work and institutions (2012). Building on phenomenology, she outlines how comfort is often a ‘fitting in’. In a later blog post on these themes she comments: ‘I am reminded how much inhabiting an institution involves garments: how class can be comfort of wearing the right jumper with the right body, a “fit” acquired over and in time: in the comportment and postures that bodies remember without having to think’ (2015). Ahmed asks us to consider how not ‘fitting’ requires effort, how workers work hard to achieve the comfort that is not so easily established in institutions that do not ‘extend their shape’. ‘Fitting in’, she makes clear is an ‘energy saving device’ (2015; cf. Cottingham et al., 2018; Green, 2001).
This idea that comfort takes or saves effort and energy is also reflected in Elizabeth Shove’s work (2003). Shove’s interest is in contemporary concrete, specific definitions of comfort because these drive (home) design and thereby consumer energy use. For her purpose of rethinking what is ‘normal’ energy usage it is necessary to rethink what comfort is. Often, she argues, we are inclined to think of comfort as a property of a material object. A chair, sweater or pants can, in this definition, be comfortable. In another, more compelling conceptualisation, a chair, sweater or pants can be ‘tools in which [comfort] is achieved’ (Shove, 2003, p. 25). This alternative conceptualisation is vital for Shove, since this involves a particular type of effort from those that use these objects and thereby displaces the expectation of comfort or the experienced right to comfort. For our purposes here, this conceptualisation makes it possible to look at the way in which material objects are used by workers and how material objects make certain experiences of workers possible. The constant and creative calibration between the self and work that is dress work therefore involves a continuous assessment of how a state of comfort can or cannot be achieved. As we will go on to show, experiences of comfort, for our respondents, are usually a combination of being successful in communicating a certain image to others, fitting in, and feeling warm enough, avoiding pain, wearing clothing that is made of fibres that will make the body less sweaty. Both the material properties of items (fabric, length, colour) and the communicative or symbolic aspects (gender, status) are calibrated in the practical achievement that is comfort. Our conceptualisation of comfort is therefore: a practical achievement of workers in which they use material objects such as clothes to calibrate the relationship between self and work in a way that enables them to become less reflexive of their bodies. This calibration is a practice that workers learn to engage in: through various pedagogies, workers develop what Karen Hansen (2005) has termed clothing competence: the skill to coordinate garments to ‘fit specific occasions and contexts, and in the overall presentation and comportment of the dressed body’ (p. 112).
Many (precarious) workers, however, do not achieve comfort and therefore experience discomfort at work and sometimes even pain. We argue that precarious work in service industries and creative industries presents new types of discomfort. More specifically: through its logic of interruption, a temporality in which fewer long-term relationships are built, precarisation creates particular states of sartorial and bodily discomfort. We know examples of professions in which a state of discomfort or pain is not something to avoid at all, such as the dancers in Anna Aalten’s study (2005). From this work, we can learn that pain is indeed a way in which the body ‘leaves its mode of absence, making its presence known’ (2005, p. 58). For most workers, however, and certainly the workers in our study, discomfort and pain, how to avoid it or how to manage it is a recurring concern, one that is hardly addressed in scholarly or societal debate on precarisation and contemporary labour markets.
Approach and methods
We base our analysis on interview data collected through the methodology of ‘wardrobe interviewing’ (Van der Laan & Velthuis, 2016; Woodward, 2007). In this type of interview, wardrobe matter (the wardrobe itself, clothes and accessories) is used to prompt narratives of and reflections on practices of dressing in particular and reflections on practices of (preparing for) work more generally. We (the authors of this article and two junior researchers, all white women in their twenties and thirties) did a total of 28 in-depth interviews that took place, largely, in workers’ bedrooms, in front of closets and cabinets. In this very intimate setting, we talked about particular matter in those wardrobes: dresses, scarves, heels, socks and underwear in an effort to talk about the daily unpaid labour of preparing for precarious work.
