Facts about Fashion and Society- with me 🎀

Hello guys ! Today I'd like to share with you some facts about clothing and fashion I'm sure you'll find interesting ass I do! Enjoy reading ! 

🎀Facts about clothing practices 

Clothing practices make us realize how much the society in which we live shapes us, even in our tastes and dislikes, according to class and gender.

Clothes are unique objects: we handle them every day (to wear them, wash them, buy them, etc.), and we see them as a way to express our tastes and our personality. Whether we have an enthusiastic, anxious, or indifferent relationship with our outfits, this everyday object can seem disconnected from major societal issues and unworthy of scientific analysis.

Yet, it is precisely because it is part of our daily practices and representations that clothing is so interesting. On the one hand, because it can make us perceive how much the society in which we live shapes us, including in seemingly trivial acts. 

On the other hand, because clothing has led the social sciences to produce multidimensional, even intersectional analyses, which are still particularly relevant today. It is in this spirit that we propose a framework for analyzing the “clothes of the social.” To do this, this introduction traces the thread of a social science approach to clothing and clothing practices that is distinct from a sociology of fashion [1], which focuses primarily on its creation, the legitimate ways of wearing it or its symbolic meanings, but also a sociology of the body, which can neglect clothing and dismiss it as a superficial veil. 

One could argue that the tradition of research on clothing and clothing practices in which we are located has sometimes been overshadowed by approaches to fashion and the body, which have prospered more. In Les Habits du social, on the contrary, we intend to highlight its multiple contributions.

This analytical thread can be traced back to the founding text of the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, which, as early as 1899, presented various characteristics that had a lasting impact on the analysis of clothing. First, he studied clothing as a means of expression and a sign of social position: he highlighted the ostentatious aspects of clothing consumption. 

But he insisted on the fact that this expression owed nothing to chance or to the spontaneous emergence of singular identity, and everything to the need to appear to be part of the “leisure class”. Then, he articulated gender and class: bourgeois women were the supports and objects of this work of sartorial distinction [2].

This analytical thread can be traced back to the founding text of the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, which, as early as 1899, presented various characteristics that had a lasting impact on the analysis of clothing. First of all, he studied clothing as a means of expression and a sign of social position: he highlighted the ostentatious aspects of clothing consumption. But he insisted on the fact that this expression owed nothing to chance or to the spontaneous emergence of singular identity, and everything to the need to appear to be part of the “leisure class”. 

Then, he articulated gender and class: bourgeois women were the supports and objects of this work of sartorial distinction [2]. Eighty years later, The Distinction of PierreBourdieu amplifies all these dimensions by projecting them onto the whole of a relational and multidimensional social space, where clothes are practices and objects of judgment which bring into play social positions defined by the composition of the capital held (economic capital, cultural capital in particular) and the articulation of class and gender.

Thus, studying clothing allows us first to show that social position has an effect on our practices that goes beyond simple material constraints and also relates to the shaping of our tastes and dislikes. In this, this approach to clothing ties together the threads of the material and the symbolic (for example, economic constraints and tastes), but also those of social determinisms and self-expression: we express ourselves through clothing, but this expression is itself determined by social position. 

This is evidenced by the importance of the "respectability" that clothing is responsible for establishing. Secondly, clothing has been the subject of an "intersectional" treatment before its time: it is one of the rare objects of sociology for which a gendered perspective has been integrated from the outset, which makes these analyses largely compatible with contemporary reflections on the articulation of social power relations. The articulation of class and gender, in particular, was earlier on this subject than on others, and it is both indispensable and heuristic.

It is these principles (material/symbolic, determinism/expressiveness, class/gender) which structure the analytical grid that we propose to read the clothes of the social. 

🎀Clothing and Lifestyles: Between Constraints and Symbolic Investments

"Tastes and colors are not up for discussion." Today, our choice of clothing seems "free," a purely personal matter of choice. It is true that dress code regulations have largely disappeared, while social prescriptions regarding attire have become more flexible, as demonstrated by the historical perspective developed by Christine Bard. 

🎀The first sociological studies to focus on clothing had to deal with this deeply rooted common-sense idea: what we like to wear or not is simply an expression of our unique personality, perhaps even our aesthetic or artistic side. 

🎀However, while the social sciences have endeavored to show that our clothing choices are in fact largely determined by our social position, this initial attention to "taste," to the expressive or symbolic dimension of clothing, has not been eliminated from analyses and has enriched them.

T. Veblen integrated this dimension from the end of the 19th century: to dress is to show one's belonging to the leisure class, that is to say to those social groups whose time is not entirely determined by work and who have the economic means to make clothing something other than a simple necessity to protect or hide one's body.

