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- Convenors:
-
Joshua Bluteau
(Coventry University)
Patricia Bluteau (Coventry University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Transfers:
- Open for transfers
Short Abstract:
As the behemothic fashion industry continues to grow, this panel will discuss how anthropologists and fashion scholars can converge, asking fundamental questions about what we wear, how, and why – crafting a new intersectional space to understand a global industry that shapes our very identity.
Long Abstract:
Anthropologists have long been fascinated by what their interlocutors wear and the social meaning ascribed and performed through objects that adorn the body. Since the earliest ethnographic fieldwork, these objects have been collected and admired, offering inspiration to anthropologists and designers alike. In the 21st century, the global fashion industry is worth in excess of a trillion USD and employs millions of people. Yet this industry is beset by inequality, environmental concerns and hegemonic value-signalling. Despite this, fashion offers an optic for considering fundamental anthropological questions surrounding identity, selfhood, production, gender, race and economics. This panel calls for papers that engage with all aspects of the convergence of Fashion and Anthropology, and welcomes submissions from fashion scholars and the social sciences. Together we will explore how we might fashion anthropology itself as we cast a collective gaze on the intersection of these two subjects that ask the same question: what does it look like to be human?
Accepted papers:
Paper short abstract:
Social media’s focus on novelty has driven fashion design toward attention-grabbing “createmic” ideas, at the cost of “valuableness”—utility, craftsmanship, and emotional depth. This leads to designs lacking cultural/personal meaning. Anthropology offers ways to reclaim deeper creativity in fashion.
Paper long abstract:
The advent of social media and the “attention economy”, coupled with ever-increasing commercial pressures, has made salience, novelty and “dopamine activation” in fashion design paramount. Ideas and imagery that are both novel and counterintuitive—two of the three requisites of any creative idea that can jointly be termed “createmic”—are known experimentally to stimulate the brain’s reward system, and a selection process in social media is under way that elevates such striking and often surprising designs at the expense of designs that possess valuableness—the third of the three requisites of creativity. Valuableness in fashion design means designs that are effective, useful, adaptive, emotionally evocative, well-made, and trustworthy. This privileging of “createmity” at the expense of valuableness also minimises the kind of cultural drivers and authentic personal meanings that drove Coco Chanel and Alexander McQueen to produce their inventive and impactful designs. The relentless imperative to catch consumers’ attention is effectively leading to more “meaningless” clothing with merely metasemiotic significance—designs that primarily reference other designs rather than cueing deeper culturally embedded resonances and personal (i.e. the designer’s) experience. Anthropology, as the most broadly human of all the academic disciplines, is best placed to make sense of this development in human fashion as well as to point to ways of making fashion more personally and culturally meaningful. While createmity cannot realistically be abandoned, new routes must be found that magnify valuableness if fashion design is to attain a richer form of creativity.
Paper short abstract:
Clothes in rural Kyrgyzstan are central to women’s social life. At and around death clothes are utilized to materialialise and negotiate dignity and embody grief, at the intersection of the personal and social.
Paper long abstract:
Clothes are central to the social life of women in rural Kyrgyzstan. Under conditions of no running water, dusty and muddy roads, and child-care activities, women still try to maintain a clean, beautiful and dignifying appearance. Clothes are central material objects that women use to connect with one another by exchanging them as gifts, congratulating one another for their accomplishments and supporting each other in difficult moments, such as at death.
Clothes in ‘blue’ colours of mourning help to make grief visible and tangible, and the norms around wearing ‘blue’ suggest a structuring of its embodiment along gender and kinship lines. The clothes of the dead in turn are distributed to enhance the dignity and good ‘looks’ of the deceased.
Focussing on clothes at and around death, this paper discusses the questions: How is human dignity negotiated and lived through handling the clothes of dead women? How do acts of looking ‘touch’ the persons wearing mourning clothes, and how does this structure their movement through feelings? How do women utilize the ‘materiality’ of clothes, such as its constancy and visibility and the possibility to dress and undress them, in order to shape both personal embodied experience and social relations?
Paper short abstract:
With anthropological and fashion theoretical methods, this project inspects the role hospital gowns take during birth. It is expected to find a lack in suitability between dress and situation, which shall act as a fertile ground for speculative and mother-baby-continuum-oriented design approaches.
Paper long abstract:
In the history of research, a lot more has been reflected on how to die well than how to birth well (Stone 2019, 1). The recent interdisciplinary field of mother studies is editing this and other imbalances. So far, research has been conducted i.a. about the interior design (Balabanoff 2019), consciousness (Dahan 2023), and the type of social interactions (Shabot 2020) promoting a positive birthing experience.
Just as we are in-clothes when doing most things in our lives (Martach 2018), we also birth-in-clothes. Clothes do not always surrender to the actions we perform in them; but can hinder, cut into, irritate nerves as well as skins (Smelik 2018, 36; Martach 2021). And clothes can also enable, facilitate, and stimulate (Ruggerone 2016). The clothes we birth in, for most: the hospital gown, so far has not gained any research attention. The present project seeks to fill this gap.
In her corporeal behaviour, the “birthing subject” (Villarmea 2024, 3) could be said to “become-animal” (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 267f.): Birth affords and happens in poses that exceed the ordinary everyday. Does the hospital gown (its materiality, cut) not just mercifully allow for, but actively move along these? Inhowfar is it capable to provide dignity and a feeling of safety in a situation of special intimacy? Besides, research already approved the positive outcome of positioning the born on the mother’s chest directly after birth. Might this practice, and the autonomy in other acts be impeded by gowns being closed/opened solely in the back?