We set out in this study with the aim to explore how post-Fordist workers balance self and work in dress. We typically started the interviews with topics related to work and insecurities concerning work. Participants were invited to talk about their job, their work histories, their types of labour contracts and the ways they did or did not feel insecure about this. We would then move on to talk about their clothes and dressing practices. Typically, we asked what their morning routine of dressing looked like; whether they selected their outfit in the morning or whether they planned this in advance. This would lead to respondents explaining their daily deliberations in selecting clothes to wear. Other questions included whether there have been work situations in which they felt their clothes were inappropriate, how they dressed for their first day at work and what clothes they would wear to the first time meeting a new employer or client. Crucially, these questions always included specific talk about particular items in their wardrobes. Personal favourites and ‘inactive items’ (that were part of the wardrobe but not worn) of clothing were discussed and counted. The interviews usually took about two hours. Focusing on the objects in wardrobes and bedrooms turned out to be extremely useful, because it allowed for very detailed explorations: Which objects in the wardrobe are never chosen for work contexts? Why? Why is a particular dress neglected in a current job while it was worn often in the previous one?
Most of our 28 respondents were working freelance, zero-hours or under short-term, fixed-term contracts, either in interactive service industries (childcare, front-office work, temp teaching jobs) or in creative industries (theatre, film, fashion). We selected respondents from those two categories of industries because we expected, based on the existing literature (Boyle & De Keere, 2019; Elias et al., 2017; McDowell, 2009; McRobbie, 2016), that aesthetic labour would be especially salient there and that these are fields where labour has become much more precarious. Aesthetic labour is predominantly associated with work in interactive service industries as this type of labour entails face-to-face interactions between worker and client. In the creative industries, personal aesthetics are critical for displaying cultural knowledge, creativity and authenticity. In our sample these two categories of industries tend to overlap in the sense that respondents often combined creative jobs or gigs with interactive service side jobs in order to have a stable or sufficient income. The ages of our respondents vary from 24 to 39 and all respondents live in the urban Randstad area (the urban region that includes Amsterdam, The Hague and Rotterdam) in the Netherlands. Eight of our respondents are men and 20 are women. These characteristics – employment contract, gender, industry, age (relatively early career) – were used as criteria in selecting respondents. Most of our respondents can be categorised as white and Dutch. In addition, many had middle class backgrounds. This limits our study in terms of what we can say about precarious workers’ navigations of the whiteness of work spaces, particular class dynamics, particular racialised aesthetics and the workings of racism in precarisation (but see previous studies on dress advice and welfare: Van den Berg, 2019; Van den Berg & Arts, 2019a, 2019b). However, based on our sample and our respondents’ narratives, we are able to analyse how workers that enjoy many privileges (whiteness, class background) and are usually not regarded as precarious do, in fact, have to navigate new kinds of insecurities in times of precarisation. Moreover, our sample reflects that under the contemporary economic system, precarious contracts are not limited to low or unskilled workers. Many of our respondents were higher educated, often easily presenting as ‘middle class’ aesthetically (we use class very loosely here, as we have not made a class analysis of our respondents or asked them about their class backgrounds). At the same time, many were eager to discuss their difficulties of navigating insecure labour markets and lives: for many, concerns about the next contract, about the need for a second job, about relying on parents or partners to make ends meet were very salient. The labour involved in that presentation while relying on discontinuous and often poorly paid labour is precisely the object of this study.
Respondents were contacted through the researchers’ personal networks and via snowballing. Given the intimate nature of the interviews, personal networks and referrals were very helpful in gaining consent and building rapport with the interviewees. The first interviews, therefore, were typically done with respondents that were relatively close to the researchers after which snowballing quickly widened the scope. We recorded, transcribed and analysed the interviews with a focus on the different strategies respondents employed in dressing for work. We found the terms ‘comfort’ and ‘comfortable’ to be ubiquitous emic terms in the interviews. Strikingly, while respondents more or less unanimously found comfort to be important in clothing, there appeared to be different uses of the word ‘comfort’. Therefore, we analysed all interview excerpts referring to or containing the words ‘comfort’ or ‘comfortable’, leading to an inventory of the different emic meanings of these words. Likewise, the concept of time and temporality turned out to be salient in the logics that respondents applied in their everyday dressing.
