Book Review Essay: Appearance Stratification and Identity: Fashion as the Clearest Example of What Sociology is All About

The Dressed Society

Peter Corrigan has already written extensively on consumption, dressing, ‘teenage daughter dress practices’ and the sociology of clothing before publishing what is his best book so far, The Dressed Society: Clothing, the Body and Some Meanings of the World. The book investigates how people dress, the clothes they select and why they do so, and the various social and socio-semiotic meanings of clothing in our societies; the analysis extends to the sensual feelings we get from the materials, such as silk and wool, or synthetic fabrics, and what these can imply and communicate in terms of identity, class and social status. Following these same logics, Corrigan argues that the giving and receiving of clothes can also reveal something about one’s own image and how a person is perceived by others. The obvious angles of analysis are included here, using a sociological approach with the prisms of class, gender, the body and the illusions of free choice. But Corrigan studies other sociological perspectives, including, for example, the religious dimension and the identity meanings of clothes like head scarves for many Muslim women, inside and outside Muslim countries. In some specific cases, the norms and sometimes the strict codes related to the way individuals must dress are not implemented by the individuals themselves, but dictated by religious leaders and/or governments; for example, the uniforms in totalitarian regimes like the former USSR, or the dress codes for women in countries such as post-revolutionary Iran and Afghanistan under Taliban rule. Corrigan also analyzes the contents of popular magazines related to fashion and style, in order to understand which specific elements are given more value in articles or through advertising – and why. In recent years, the role of the internet and cyberspace have only intensified these phenomena, with many blogs and other websites dedicated to discussion often focusing on fashion and clothing.

Perhaps the conclusion of The Dressed Society proposing a ‘Hermeneutics of Dress’ is ambitious, but few could fail to find the book well researched, engaging and original. In my view, The Dressed Society is an excellent, easy to follow and well-written contribution that should serve as a valuable introduction to undergraduates in sociology, cultural studies, anthropology and beyond.

The Power of Looks

While Corrigan’s book investigates the ‘envelope’, that is dress, in her book The Dressed Society, Bonnie Berry examines the body itself and its many alterations from various sociological perspectives. Again, analysis focuses on the fundamental tension between attempts to define oneself yet at the same time comply with some shared ideal or model of how to look. The Power of Looks focuses on a few fundamental sociological concepts like ‘appearance bias’, social aesthetics, social stratification, and inequality. Introducing the book, Berry argues that ‘appearance bias overlaps with racism, sexism, ableism, and ageism’ (p. 2), and that a ‘look-bias’ creates ‘categories of people with greater and lesser social power’ (p. 2). Such bias includes age, height and weight, but also a range of other variables that may place people outside the ideal ‘look’ as portrayed in mainstream media and advertisement – all of which can bring stigma, prejudice, isolation, and exclusion, especially if a person is unemployed and looking for a job (p. 4). Furthermore, Dr Berry argues that some ‘repeated themes, such as supermodel-thinness, celebrity plastic surgery, extreme makeovers, and so on, leave the public with no doubt that beauty is important and anxiety-producing’ (p. 7). Of course, the notion of beauty can change significantly over time: ‘Obesity was once admired but now (in most societies) it is a scourge to be avoided’ (p. 9).

Here enters the sociological understanding of this phenomenon (p. 86). Hence, many contradictory approaches are opposed in Chapters 1 and 3. For example, in order to explain that the women who undergo plastic surgery are neither mere victims of the fashion system nor ‘cultural dopes’ (p. 13), Berry refers to the works of Kathy Davis and uses in this context the concept of agency, which is ‘referring to the active participation in social life’ (p. 13). According to the agency perspective, these women should be seen as ‘competent actors’ who are fully aware, ‘who are using cosmetic surgery as an action of choice, a solution to a problem, as a form of empowerment’ (p. 13). But Berry does not argue that fashion is entirely a matter of individual choice: ‘There is a choice, but to choose to not make oneself as attractive as possible can cause grave social harm to the individual’ (p. 14).

A brief but informative book in 11 short chapters, The Power of Looks comes with a variety of useful elements, including an historical overview of social aesthetics, a thought-provoking discussion about some core concepts (from marginalization to visual sociology), plus some relevant methodological remarks, and finally some of the author’s own field notes from the interviews she made with street labourers in Seattle in 2007. Different views about beauty standards are considered and contested – according to Berry ‘there is no fat culture’ nowadays, ‘but there is a diet culture’ (p. 59). Gender is a central theme, and Berry argues that ‘social constructions are not created equally’: if both sexes often feel they must go through a diet, many women have to face ‘liposuction, breast enlargement or reduction, face-lifts’, while some males ‘undergo transformations by surgery (such as hair transplants), weightlifting, and steroid use to mould their physical being to the masculine ideal’ (p. 89).

