Clothing Cultures - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2013

This article discusses the proliferation of class distinctions through the consumption of fashion, using the concept of co-creativity to further our understanding of the role of consumers in the production of newness and difference. Drawing on recent theories of identity and creativity, it is a contribution to the development of research methodologies adequate to the task of understanding fashion, by focusing on cross-media practices through which clothes/objects become meaningful, rather studying clothes within the confines of an object-based discipline (such as Dress History). It emphasizes creative production as the outcome of historically specific relationships between practitioners, objects/images, and consumers. The broader context for this discussion relates to current issues and debates around the creative economy’s need for a fusion of knowledge and skills from graduates who are comfortable working across the boundaries of established disciplines such as design and marketing.

This article uses family photographs to discuss the labour of home dressmaking in Australia in the 1960s. These images reveal the products of this domestic labour in garments of economy and style and allude to the affective labour associated with the socialization of girls. The clothes produced by mothers for their daughters can be viewed as a performative act of mothering at that time. Drawing on conversations, discussions and interviews with their mothers and other women from the 1960s, the authors demonstrate the value of personal narratives, beyond individual subjectivity, as a way of opening out the broader and more complex historical and social process of their everyday lives.

Disguise – the substitution of one identity for another – is a deliberate act of construction and an elimination of self. Through costume, signs of self are concealed and erased, and in their place appears an apparently complete alternative identity. Although dress is typically aspirational, reflecting a desire to imitate those of higher socio-economic status, this article observes that there are occasions on which it is desirable to use costume to reduce status, and to escape the perceived pressures and responsibilities of social or economic power. In trans-status disguise, it is necessary to abandon all outward indicators of individuality and status: to perform ordinariness.

Performance of ordinariness is a means to an end: a tool to enable behaviour that would otherwise be inappropriate or impossible. Inspired by Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, nineteenth-century journalists used costume to experience life in the poorest sections of society with the aim of increasing trans-status empathy. In screen-based narratives, a disguise can often be pivotal to a plot, particularly since, in these primarily visual media, costume is a key identifying feature of any character. Taking as examples, Coming to America, Superman and The Saint, this article observes how costume permits a perceived lowering of status, which in turn enables liberation. In particular, it will propose that there are parallels between the social experiments of nineteenth-century journalists and the fictional narratives of twentieth-century television and cinema.

Street-style blogs have become a major Internet phenomenon in the last few years, luring millions of readers and documenting everyday fashion in diverse cities around the globe. But the Southeast Asian island nation of Indonesia, despite an abundance of other varieties of fashion blogs and a population with some of the highest percentages of social media use in the world, remains decidedly off the street style map. This photo essay seeks both to understand why and to begin filling in that gap. Through full-colour and black and white photographs taken by the author on a recent trip to Indonesia, along with reflections and thoughts inspired by the photographs, it investigates the vibrant and idiosyncratic expressions of style happening in Indonesia today. But it also questions the very qualification of these images as ‘street style photographs.’ Does street style have to happen on ‘the streets’, this essay asks, to be street style? For if so, Indonesia’s urban model seems to preclude participation. And does ‘cool,’ that occult quality ascribed to the subjects of street style photographs, translate to an Indonesian context? This essay both adheres to, and calls into question, the conventions of street style photography to document the myriad meanings of ‘style’ and ‘street’ in contemporary Indonesia.

The principle aim of this article is to contribute to the development of a phenomenology of fashion through an analysis of my relationship with clothing using Heidegger’s phenomenology of Being as outlined in Being and Time (1997) to provide the study’s methodological foundations.

I say ‘a’ phenomenology; however, I will argue that it is only through engagement with the ‘partial perspectives’ and ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway 1988: 583) offered by individual Beings-in-their-worlds that small but significant intersubjective truths can be identified.