Abstract
Reviewed by: Emma Tennent, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
As subjects of western capitalism, we make decisions about what to wear every day when we wake up. We choose clothes depending on how we’re feeling, where we’re going, and what we’re doing. Our dress can be influenced by the weather, the time of day, and what’s available in the wardrobe. At sports matches, supporters wear the colours of their team, just as high school cliques often dress in similar patterns – to signal allegiance to a shared identity. Magazines, billboards, and reality makeover shows proclaim that ‘you are what you wear’, but to what extent is this true? In the second edition of The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress & Modern Social Theory, Joanne Entwistle highlights the centrality of dress to our identities, gender, and sexuality. Her historical and theoretical analysis interrogates many of western society’s common-sense assumptions about fashion, dress, and the body.
The second edition opens with a lengthy preface which situates the book in relation to recent literature. Entwistle briefly updates each chapter, drawing on work published since the 2000 publication of the first edition. Aside from the preface, and an extended final chapter, the substance of the original work is unchanged. The first two chapters are heavily theoretical, the first addressing the ways different social theories have overlooked the body, and the second providing a theory of fashion and dress for western modernity. For students interested in such a theoretical approach, these opening chapters provide an excellent review, although they are much denser than the rest of the book. In a lively third chapter, Entwistle turns to the ways fashion and dress are linked to social change, tracing the historical rise and development of fashion in the West. This historical analysis continues in the fourth chapter, with the 19th-century figures of the ‘dandy’ and the ‘bohemian’ used to illustrate the links between fashion and identity. The chapters on gender and sexuality are both enriched by similar historical examples. The seventh and final chapter examines the production side of the fashion system. Again, Entwistle traces historical developments, attending to the ways different technological improvements have reproduced gender hierarchies and labour exploitation.
The central argument of the book is that dress should be studied as “situated bodily practice” (p. xi). This approach allows Entwistle to ask provocative questions about fashion. Why does women’s fashion change so rapidly? Who determines what comes to be fashionable and how does this process work? How do people use dress to express aspects of their identity? Because clothes are worn so close to the body, they cannot be understood from a safe theoretical distance. Entwistle insists that analysis should be grounded and situated, and calls for future research that attends to the historical, social, and contextual specificities of fashion. There are a variety of different theories that have attempted to understand dress and the body, yet as Entwistle notes, most sociological theories examine dress or the body, rather than combining the two. By positioning the body at the centre of her theory of dress, Entwistle insists that dress is a practise – both a noun and a verb. The tension between the structure of the fashion system and the agency of individuals makes dress an ideal topic for sociological analysis. However, her approach also offers valuable insights for psychology to interrogate the tension between individual choices and socially produced systems of dress.
The first chapter offers an extensive survey of theoretical literature relating to the body. Perhaps challenging for the introductory reader, the chapter provides an excellent summary and critique of social theories of the body. Entwistle integrates insights from post-structuralism and phenomenology to develop a theoretical framework that attends to both subjectivity and embodiment. Perhaps challenging for the introductory reader, the chapter provides an excellent summary and critique of social theories of the body. Throughout, Entwistle highlights the weaknesses of theories that cannot attend to the body as a gendered, classed, raced site of experience, and subjectivity. Theory can provide a useful resource, but only if it acknowledges the structural influences on practices of dress in everyday life.
Having theoretically situated her framework, Entwistle turns to the way fashion and dress are related. She moves swiftly through terminological debates, defining fashion as “a system of dress characterised by an internal logic of regular and systematic change” (p. 45) with its own dynamics of production and consumption. The social and historical factors of western modernity are a defining feature of Entwistle’s fashion system. She rejects claims for universal fashion as Eurocentric and argues that fashion should not be seen as superior to traditional or non-western forms of dress.
As she illustrates in her history of dress and social change, fashion can only occur in societies where social mobility is possible. Fashion as we know it emerged in 14th-century Europe with the rise of cities and the middle class. Entwistle’s engaging history examines what fashion can tell us about the society it came from. She demonstrates the parallel development of fashion ideas and practices by locating theorists within their historical and social contexts. Throughout fashion’s history, the ruling elite have used sumptuary laws to restrict clothing and materials on the basis of class and morality. Changing styles of dress made it harder to identify someone on appearance alone, causing panic amongst moralists who feared God-given class and gender hierarchies might be subverted.
Entwistle gives the examples of the aristocratic dandy and romantic bohemian as two 19th century ‘technologies of self’ that arose as solutions to the problem of anonymity. The dandy used dress to perform an artificial self, while the bohemian’s dress expressed a supposedly authentic inner self. These styles of dress may seem archaic, but we still read people by their appearance, with the body the “prime location of identity” today (p. 124).