Producing comfort with clothes
If we conceptualise comfort as a practical achievement, it follows that workers use material objects in this effort. One of the ways in which this was apparent in our research was the way in which numerous respondents spoke of specific items of clothing that were useful in achieving comfort for situations in which they would be either standing or sitting down. Jeans, for example (a well-known example of ‘comfortable dress’, Miller & Woodward, 2012), were categorised in these sometimes mutually exclusive boxes: certain jeans were easy to move around in while standing up straight, because of the stretchy fabric. This made them a good option for waitressing. Other, more mid-waist jeans were preferred whenever our respondents were preparing for a day at the office or working while sitting: they wanted their lower backs to be covered by their clothing. Fashion-photographer Sophie, for example, preferred relatively high-waist jeans to make sure no one would see her underwear because her job involves crouching down a lot. Jeans with or without Lycra, low-waist or mid-waist, are not necessarily comfortable by or of themselves, but rather objects in an effort towards sartorial comfort at work.
This achievement of comfort often entailed a feeling of ease, painlessness, security and safety, a sense of freedom. In some cases, the feeling of security was primarily meant in the sense of protection against weather conditions but also against gazes of co-workers in a sexist work space. Alexandra, a front-office worker in her early thirties, explained how one of her primary concerns in dressing for work was to cover her body in such a way that her breasts were less visible to men.
This blouse is nice and big
What is nice about that?
. . . Well, just that it feels nice and loose and you don’t see too much of your shape. This other one is slightly more tight, so you see more of your breasts, so that stands out more. I feel less comfortable in that one. . . . I feel very uncomfortable in such a blouse, just the idea that they [men] stare at you.
Alexandra’s ‘nice and big’ blouse is comfortable because it enables her to navigate gazes in a male-dominated work space. In this example, comfort is about being less conscious about the body by feeling less of an object. While many of our respondents talked of the need to feel like oneself at work and ways to achieve this through clothing, one of the most striking recurring themes in the interviews was the way in which clothes were used to feel safe by fitting in or by not being noticed. Evie, a sales manager in a boutique, sees herself returning to trusted items time and again to navigate the fashionable work spaces she is in:
I prefer wearing black anyway.
Why is that?
I guess it’s because I stand out even less then. Not that I’m not interested in standing out per se, but not standing out is comfortable. . . . I also like these [blouses], mostly because they’re quite neutral.
For Evie, comfort is achieving a situation where she blends in, where she communicates to her customers and co-workers that she belongs, a fitting-in that also involved wearing certain brand clothes that would be recognised as such by her co-workers. The colour black or this particular brand-recognition, then, enables Evie to not stand out and for her body to not be overly observable. This corresponds with a well-known argument in fashion and dress studies regarding the balance that is to be struck between originality and conformity (Simmel, 1957) or how people generally try to achieve aesthetic fit (Mears, 2014). Buying these items entailed quite elaborate strategic planning because they are relatively expensive. Waiting to buy certain items once on sale or saving money to buy much coveted pieces were, for Evie and other respondents in similar situations, important to blend in in a relatively fashionable context on a modest and insecure income. Respondents like Evie are not just performing extensive unpaid labour in doing dress work, they are also using their modest incomes to buy clothes that enable them to do that unpaid labour and not stand out at work.
Alexandra and Evie use particular items of clothing to produce a state of comfort or to help them navigate an uncomfortable space. In an important sense, clothes are agentic here: they do something, whether it is enabling fitting in or feeling uncomfortable (cf. Miller, 2010; Woodward, 2007). As Sophie Woodward (2007) has shown, looking into moments in which clothing fails is especially interesting in this regard. Often, these are the moments in which the agency of material objects is particularly present. Consider for example Wouter, a musician who is making ends meet through various casual jobs. Wouter found a job in a hotel in which he was asked to wear formal clothes in which he felt ill at ease. In Wouter’s case, the achievement of comfort is very much related to a sense of freedom and autonomy.
