Fashion is a complex cultural phenomenon made up of the creative design process of garments, cultural affiliation, commercial industry, and consumer needs. The processes of consumer adoption and the cycles of change in the fashion industry have traditionally mirrored each other.
Fashion cycles refer to the organization of the fashion industry in seasons that is perpetuated by not only designers, producers, and retailers in Western contexts, but also more widely by institutions and organizations that partake in the mediation of new fashion through fashion weeks; fashion media including magazines, newspapers, and blogs; marketing activities including fashion film, modeling, PR; and stylist agencies as well as street culture, popular culture, and subcultures.
Together, this forms a fashion system in the sense of an institutionalized set of processes that take an item of clothing or a style from creator to consumer (McCracken 1990; Davis 1994). This definition of the fashion system is broadened to include a more dialectical process between creator and consumer, allowing for the exchange between, for instance, street style and fashion industry. It also opens the system for conceptions of fashion that are not necessarily newly produced, such as vintage or fabric-based, similar to the corporeal fashion of beards.
While these factors will appear throughout the examples and case studies, the main focus is on the social agenda at play when we as individuals engage with fashion. Fashioning identity is understood here as a science of appearance through not only dress and adornment, but also body management, including hair and makeup.
It is about how we choose to look at a given time as part of staging who we are or who we would like others to think we are. Status display as a mix of reality and dream is treated as mainly a social and highly malleable quality that serves the paradoxical function of making us both fashionably unique and part of a crowd.
This game of identity is organized in conceptions of novelty and symbolic meaning that, both in immaterial and material manifestations, are considered transitory. The focus on the cases become a vehicle for the main focus, namely, the mechanisms involved in fashioning identity. This approach is in line with social philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky who considers fashion to be a “specific form of social change, independent of any particular object” (1994: 16).
The expression of our fashionable selves is played out in a series of brief, fictional moments in which past and future overlap. Fashion’s favorite love interest is this ambiguity of the now. Within the context of fashioning identity, novelty is a tool for social distinction, a promise of transformation, or a shopping high while the business of fashion pushes the new to stimulate growth in the marketplace.
As designer Christian Dior (2007: 7) wrote in his 1957 autobiography, the fashion industry is “a trade where novelty is all-important.” So, what is considered new and desirable in fashion is promoted by the fashion industry and negotiated socially by consumers.
This story of “hatless Jack” (Steinberg 2005) suggests a tension between the opposing principles of tradition and innovation that are never fully resolved. This causes a productive act of ambivalence, what sociologist Fred Davis called “ambivalence management” (1994: 25).
Ambivalence is a key concept in more than a century of social theory of fashion and status, from sociologist Georg Simmel (1957) writing in the early twentieth century to Ana Marta González (2012) and Laura Bovone in the twenty-first century.
This ambivalence has been paradoxically constant through shifting visual cultures as well as social, political, cultural, and temporal contexts. Social identity in fashion is in a permanent state of unrest stemming in part from the tension between not only novelty and continuity but also, for instance, the young and aged, masculinity and femininity, high and low status, revelation and concealment, conformity and rebellion (Davis 1994: 18).
So, in the mundane act of handling a hat, the world witnessed Kennedy publicly negotiating a personal balance between individual preference and collective norm as part of a larger system of fashioning identity. In this sense, fashion provides visual metaphors for the construction of social identity that trades on ambivalence through a range of opposing principles.
The tensions this creates constitute a motor in the process of fashioning identity, and the intention is therefore not to eliminate these oppositions but to create conditions that will maintain them as a necessary part of the dynamic.
The social exercise involved in fashioning identity relies on the nature of fashion literacy understood as the ability to decipher sartorial assemblages within the framework of shifting taste preferences. What is being read is the social currency. This is to be understood in the double meaning of what is considered current or modern within a specific context but also which currency or value will provide status.
This is not necessarily afforded through conspicuous pecuniary means as has been the case historically, but increasingly operates through values or ideals signaling status locally negotiated and often ambivalent in expression.
Clothes are no longer the badges of rank, profession, or trade as they were in preindustrial times (Wilson 2003: 242), but there are still politics of appearance. While means and access are relevant when studying this “status competition” (Davis 1994: 58), there has been a gradual move away from an emphasis on class.
In response to the work on Simmel, Herbert Blumer (1969: 282) argued that fashion mechanisms were not a response to a need for class differentiationn and emulation but were rooted in a wish to be in fashion, a process he termed “collective selection.
Fashioning identity is partly about scrambling for attention not in a verbatim translation of visual expressions, but rather as a sartorial trick or “status ploy” (Davis 1994: 76) to be read by the fashion literate while deliberately misguiding those less versed in cracking dress codes.
Fashioning identity is mainly a display of the public self the purpose of which is to communicate social belonging and individual distinction simultaneously. Fashion as a set of symbolic codes, as argued from Simmel (1957) to Susan Kaiser (2002), is suitable for this paradoxical endeavor that relies in part on shifting ideas of beauty, status, social standing, culture, sexuality, and gender.
The sartorial dialectic is charged between the private core self and the fluctuating public self. But this mechanism has its limits. While fashion is a potent tool for the spectacle of identity, we are also so much more than how we manage our appearance.
Fashioning identity is primarily a social game where the sartorial self is public and only in part an extension of the private self. In an attempt to explore the complex process of fashioning identity in the early twenty-first century, a range of examples and cases will be studied with ambivalence as a theme running through the article.
The article as a whole may be seen as a form of reconsideration of Fred Davis’s work in Fashion, Culture, and Identity, originally published in 1992. His observations are still relevant twentyfive years later, but the developments in society and the fashion industry call for an update to match the current context.
Davis’s key concepts will be reexamined through a series of examples and cases, each section representing a different take on the theme of status tactics. Davis approached social identity as unstable and contradictory, individually negotiated and communally shared.
This turbulent process is in part fueled by fashion. A central quote for the article concerns the continuous tension from which fashioning identity gains its strength: The sartorial dialectic of status assumes many voices, each somewhat differently toned from the other but all seeking, however unwittingly, to register a fitting representation of self, be it by overplaying status signals, underplaying them, or mixing them in such a fashion as to intrigue or confound one’s company. (Davis 1994: 63)