In her fifth chapter, Entwistle draws on a range of theorists to tease apart the ‘natural’ associations of sex and gender. Clothes have a crucial role to play in displaying gender identity. Entwistle astutely points out that women wearing trousers still enter toilets with the icon of a woman in a dress, because in this case clothing connotes ‘woman’ as a gender entirely, rather than actual dress practices. Thus, clothing “turns nature into culture, layering cultural meaning on the body” (p. 143), while at the same time naturalising the cultural order.
Despite the fact that men’s dress has historically been highly erotic, women are associated more closely with the body and sexuality, which Entwistle attributes partly to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Clothing has long been thought to communicate messages about the wearer, and in particular, her sexuality. The idea that women can ‘ask for it’ simply by wearing particular clothes persists today in popular discourse and rape trials. In the workplace especially, women struggle against this ingrained association of femininity, sexuality, and embodiment. In her own research, Entwistle has examined the way power dressing discourses construct women’s bodies as obstacles they must manage to achieve professional success. There is a dangerous double standard when men’s suits are understood as neutral, yet women’s clothing ‘inherently’ sends out sexual signals. Entwistle exposes the impossibilities of guidelines for women’s dress. Working women should dress smartly to be taken seriously, but not so masculine they threaten male colleagues, dressing feminine enough to be appealing to men without being provocative. Power dressing may have gone out of style, but women still face far more pressure than men to monitor their appearance in all public spheres, not only the workplace.
In the final chapter Entwistle confronts a truth most of us know but would rather not acknowledge – that the fashion we all consume is often produced under abhorrent conditions. She argues persuasively that no analysis of fashion is complete if it focuses merely on consumption. The ways people buy and wear clothes cannot be understood without analysing the “relationship between the manufacturing, marketing and distribution of clothing into retail outlets” (p. 45). Here, she substantively adds to the work of the first edition, including her own empirical research which greatly strengthens the analysis. Entwistle urges scholars to examine the tension between production and consumption rather than be complicit in fashion houses’ attempts to distance themselves from the distinctly unglamorous locations in which their wares are produced. In a damning survey of the history of clothing and textile production, Entwistle argues that conditions for women have improved little since the Industrial Revolution. The volatile market of changing fashion styles creates demand for cheap and disposable labour, with risk passed down the production chain onto workers who are often exploited. Attending to the intersections of gender, ethnicity, and class, Entwistle tracks the changes from England’s industrial working class labour to the ways contemporary western fashion brands source labour from developing nations or contract immigrant women in western countries. Entwistle exposes the inadequacies of theories that treat fashion as an entirely aesthetic discourse, insisting on the gritty reality of fashion as a socio-economic practice.
In her history of fashion locations, Entwistle travels from market stores to department stores, analysing the ways they combine culture and economy. However, in the internet age, Entwistle’s analysis of place, embodiment, and purchase take on new inflections. Online retail can change the ways consumers relate to both physical and digital store locations (see Wolfinbarger & Gilly, 2001). Entwistle is right that “technology alone does not produce cultural change” (p. 213) and it is unlikely online shopping will replace traditional methods (Anja, Çakanlar, & Hohls, 2015); however, this seems a fruitful direction with which to apply Entwistle’s framework to fashion consumption and production in the 21st-century. In a similar manner, the rise of digital social networking platforms has created new semi-anonymous spheres in which identities, appearances, and the body must be managed. Entwistle’s discussion of dress and identity only touches on 21st-century subcultures, but it would seem that platforms like Instagram play out the tensions of authenticity and artificiality in ways that combine embodiment and online presence (see Daniels, 2009).
Despite thorough analysis of the influences on women’s dress, Entwistle makes few references to feminism. She touches on the suffragette movement to explain the unpopularity of bloomers in the 19th century, but the book could have been strengthened with a more explicit analysis of the ways the body and dress are related to feminism. The effects of uncoupling the body from social status and dress had effects not only for women but for wider feminist politics (Baer, 2016). In new forms of activism today, the ambivalent nature of dress and sexuality can be used as a form of protest. The SlutWalk demonstrations are a pertinent example of the way feminist politics can tap into the associations between dress, sexuality, and the body, attempting to push back or reclaim these meanings (Baer, 2016).
Nevertheless, The Fashioned Body provides a gendered analysis of dress and the body that is valuable in its attention to intersections of identity. Joanne Entwistle’s focus is on sociology, but her analysis can provide useful insights for feminist psychology. Her attention to social and historical context is a useful tool for the analysis of dress as practice informed by the fashion system but carried out by individuals on their bodies. Entwistle’s case for the embodied study of fashion is strengthened by the amount of work produced since her first edition. This second edition serves as an excellent introduction to fashion analysis, and may inspire a new generation to take up her call for situated analysis that puts the body at the heart of the study of fashion.