Shoes had to be neatly polished; everything had to be perfectly in order. Within one week I found myself thinking ‘this is not me’. My sister was already working at that hotel and she had gotten me the job. After one week she said: ‘Wouter, I feel so guilty you’re working here now.’
And what was it that made you feel uneasy there?
That’s just not me.
Neat?
Well, it’s not the neatness that bothers me. The thing is, when workplaces demand of you [to dress a certain way] it bothers me that I feel like I’m losing my identity, or something like that. I mean, however silly, ’cause I’m not very conscious about the things I wear. Which is essentially a statement in itself, if you look at it that way – not thinking about what to wear because it’s ok anyway.
The clothing demanded by his employer actively produces discomfort for Wouter. When describing how the clothes made him feel, Wouter talks about an experienced lack of autonomy, of being told what to wear and having to conform to a dress code that makes him very conscious about his body. Wouter owns several dress shirts and jackets and would not necessarily mind looking formal when performing as a musician. However, in the context of the hotel, where all employees are expected to dress in a similar style, the same clothes feel uncomfortable to him. Here, discomfort is not caused by the properties of the clothes per se or the social position of the worker, nor is it due to uncertainty about norms or etiquette. On the contrary, the stringent norms concerning physical appearance in the hotel are the cause of Wouter’s discomfort: they make him extra conscious of his body and make him feel less like himself. Importantly, Wouter’s story also reveals a certain degree of privilege: he is used to having the freedom to express himself through clothing, it seems, and feels enough freedom to opt for different work environments if he feels his autonomy is under threat – something that many in the service economy are not able to do.
When discomfort is especially intense, the experience becomes a painful one. In pain, the body makes itself known in an especially pressing way. Consider for example Lynn’s story. Lynn works in a shop for vintage designer bags on a zero-hours contract and at the time of the interview was looking for a new job. The owner of the store compliments her whenever she looks polished: when she wears nice leather shoes, blouses, skirts. In order to feel comfortable, however, Lynn does not always opt for these items: she wears sweaters when it is cold and often prefers sneakers because her work entails standing on her feet in the store. Even though she knows a certain pair of loafers will cause pain, she occasionally wears them anyway, about which she comments:
I have a lot of sneakers. Usually I just wear those. Well, it depends on how I’m feeling. If I’m feeling a little too sore in my legs, or if I have a back ache, then I just wear something comfortable like sneakers.
So when you’re in pain it’s sneakers? And what about if you’re feeling well?
. . . I’ll usually just wear loafers. But then I have pain by the end of the day. I have sort of difficult feet. I need support in my shoes, so then I’m like: ‘it’s nice for you that you can work on those cute flat shoes, but for me that doesn’t work’.
When working, Lynn is on her feet most of the time and she knows that when she wears loafers rather than sneakers, her feet and back will be sore by the end of the day. The shoes not only cause discomfort, the sartorial expectation of the shop-owner causes Lynn pain too. The sneakers and sweaters are items with which Lynn produces comfort in the face of those expectations and the material setting in which she works: a shop with an open door (cold) in which she has to stand on her feet the whole day (pain). Individualising her situation (‘I have sort of difficult feet’), preventing pain by wearing sneakers is what Lynn means when she talks of comfort. Dressing for Lynn involves a calibration between preventing pain and wearing the type of clothes that fit her communicative goals: looking polished and fashionable.