At the turn of the 1960s, when the social sciences began to take an interest in clothing again, these different dimensions structured the debate between the semiological approach on the one hand, led by Roland Barthes, and against which the sociological approach defended by Pierre Bourdieu was then positioned. 

Whereas the former considered clothing as an object of communication and part of a system of signs, the latter approached it from a material angle, highlighting the expense incurred by clothing, in connection with the symbolic investment it receives based on class and gender [3]. The sociological approach therefore intervened at a time when the expressive, symbolic aspect of clothing had already been highlighted and, in fact, its materialist bias included this dimension in the analysis.

🎀Clothing purchases are determined by economic resources and professional positions…

Maurice Halbwachs, studying the budgets of American and European workers at the beginning of the 20th century, gives pride of place to clothing expenditures and shows that their evolution is not simply determined by wage and price levels, but that gaps between social classes are structural [4].

 In the 1970s, large-scale quantitative surveys confirmed the link between social position and clothing consumption. This statistical sociology focuses on two main subjects: the share of clothing expenditures in the budget; and product statistics, that is, the items of clothing purchased, recorded using rather crude classifications, but which make quantitative surveys and their reproduction possible.

These quantitative data highlight the ways in which income and profession affect clothing. La Distinction [5] demonstrates the inversion of the relative share granted to food and clothing between the working classes, who devote a larger part of their budget to food, and the middle classes, for whom, on the contrary, clothing takes precedence.

 The gradation of economic investments in clothing is explained by the anticipation of professional profits from appearance, higher as one rises in social space. The items of clothing purchased, for men, confirm the determining importance of differences in professional position: "suit" (that is, a suit—matching trousers and jacket—) and coat for executives, blue workwear, Canadian—a warm jacket, in wool or leather, fur-lined—or jacket for the working classes.

Based on relatively undetailed statistical categories, these works analyse clothing essentially in terms of volume: how many items of clothing do we own, how much did they cost? However, going into the details of the items – what kind of jeans, what tracksuit, what suit and tie – allows for greater finesse in both the analysis of clothing and social classes, and Les habits du social, which is based on statistical studies, but also on qualitatively collected materials, allows us to see this.

But clothing choices are also shaped by logics of vertical and horizontal distinction: "respectability."

Founding quantitative analyses also show that differences in social position are not simply income gaps or positions in the division of labor. To borrow Bourdieu's words, clothing "touches on the symbolization of social position," as can be seen by comparing workers and employees: for an equivalent income, workers spend more on food and less on clothing than employees.

Among men (workers), expenditure on clothing represents 85.6% of what it is among employees. They buy the same clothes more cheaply (…) and especially different clothes: on the one hand, leather or imitation leather jackets and Canadian jackets for moped rides on cold mornings, on the other, coats that fall on the side of petty-bourgeois respectability; here, overalls, dungarees or blue work clothes, there, blouses or aprons, jackets, vests and blazers [7].

In the ruling classes, class fractions also influence clothing consumption: industrialists and large traders have average presentation expenses, these are limited among the higher intellectual professions, and it is for the liberal professions that presentation and representation costs far exceed those of all other fractions.

Distinction shows this for clothing as for other cultural consumptions: economic constraint is not enough to explain their structuring, which also rests on socially constructed tastes and dislikes that distinguish not only classes, but also class fractions. A social position is not just income, it is not just a position in the division of labor, it is clothing styles that are as many "lifestyles." This notion is a truly useful tool for understanding how we dress in different places in the social space and the way in which clothing engages issues of distinction—which mix possibly conscious strategies of differentiation and incorporated and sometimes completely unconscious tastes and dislikes.

An important element of distinction between social groups and even between class fractions is in fact the importance given to one's dress and the care displayed. N. Herpin already noted that civil service executives, who are not inclined to spend money on clothing, buy fewer ties and more sweaters than average, in a basic outfit that makes little difference between work and private life [8]. 

As Martine Court shows [9], it is the parents of the educated upper classes who are the least reluctant to make their children wear torn or second-hand clothes. Thus, in many cases, members of the educated middle and upper classes wear clothes that are less visibly well-groomed than those of other social groups, or even ostentatiously display less investment in their appearance, which can be condemned by members of the working classes.

Beverly Skeggs thus shows, in a survey carried out in the 1980s and 1990s in England, how the “bohemian” clothing of young people from the middle classes – who, despite all their money, “are extremely dirty”, do not know how to dress or put together an outfit, lack “style” and seem to make no “effort” – makes them disheveled with a “totally rotten look” in the eyes of young women from the working classes [10]. What is seen as dirty and neglected can, on the contrary, be experienced as a luxury and the hallmark of social excellence: at the same time, in France, a wealthy bourgeois member of the Jockey Club speaks with admiration of the “shabby clothes” of his companions, twenty-year-old clothes whose “extraordinary cut” he celebrates and even the wear and tear that gives them, like antique furniture or works of art, a “patina” [11].

