HOW CAN FASHION BE USED TO IDENTIFY GENDER?

Dress is a visual form of communication, and is the first channel of communication. It reveals gender, ethnic origin, social status, group membership and mood. Masculinity or femininity is reflected in the presentation of dress by the individual and this is interpreted by others according to social norms. 

According to Turner, “identity” displaces “self” as a way of discussing the complex facets of an individual.[1]Goffman argues that the social body is ritualized and dependent on social interactions, which are symbolic and ritualized on the micro level.[2]He also suggests that the self is directly connected to the body, which negotiates between “self-identity” and “social-identity”.[3]The body plays an important role in the construction of an individual’s identity or identities. Thus, clothes are an extension of the body and also display the sense of identity.[4]Clothing and body decorations form part of the way humans interact with the world and each other in all recorded cultures.[5]

Identity in dress strongly intertwines with sex and gender. “Sex” is used to denote biological categories (male and female). “Gender” on the other hand, is used for distinctions in role, appearance and behavior that are cultural in origin but stem from an individual’s sex (masculinity and femininity).[6]The examination of global cultures, reveals wider variations on how gender is expressed through appearance. In the 1800s men’s dress communicated economic success and women’s dress followed an elaborate set of rules or expectations. Distinctions between men’s and women’s dress increased in the nineteenth century. During the early twentieth century through the 1950s, men dressed uniformly to focus on work rather than their looks.[7] Gregory Stone suggests that men are motivated to avoid wearing clothing styles that may be viewed as feminine for fear of ridicule.[8]In contrast, women had an elaborate code for appearance through the 1950s. Women were encouraged to spend considerable time on their appearance to render themselves to men. However, this gendered-fashion became problematic with the rise of feminism. For example, female college students in the US were not allowed to wear pants on campus until the late 1950s to early 1960s, a change that influenced the women’s movement of the 1960s. Feminists boycotted the stiletto because it belonged to the women’s sartorial code.[9]  In the 1960s the term androgyny was used to define a condition in which the characteristics of the sexes are not rigidly assigned. The forms of gendered dress have changed over time, but the idea of gender difference has endured.[10]

The way people dress is a way of doing gender. Doing gender means the conscious or unconscious staging of gendered selves in everyday life. Judith Butler points out that while people may intend to express their sexual and gender identity, they actually create identities by incorporating cultural ideas of sex and gender. She clarifies that gender is not the interpretation of predetermined, unchangeable sex but a cultural construction that creates sex. Clothes are not the expression or interpretation of sex and/or gender but an important visual that creates ideas of gender and sex.[11]According to Stefan Hirschauer, clothes do not express a biological body but rather create an aesthetic body of their own that it is always a materialized fantasy of an ideal or imaginary body – male, female, androgynous, asexual etc.[12]Furthermore, Elizabeth Wilson says that dressing is an act of staging themselves and their identities. In dressing, people are doing gender and people are also doing fashion.[13]

Overall, clothes are usually read by others as a gendered body. Clothes define the wearer, but the wearer choses them. Men and women’s clothes and their behavior is influenced by society. Therefore, clothes as well as fashion always communicates gender and identity. 

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[1]Bryan Turner, The Body and Society: Explorations of Social Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

[2]Erving Groffman,“Embodied Information in Face-to-Face Interaction”, in The Body: A Reader, ed. by Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco, (Oxon UK: Routledge, 1963).

[3]Erving Goffman,Forms of Talk (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981).

[4]Charlotte Suthrell, "Clothing Sex, Sexing Clothes: Transvestism, Material Culture and the Sex and Gender Debate", in Unzipping Gender: Sex, Cross-Dressing and Culture, 13–30 (Oxford: Berg, 2004), accessed October 18, 2017. doi: 10.2752/9781847888952/UNZIPGEND0005.

[5]Ruth Barnes and Joanne Bubolz-Eicher, Dress and Gender: Making and Meaning in Cultural Contexts(Oxford: Berg, 1997), 4.

[6]Jo B Paoletti, "Fashion, Dress, and Gender", in Bibliographical Guides(London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), accessed October 17, 2017, doi: 10.5040/9781474280655-BG002.

[7]Susan Michelman and Kimberly Miller-Spillman, "Gender", in Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion: The United States and Canada, edited by Phyllis G. Tortora (Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010), accessed October 17, 2017, 230.

[8]Gregory, Stone, “Appearance and the Self”, in Human Behavior and Social Processes: An Interactionist Approach, ed. by A. Rose (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).

[9]Lee Wright, “Objectifying Gender – The Stiletto Heel”, in Fashion Theory: A Reader, ed. by Malcolm Barnard (Oxon: Routledge, 2010), 197.

[10]Michelman and Miller-Spillman, 230.

[11]Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2015).

[12]Gertrud Lehnert, "Gender", in Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion: West Europe, ed. by Lise Skov, 452–461, (Oxford: Berg, 2010), accessed October 17, 2017, doi: 10.2752/BEWDF/EDch8075.

[13]Elizabeth Wilson, “All the Range”, in Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body, ed. by Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 29.