The temporal logic of comfort: Aesthetic pedagogies and interruptions
Achieving comfort through clothing, in the ways discussed in the previous section, typically becomes easier over time. Particular material aspects of objects of clothing in combination with particular work settings and their affective dimensions are balanced towards becoming less reflexive about the body, towards feeling less of the body. Learning how to approach and accomplish this is part of the development of ‘clothing competence’ (Hansen, 2005). Workers learn how to dress appropriately in order to fit in while mitigating discomfort over time. Workers develop expertise in translating: through feedback effects (colleagues commenting on looks and items, for example), experience and looking closely at the dress practices of others, workers develop a sense of what certain colours, materials, shapes and combinations of garments will do in new contexts. When a work relationship can develop over time because it is relatively long-term and it offers stability, workers can also develop this competence: they can learn to imagine what a certain dress, pair of shoes or shirt will make them feel like at work while, for example, doing ‘mirror work’ at home (Sassatelli, 2011). A considerable amount of unpaid (backstage) labour, our respondents told us, goes into this pedagogical process. The comfort that is produced when this calibration is successful, however, is often interrupted in precarious labour markets. Many of our respondents told us stories that highlighted the temporal logic of this calibration project.
In a new (work) situation, workers take much effort in this calibration of dress. It became clear in the interviews that comfort is hard to achieve in an unfamiliar professional context and entails unpaid labour in moments of reflection, interactions with friends and partners for advice, shopping and assembling new outfits. Our respondents illustrated two important mechanisms for this. Firstly, as comfort can require ‘fitting in’, familiarity with norms is conducive to its achievement. Getting the symbolic aspects of clothing right and communicating a certain image to others is a subtle art demanding meticulous study of contextual norms and this is a process that takes time.
Secondly, the importance of making the right impression is especially significant in a new work situation, in particular given the insecurity of the labour relation. This means that in early professional relationships, comfort may be out of reach as a result of high stakes and unaccomplished calibration. The continuous interruption to the process of producing comfort that is the result of precarisation and short-term employment, therefore, also leads to discomfort and the unattainability of comfort. As such, not only does the aesthetic labour of dress work involve much time and effort in new labour relationships, its continuous interruption also results in discomfort.
For example, if I would wear this [a red dress] to the offices [in an earlier job], you know, then I wouldn’t get any remarks. But I wore this to an on-site location of the [beer] brand, and immediately got comments such as ‘wow, you’re wearing a red dress today’, which made me feel looked at. So yeah, I won’t wear that next time.
In an effort to avoid comments and stares, Alexandra, like many of our respondents, tried not to wear clothes that make her stand out. However, only by wearing it did she become aware of the responses: knowing how to conform to situational requirements takes time. This means she endures discomfort in learning which clothes make her fit in. Her clothing competence at the time that she wore the red dress on-site did not extend to being able to imagine the translation of this particular garment to the situation that she was expected to present herself in, as a representative of a beer brand. While she had learned that this dress produced comfort in her previous job, in the new position, it made her stand out and highly reflexive of her body.
Sometimes anxiety about ‘getting it wrong’ prevented our respondents from taking explicit dress advice by their temporary colleagues. Consider for example Michelle, a theatre maker who was advised to dress warmly to her new job and did not, for fear of not dressing appropriately:
Did you ever get advice when you were working for the theatre?
Yeah I remember at my placement last year, the theatre group, erm, they sort of gave advice to wear really warm clothes. They said: just wear really, really warm clothes. So, the producer there, that’s quite an important job, you know, she’s responsible for all the money coming in, all the professional relations and obviously when she would go out she would wear professional clothes but when we were there, because it was so cold, she would be wearing five layers or whatever just to adapt. And I noticed being [reluctant], only then did I start wearing these big sweaters and felt like: okay, this is allowed here.
Michelle waited to see other colleagues dress in multiple layers of sweaters until she felt convinced that it was in fact accepted. Michelle’s comfort increased over time not only by being able to wear clothes that are materially comfortable to her, but also because she felt comfortable doing so. Achieving comfort was easier because the work relation lasted for a longer period of time.
An important aspect of the temporal logic of dress work is that in the process of calibration, the communicative aspects of clothing are more important when the professional relationships are still new and fresh. So consider for example Annelies, a film maker that also works as a director’s assistant. For Annelies, working long days outside in all sorts of weather conditions, her primary clothing concerns are that they keep her warm and allow her to move her body freely. However, prior to shooting, there are usually rehearsals and meetings. For these occasions, Annelies makes a conscious effort to look good.