To understand clothing practices in terms of social position, we must therefore take into account internal divisions within groups, which are as many aspirations and identifications with or rejections of neighboring groups. Christelle Avril thus analyzes the differences in clothing, and more broadly in styles of femininity, between women who share the same profession, that of home help [12]: those who come from or identify with the independent lower middle classes prioritize their appearance and respectability in the local space in which they circulate between their different workplaces and wear heels and handbags, while those who come from the most precarious fractions of the working classes favor the practicality of sneakers and backpacks to cope with the intense physical activity that all their professions demand. In return, Amélie Beaumont and Lise Bernard explore what their work clothes do to those who exercise presentation professions [13].

🎀Clothing and Intersectionality: Between Class and Gender

In the analyses cited above, the informed reader will have noticed that gendered variations in clothing practices are clearly evident. However, this was far from being the case for all the subjects studied by sociology in the mid-20th century. One might hypothesize that, here too, the power of common sense regarding clothing influenced the social sciences: it seems so obvious that clothing is, above all, a feminine accessory that even the most ardent supporters of social class as the sole explanatory variable could not ignore it.

Added to this is the fact that, if we include it in statistical explorations, the effect of sex appears massive [14]. Clothing practices are in fact multiple gendered: in clothing expenditure (greater among women, in almost all Socio-Professional Categories, and this yesterday as today [15]), in the pieces or colors worn, in the greater or lesser legitimacy of the concern for one's clothing, in the variable intensity of expectations and sanctions, etc.

This omnipresence of gender in determining clothing practices has enabled significant advances in the way this "variable" is considered in analysis: not only by not excluding it, but also by demonstrating its historical variability and reflecting on its articulation with other social power relations.

🎀Dress is not naturally a woman's affair.

While it seems obvious today that men and women dress differently, and that the latter devote more time to it than the former, historians have shown that this has not always been the case – and therefore is not self-evident. For a long period, the lack of differentiation prevailed: in Europe, men and women wore long, dark-colored dresses. The first to make their attire a mark of their social status were men. From the middle of the 14th century, competition between social groups was marked by the quantity and flamboyance of men's clothing accessories [16]. Their pink color was then a marker of power, prized by Henry IV.

The French Revolution simultaneously established formal equality between men and the difference between the sexes, by removing all regulations governing the right to wear a particular outfit reserved for a trade or a rank of nobility. Clothing, however, had to be adapted to gender: the ban on trousers, which Christine Bard returns to [17], marked the exclusion of women from the civic sphere. Although there were no longer any dress regulations, the sociological reality of the logic of distinction between social groups did not disappear in 19th-century France. It was now primarily reflected in women's clothing, designed as a reflection of the social status of their father or husband [18].

Gender and class combine to shape clothing practices

More generally, attention to gender and attention to class in shaping clothing practices enrich each other. Here we encounter intersectionality, a sociological concept useful for understanding how social positions are at the intersection of power relations. This amounts to not being able to examine the clothing of executives [19] or elected officials [20] without asking how it is defined by gender, or, conversely, to seeking to specify the types of skirts worn by women according to their professional group.

Class and gender gaps that structure each other

This intersection of power relations is not absent from early work on clothing. Distinction thus highlights the more pronounced nature of class differences in the case of men's clothing (Canadian women versus long coats) than in women's clothing: in women's wardrobes, the gap between social groups is greatest for ensembles and suits, less so for dresses and especially skirts and jackets, which can look similar on women who are otherwise very different socially [21].

Conversely, these works highlight that the gap between men's and women's clothing varies according to (fractions of) social classes. Thus, in Nicolas Herpin's survey, which covers the early 1980s, while families of craftsmen and business executives spent as much on their sons as on their daughters, business leaders and liberal professions, despite their high incomes, spent very little on children's clothing, and even less on boys' clothing (a son of a liberal profession costs barely more in clothing than a son of a worker) [22] —Martine Court shows that this lower investment in children and this difference in treatment between boys and girls seems to have disappeared from all middle and upper class families in the economic pole.

Today, some parents claim to dress their children in a "neutral" way, despite the gender-specific sections in stores. What we see, however, is that in practice, this amounts to putting little girls in clothes coded as masculine (and never the other way around) and, above all, that this hardly lasts beyond the first months of life [23]. Moreover, this distancing from gender-specific clothing norms is even better understood if we place it in its social class context: it is in fact mainly members of the middle and upper classes who are relatively more endowed with cultural capital than with economic capital who practice it.

