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.