Chapter 9 brings an unexpected discussion about pets and the distinctive ‘power and specialness’ that may be indicated or symbolized by the animal itself: the owner of an exotic bird seems uncommon by association; a snake as a pet conveys something different, a pit-bull something different again (p. 102). Chapter 10 is important as well because it raises the dilemma of acceptance or resistance to these codes: must one ‘play the game’ (accommodation) or oppose (resistance to social dictates)? In my view, the last three chapters are perhaps more valuable because of the many theoretical elements that are brought in, while most of the first half is rather descriptive.

In sum, The Power of Looks is a very interesting contribution to the sociology of the body and also to women’s studies, domains in which Berry is a central player. The book is a short one, as I have already indicated; the index is short too, perhaps disappointingly so, and some of the case studies seem a little brief – but sometimes, as here, to be brief is to be clear and to the point. Finally, The Power of Looks brings an array of original concepts like ‘appearance stratification’ which could even be adapted in other research related to the sociology of body and fashion (p. 119).

Fashion Theory

Malcolm Barnard gathers an impressive number of texts in his anthology Fashion Theory: A Reader (this excellent book should not be confused with about a dozen other non-sociological publications with similar titles). Fashion Theory combines 48 texts into 12 thematic sections, on topics such as ‘Fashion as communication’, ‘Fashion, clothes, and the body’, ‘Production and consumption’, and ‘Post-modern fashion’. The selection of authors gathered in this anthology is quite diverse; only the name of Pierre Bourdieu seems to be missing in the table of contents and also in the index, even though his classic work, Distinction, is mentioned on a few occasions (pp. 337 and 383). Otherwise, one can find here many classic works on consumption and fashion, from Marx’s ‘The fetishism of the commodity and its secret’, to ‘Fashion: from class differentiation to collective selection’ from 1969, in which Herbert Blumer issued ‘an invitation to sociologists to take seriously the topic of fashion’ (see pp. 233 and 245). Other established contributors (such as Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes) are included alongside a great many lesser-known articles and book excerpts – which are among the most interesting elements in this reader.

Some anthologies do little more than bring together a collection of related writings without much comment or editorial linking of texts, but Fashion Theory is quite different. Barnard has chosen a usefully eclectic mix of texts, some non-sociological, but he always brings a sociological dimension to these, ahead of each of the 12 sections of the book. Right from the first pages, his ‘Introduction’ clearly defines the terms ‘fashion’, ‘theory’, and then ‘fashion theory’, and insists on the importance of a sociological analysis of fashion and dress, aiming beyond description, because ‘mere explaining is found in the natural sciences, but understanding social phenomena must contain an element missing from the explanation of natural phenomena’ (p. 6). Here, Barnard adds that this missing dimension is ‘the actor’s purpose or intention, the fact that what people do is meaningful to those people and to the people around them, and social sciences must therefore pay attention to understanding that meaning’ (p. 6). This whole Introduction to this rewarding anthology is a succinct illustration of what sociology can add to disciplines such as art history, fashion studies, and other domains related to the humanities (this is one good reason why the Reader should be of interest to students of fashion with no social science background; p. 9). Further on, the same framework applies for every section. For example in Section 6, partly related to ‘social class’, Barnard ranks the selected texts into two main sociological perspectives, ‘Marxism’ and ‘functionalism’, and then defines both approaches, indicating what it is that fundamentally separates them (the focus on antagonism vs the sharing of values) (p. 186). Further on, the micro-sociological approaches of fashion are discussed as well in an extensive section on ‘Fashion: Identity and difference’ (p. 187).