You see, I’m never on set for just one day – I’m there for 20 or 30 days. So at a certain moment I know who I’m working with and what I can and cannot wear. When we start shooting, I wear mostly practical clothing. But before shooting, there are usually rehearsals and meetings. And then I deliberately pick nicer items of clothing to wear, thinking: ‘later on you’re just going to see me wearing super boring clothes, but that’s not what I usually wear’.
Annelies’ story resonates with the way in which for many workers, the communicative aspects of clothing become less significant in their dress work over time. An obvious example of this is that of the job interview, for which the applicant spends a significant amount of time and energy preparing what to wear in order to make the right impression – a work of anticipation and ‘hope labour’ (Kuehn & Corrigan, 2013) more than of calibration. In a new work situation it is not only difficult to ‘get it right’ because of uncertainty regarding the norms, but also because being unknown to others requires a clothing strategy in order to send out the right signals and make a good impression. Having the time to calibrate uninterrupted does not, of course, mean that dress norms become less strict over time or that impression management becomes less important over time per se. It does mean that workers have the time to develop the clothing competence that is necessary to understand the situations they are in for work and to know how to find the items of clothing that will help them produce comfort in them.
Conclusions: Interruption – discomfort – precarisation
Precarisation is felt on the skin. It is felt in the muscles and stomachs of workers who are navigating new insecurities. To be insecure is to feel bodily discomfort: to feel raw, uneasy, ill-fitting. The new sartorial discomfort of work is best understood as the result of interruption by precarisation. Workers’ appearance has become a crucial part of work for many in the creative industries and interactive services and especially in times of precarisation. Dress work, the backstage labour of dressing the body for work, is a fitting of bodies and work spaces. For many workers, we maintain here, the aim of dress work is not just to look appropriate or to communicate the right identity and status, but rather to achieve a certain comfort. The approximation of comfort becomes easier over time, when workers are allowed the time to experience their work, colleagues and spaces and to learn how to achieve a fit. It is precisely these pedagogies that are interrupted as a rule under precarisation. It is therefore the temporality of labour, or the rhythm of interruptions, that causes discomfort and sometimes pain. Put differently: we show in this article how the temporal logic of growing comfort over time is interrupted by short-term, zero-hours contracts in which workers have to perform hope labour to ensure labour in the future and are always on the look-out for their next source of income. In a labour market in flux, workers constantly find themselves in different circumstances with different requirements. Precarisation interrupts the process in which workers find more comfort through clothing and can become less reflexive of their bodies. The workers we interviewed never experienced the luxury of not having to think about their bodies and its presentation at work. Their bodies made themselves known in discomfort and respondents remained highly reflexive of their aesthetic presentation.
This means that the ‘sinking in’ (Ahmed, 2012) work spaces that becomes possible if a fit between workers’ bodies and work is achieved never materialises. The energy-saving that becomes possible once a context is known and strategies to fit in are developed, is never attained. This, our study shows, is true even for relatively privileged workers in the context of a developed welfare state (although the welfare state is changing rapidly under Dutch austerity). The effects of precarisation are also felt on the skin of those that are otherwise often allowed to forget their bodies because of white, male or middle class privilege, even though gendered, raced and classed inequalities in work and comfort also endure. Precarisation clearly registers on the body – it registers, ultimately, in visceral complaints such as sore backs, tense shoulders and restless legs. This is where the intensity of post-Fordist insecurity is felt.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank our respondents for sharing their dress work routines and Carmen Ferri and Simone van Dijk, who performed interviews for this study. We would also like to thank Josien Arts, Sarah Bracke, Yannick Coenders, Adeola Enigbokan, Mutsumi Karasaki and Daria Krivonos for an inspiring early reflection on the data and the programme group Political Sociology for funding the Dress Work project.
Funding
This research project was funded with a grant by the programme group Political Sociology: Power, Place and Difference of the Department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam.