Clothing Identity and the Embodiment of Age

In J. Powell and T. Gilbert (eds) Aging and Identity: A Postmodern Dialogue, New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2009

Clothing, Identity and the Embodiment of Age Julia Twigg1

Identity and dress are intimately linked. Clothes display, express and shape identity, imbuing it with a directly material reality. They thus offer a useful lens through which to explore the possibly changing ways in which older identities are constituted in modern culture. In this chapter I will address three sets of questions. First I will ask how writers have understood the relationship between clothing and identity. How has this been have been theorised in sociological, anthropological and dress studies? I will then address how such understandings or analyses relate to, or can be related to, the situations of older people. Is there something different or specific about age? Lastly I will ask whether questions of clothing and dress shed light on established debates concerning the changing nature of ageing in late modern, consumer culture. Clothing not fashion The focus of the chapter is on clothing and dress rather than fashion. By clothing I mean the empirical reality of dressed bodies; and the approaches I draw on derive from sociological and anthropological traditions that regard clothing as a form of material culture, a species of situated body practice, and part of lived experience of people’s lives (Entwistle 2000a,b, Guy et al 2001, Hansen 2004, Weber and Mitchell 2004, Kuchler and Miller 2005). This focus is important for a group like older people who are not normally encompassed within fashion studies and whose dress is often excluded from its consideration, but who still wear clothes, make choices about them. In this chapter I will largely refer to the situations of older women. This is partly because of the established nature of debates in relation to women, the body and clothing, but it reflects also the
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School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research,

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