Later, in adolescence, gendered dress practices again differentiate according to class, and dress styles continue to manifest situated conceptions of masculinity and femininity: young people from the working classes reinforce the marking of gender difference through their dress style (and devalue, for example, the lack of virility of long-haired “skater” boys) whereas their counterparts from the middle and upper classes adopt dress styles that oppose traditional gender models (and mock the accentuated femininities and futility of those “who wear makeup like paint pots”) [24]. On the parental side, mothers encourage (in the working classes) or delay and control (in the middle and upper classes) the wearing of backless tops, thongs or high heels by girls, which can be seen respectively as “cute” or vulgar, or even as an indication of academic failure [25].

From "thugs" to "scum." The shift in the rejection of sartorial pretension among young working-class men

This intersection of class and gender is particularly evident in the clothing of working-class men. 

For a long time, "pretension" in matters of dress constituted a double prohibition for them: "submission to demands perceived as both feminine and bourgeois appears as an indication of a double denial of virility" [26].
This refusal of constraints and conventions in matters of clothing is found among the "thugs" of the 1980s with their style which mixes jeans, perfecto and cowboy boots ("jeans rather than trousers, jackets rather than blazers, sneakers or boots rather than city shoes"). In this they oppose other young men more attentive to their appearance, on the one hand the "posh type", "teenager", "playboy" and on the other the "intellectual type", "hippy", "hippie" [27].
Today, working-class youth who provoke equivalent disapproval from middle- and upper-class parents [28], and from some of their peers, are the "scum." Thus, for middle-school students in the 2010s attending a school located in the heart of a council estate in the Paris suburbs and attended by students from working-class and middle-class backgrounds [29], notably from immigrant families, the dominant clothing standard for boys is an "American" outfit, inspired by rap: jeans or baggy pants, combined with very large t-shirts or sweatshirts; clothing brands Nike, TN, Adidas, Sergio Tachini, Puma; short hair, even completely or partially shaved with clippers (with the exception of a few boys from African families whose hair is braided or plaited), caps, hoods. 

The girls' outfits are also inspired by the world of rap and R'n'B music, with tight-fitting clothes and fitted sweaters (from brands like Pimkie, H&M or Zara), to which makeup and jewelry are gradually added as they get older.
Attention to dress is thus widely shared by both sexes, and the brands favored by young men are even more expensive. The rejection of the sartorial pretensions of working-class young men has shifted to young rural people who identify urban people as those who “dress like scum” [30]. Isabelle Clair shows in particular the intersecting logics of distinction that organize relationships to the care of appearance and taste for clothing: signs of virility in working-class suburbs, they are rejected by young rural men, while on the contrary young bourgeois people appropriate this appearance of “scum” as a performance of masculinity [31].

We can see from these examples that, despite a relative void in work on clothing between the 1960s and today, the joint attention to gender and class in the founding works allows them to enter into dialogue with contemporary intersectional approaches, which also integrate other social relations (race, age, urban/rural, etc.), as Les habits du social also shows
Clothing and Bodies: Towards a Sociology of Worn Clothes

This eclipse of work on clothing may stem from the disappearance of clothing behind the body, which has become "itself," "more than the social symbols of wealth and authority" that clothing can be, "the medium of social distinction" [32]. Perhaps also because spending has shifted from clothing to body care [33], the sociology of bodies and bodily inequalities of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has focused more on materialities and bodily conformations—fat, thin, anorexic, obese, stigmatized, legitimate, dominant bodies, their health conditions or the physical activities and diets to which they are subjected—than on the clothing that covers them. It is therefore on the body itself that the intersectional gaze has been focused, which has, for example, revealed that the differences in corpulence according to social class were much more pronounced for women than for men, or that health conditions and life expectancies dramatically distinguished male workers from male executives, whereas they less oppose female workers to female executives.

While it was indeed necessary to seek out the social world in the depths of the body, it is a shame that this has been achieved at the cost of systematic and sociologically organized attention to clothing. By stripping bodies bare, sociology has partly turned its back on clothing, and this book aims, on the contrary, to consider it attentively. However, we should not fall into the opposite excess: looking at clothing while forgetting bodies, social differences in conformity and hexis, or even social inequalities in health and weight. The same t-shirt or the same pair of jeans do not mean the same thing and do not constitute the same garment on different bodies. It is in fact the dissociation of the sociologies of bodies and clothing that must be fought, and a sociology of dressed bodies, or of worn clothing, that still largely remains to be constructed. 

In The Clothes of the Social, we begin by going back in time to follow the thread of a political history of trousers, before returning to childhood to observe the variations in clothing. We then come to ask how, later in the life cycle, we dress for work, before ending with the examination of a particular case of work clothes, those of a famous female politician. Along the way, we encounter many forms of the clothes of the social: those in which the social dresses us, but also those in which we dress it, by covering it and revealing it at the same time.🎀
Happy tot share with you guys these interesting facts! Wish you to enjoy life and take care ! Don't forget to dress how you love and how it makes you feel good and enjoy every life's precious moment !