Paper short abstract:
Donning clothes made by ones interlocutors can tell us much about the relationship between body and cloth. Ethnographic wearing takes us a step further and asks what this process can tell us as anthropologists about the world around us
Paper long abstract:
This paper depicts a research practice developed by the author called ethnographic wearing and uses it to problematize the wearer as a contested body - part research tool, part incidental corporeal entity. Set against a landscape of the social media gaze on ‘fashionable’ bodies this paper asks how wearing artefacts in the field can tell us something new about the garments themselves, and the nature of the world around them. With a particular focus on suiting - cast as a problematic icon of maleness - this paper explores the ways in which bodies are crafted and performed by the fabric draped over them and asks whether we, as anthropologists, can understand this process without donning such apparel ourselves. Weaving a narrative of commodity fetishism, online social media style accounts and tailors shops, this paper strides through the ever-blurring boundaries of modern masculinities to look at the performativity of the research themselves and their wardrobe as a site of ethnographic encounter.
Paper short abstract:
This paper critically examines the concept of heritage style, unpacking its meanings and implications within contemporary fashion and questioning how it is constructed and consumed.
Paper long abstract:
Heritage style, characterised by its emphasis on craftsmanship, durability, and historical continuity, occupies a prominent place in contemporary fashion. However, what exactly constitutes heritage style, and why does it resonate with consumers? This paper seeks to deconstruct the notion of heritage style, analysing how it is constructed, represented, and consumed in digital and cultural contexts.
Drawing on an anthropological framework of material culture and fashion, particularly the works of Daniel Miller, Sophie Woodward and Joshua Bluteau, this paper approaches clothing as cultural artefacts that mediate identity, social values, and cultural narratives. Through desk-based research and the analysis of online sources, including social media platforms and brand narratives, this paper critically examines how heritage style negotiates tensions between authenticity and commodification, tradition and modernity. By interrogating the very term “heritage,” it explores how this aesthetic is imbued with cultural and material significance.
This paper aims to open up questions, offering a foundation for future research into heritage style’s broader implications. By situating this deconstruction within the fields of material culture and fashion anthropology, it contributes to understanding how clothing operates as a cultural artefact, shaping and reflecting the identities of both producers and consumers in an increasingly digitised and globalised fashion landscape.
Paper short abstract:
We are interested in Khadi’s perceived morality and its social appeal to consolidate national identity. Through a digital ethnographic study, we reflect on how the' moral' fabric of Khadi has been branded as a mass fashion avenue for the Indian millennials who cherish its moral/national appeal.
Paper long abstract:
Khadi, a handwoven natural cotton fabric that morally and politically served as a symbol for India’s freedom struggle, has now grown into a multi-product socio-economic Indian brand in the 21st century India that supposedly expresses ‘Indianness’. Popularized by Gandhi in the colonial times, promotion of hand-spun Khadi in the independent India became a national imperative to make Indians aware of their moral obligation to wear Khadi as national identity. It was chiefly accomplished through the formation of a statutory body named Khadi and Village Industries Commission (KVIC) in 1956 and since then, the fabric has been absorbed into the fold of mass fashion.
Presently, Khadi is promoted and sustained by both the state and the private entrepreneurs and it nationally and internationally corroborates to India’s self-image and ushers into sartorial nationalism. Khadi’s mass production and commodification in the 21st century India promoted it under the rubric of 'slow fashion’ for its ethical, sustainable, and weaver-centric approach. Anthropologically situated between the turmoil of putative morality and its present bend towards mass fashion, Khadi apparels are branded as alternative choices against the ‘fast fashion’ and modernity’s tiring endeavors at once.
Through a digital ethnographic study of six popular Indian clothing websites (including ‘Khadi India’ by KVIC) we will assess the nationalist politics that Khadi apparels sewed into India's socio-cultural space. We will be assessing the impact of Khadi’s cultural politics through the advertisements, branding and marketing techniques from these websites that conjoin morality with fashion.
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at how appearance is part of ‘personality development’ and in refashioning new forms of personhood in globalised Delhi. I contend that the choice of a particular fashion is an indicator of the social and the political, and is mediated by the aesthetics of caste and class.
Paper long abstract:
This paper looks at how clothes and appearance are part of ‘personality development’ and in refashioning new forms of personhood in globalised Delhi. The new economic policies of 1991 in India led to the emergence of a consumption-driven economy, the new middle class and a booming service industry, producing new aspirations and sensibilities. Delhi’s new ‘world-class’ spaces of employment, pleasure and consumption in the form of new cultures of work, shopping malls, gourmet restaurants and religio-touristic sites demand new modes of belonging. Thus, this has led to many sections of the youth and upper-middle-class women desiring to curate an image or an aesthetic fit to demonstrate their belonging to the new sites of the ‘global’. To cater to the demands of achieving an aesthetic fit, grooming schools have become a popular sight/site in Delhi. By focussing on lessons in appearance and attire, I examine how fashion is systematically and pedagogically broken down to curate an appropriate aesthetic fit. Fashion brings with it a sense of access and acceptance, while simultaneously being a cause of judgment and anxiety. I examine the choices of my interlocutors and the advice of the grooming instructors to dissect what constitutes fashionable and unfashionable in the urban milieu. I contend that the choice of a particular fashion is an indicator of the social and the political and in this case, it is mediated by the aesthetics of caste and class.