Among many thought-provoking excerpts gathered in Fashion Theory, one should check the comments written by Fred Davis about antifashion and counterculture, in which he asks how it is that individuals who oppose mainstream culture (from hippies during the 1960s to the 1970s punks) can create another form of fashion themselves; in fact, many leaders in the world of fashion seem to ‘come more and more to overlap with demimonde, arty, bohemian, socially deviant, radical, and other counterculture formations’ (p. 99). Baudrillard’s analysis of the blue jean provides an example of a non-fashion item that became fashionable in time (p. 472). Other remarks about the evolution of the blue jean, originally ‘designed for men’ and adopted by women who were ‘masculinizing with their front fly’ (p. 380) can be found in one of the most stimulating chapters, where Tim Dant highlights the gender dimensions of the blue jean case when he argues that ‘they were possibly the first unisex garment’ (p. 380). Moreover, Dant notes that ‘in the 1950s and early 1960s, jeans on women would have been regarded as a possible sign of lesbianism, along with short hair and no make-up’ (p. 380). His rich conclusions describe the complex dynamics of fashion systems that are always interlinked, from the individualistic and institutional perspectives as well: ‘Wearing clothes is social in that what people wear is treated by those around them as being some sort of indicator of who they are’; he adds that ‘there are competing fashion systems within the cultural field of clothing; second hand clothes, street styles, family and peer groups, that cut across the production/consumption system of mass manufactured clothing’ (p. 382).

Among the best chapters, Paul Sweetman studied tattoos and body piercing in a fascinating article on ‘Anchoring the (postmodern) self: Body modification, fashion and identity’. There, he argues that these phenomena can be understood as ‘the partial incorporation of both forms of body modification into consumer culture’ (p. 292), but also as ‘instances of body project’ (p. 293). Using some 35 interviews, Sweetman studied several aspects of tattooing, such as ‘permanence’, ‘planning’, and ‘pain’: for one of the interviewees, a tattoo is like ‘making a statement of sorts’ (p. 298). On another topic, I appreciated Peter Braham’s discussion on labels and looked-after logos on clothes that are often counterfeited by ‘unlicensed manufacturers from South America to South-east Asia’ (p. 362). His whole text aims to go beyond the superficial aspects of fashion to concentrate on ‘the relationship between production and consumption’, including the dimensions of globalization and modernity (p. 355).

Apart from Bourdieu, another important sociologist is almost absent from this anthology – Georg Simmel, even though many contributors quote his article from 1904 on fashion (see in this anthology Barnard, p. 87; Davis, pp. 99 and 151; Blumer, pp. 234–8; Braham, p. 355). In the aforementioned text from 1969 by Herbert Blumer, his first pages acknowledge Simmel’s salient contribution to fashion studies from a sociological perspective, which could be synthesized this way: in the 19th century, the elites dressed in an elegant fashion that was seen as distinctive, a style which was copied by other classes until the elites realized they were not that different any more, thus a change in their clothes and fashion towards a newer style, and so on. Even though he criticizes and completes Simmel’s model, Blumer reuses his concept of fashion as ‘class differentiation’ (Blumer, in Barnard, p. 238).

Overall, Fashion Theory represents an immense sum of scholarship that has, as yet, no equivalent in the field of sociology of fashion. Apart from the quality and coherence of the selected texts, the strength of this anthology lies in the theoretical dimensions that are brought into every section. Of course, one could complain that many of these texts are only excerpts of longer demonstrations, but this is the compromise to pay in order to get in return so many authors, themes, and avenues into one single book. My only (minor) quibble would be about the lack of the real dates of the original publication in the case of the older texts included here; we only find here the year of the edition that is quoted; therefore, Karl Marx’s text appears to be from 1990 (p. xv) and the excerpt from Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) seems to be from 1992 (p. 335). Students need to be reminded that there were already writings on fashion before the 20th century.

Conclusion

Because almost everyone has some interest in fashion and some knowledge about it, the studying of fashion appears to be one of the easiest examples for the understanding of what sociology is all about, especially for undergraduates, many of whom are very much aware of ongoing fashion trends, without necessarily recognizing, at first, that these are phenomena to which serious sociological analysis can be applied.

Because of the way their authors or editors have made them, it would be somewhat unfair to compare these three excellent books, each of which is intended for a slightly different audience. Corrigan’s Dressed Society is a general book, mainly for sociologists and anthropologists, that is centred on dress and clothing. Berry’s The Power of Looks is rather about the body and idealized images, and less about clothes or fashion; this concise book could as well be of interest for graduates in gender studies, cultural studies, disability studies, and sociology. Barnard’s Fashion Theory: A Reader is one of the most comprehensive anthologies I have reviewed in recent years because it gives such a diversified presentation of the many sociological dimensions for the study of fashion. All these three books – from three scholars working in three different continents – are important contributions to sociology and should be found in university libraries. Undergraduates in sociology will benefit from all three titles, each of which enables an understanding of why we dress the way we do that goes well beyond the simple idea that we ‘choose’, as individuals, what to wear. Such understandings are the basis of all sociological thinking.