Identity and dress are intimately linked. Clothes display, express and shape identity, imbuing it with a directly materiel reality. They thus offer a useful lens through which to explore the possibly changing ways in which older identities are constituted in modern culture.
The link between clothing and identity is a long established theme in dress studies, though one that has been given new impetus by the rise of postmodernism with its emphasis on identity. The link has been understood in a number of ways. The most prominent has been in terms of social class. From the time of Veblen (1889) and Simmel (1904) on wards, sociologists have explored the way in which clothing operates as part of class identity, with fashions diffusing down the social hierarchy as they are successively adopted and abandoned by elites, and as lower groups take up the style. Competitive class emulation is thus the engine of fashion. More recently the dominance of class in the account of fashion has been challenged. The democratisation of fashion and the rise of street styles, has rendered its dynamic less central, with the result that other aspects of identity are increasingly emphasised.
Clothes have long been used to hide sexual difference in its strong biological sense, at the same time to pointing up and signalling it through assumptions concerning gender in clothing codes. Fashion thus helps to reproduce gender as a form of body style, producing a complex interplay between sexed bodies and gendered identities.
The third major way in which clothing and identity has been theorised is in semiotic terms, whereby clothing is presented as a linguistic code - a means whereby people send messages about themselves - and Barthes (1985) gave a celebrated account of the Fashion System in such structuralist terms. But if clothing is a code, it is an inexact one. Empirical work suggests that meanings are not always fixed or shared, with the link between the intention of the wearer and the interpretation of the observer far from straightforward.
Lastly, fashion and identity is often theorised in terms of sub group analysis, in which clothing and body styling is seen markers of the boundaries of the group, a means of stabilising identity and registering belonging. Such approaches tend to focus on youth culture, street styles, and transgressive, counter-cultural modes; and they are rarely applied to conventional or dominant groups.
Age & Identity
Clothes are indeed one of the ways in which forms of social difference are made visible and concrete. But such understandings have rarely been extended to age. Older people have been excluded from fashion studies, for reasons that reflect the preoccupations of the fashion/ design industry with youth and high style, as well as the gerontophobia (fear of growing old) of cultural analysts. However, if we indeed talk of 'master identities', then age is surely one of them; how we are perceived, who we socialise with, how we are judged and ordered socially is crucially determined by our age, or our location within an age categorisation.
Age ordering in dress is perhaps easiest to see in relation to children, where at least since the Romantic period in the West children have worn distinctive forms of dress that reflect their position in the age order. The degree of this, and its interplay with adult fashion varies historically and culturally, but clearly there are forms of dress that relate to childhood, and that are seen as appropriate for children to wear. In the past, this was true of older people also, and certain forms of dress were traditionally thought appropriate for older men and women: the long robe, caps and kerchiefs, sober, quiet dress. Some of these associations persist today, certainly in relation to longer skirts, covered up arms and necklines, neutral toned down colours, and the avoidance of showy, blatant or sexual styles.
Clothing & the Body
Clothing is closely linked to the body. It forms the vestimentary (relating to clothes) envelope that contains the body and presents it to the social world. It is the body that makes clothes live; and we cannot understand the field of clothing and age without reference it.
How we approach identity and dress, for some of the features of age-associated clothing arise form physiological changes. For example, the cut of clothes for older people is looser, designed to accommodate thickening waists and heavier busts, specially post menopause. Sizes are often larger. In terms of colour the toned down palate associated with age does largely seem to be cultural, signalling self effacement and no longer making claims for attention, particularly sexual attention. Colours such as scarlet are commonly described as unsuitable or unflattering for older women, and their condemnation clearly draws in wider ideas of the meaning of scarlet as showy, blatant, sexual. However, there may be some truth in the idea that as skin ages, different colours come to be flattering or unflattering in ways that do not simply reflect cultural stereotypes.
Youthfulness is not just a product of performance. Adopting youthful styles is not necessarily a route of appearing young, and is sometimes the reverse. Indeed exaggeratedly youthful styles can point up age, exposing the disjuncture between the expectations of the dress and the aged body that wears it. Featherstone and Hepworth (1991) argue in their account of the Mask of Ageing that the experience of age in post-modernity is one in which people are increasingly unable to perform their identities in ways consonant with the expectations of consumer society. The mask of ageing is an old conceit; what is new is the character of consumption society and the demands it presents.
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