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Fashion and Age: Dress, the Body and Later Life
Throughout history certain forms and styles of dress have been deemed appropriate - or more significantly, inappropriate - for people as they age. Older women in particular have long been subject to social pressure to tone down, to adopt self-effacing, covered-up styles. But increasingly there are signs of change, as older women aspire to younger, more mainstream, styles, and retailers realize the potential of the 'grey market'. Fashion and Age is the first study to systematically explore the links between clothing and age, drawing on fashion theory and cultural gerontology to examine the changing ways in which age is imagined, experienced and understood in modern culture through the medium of dress. Clothes lie between the body and its social expression, and the book explores the significance of embodiment in dress and in the cultural constitution of age.Drawing on the views of older women, journalists and fashion editors, and clothing designers and retailers, it aims to widen the agenda of fashion studies to encompass the everyday dress of the majority, shifting the debate about age away from its current preoccupation with dependency, towards a fuller account of the lived experience of age. Fashion and Age will be of great interest to students of fashion, material culture, sociology, sociology of age, history of dress and to clothing designers.
- GenresFashion
292 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 13, 2014
I picked this up expecting it to be yet another what-to-wear handbook but the author ranges widely. It is an academic thesis and you have to disregard the occasional intrusion of academic jargon. The book echoes the frustration of any woman over 50 who still wants to look stylish. We oldies have money to spend but face a choice between strappy, stretchy outfits and floral tents. The author interviewed customers, retailers and magazine editors, with forays into history, cultural attitudes and the symbolism of colour. I found it a fascinating read.
September 17, 2019
3 – Ageing, Embodiment and Culture
p.41 – Modern media culture is intensely youth-oriented. We are surrounded by representations and images in which the body is presented in youthful, idealized form, offering an unattainable level of perfection. The damaging effect of these images on younger women has been widely critiqued by feminists such as Bordo (1993) and Wolf (1990) in terms of the beauty ideal and its malignant effects, evidenced in the pervasive body dissatisfaction that has become the norm among modern Western women. Women are taught to feel insecure about their bodies, constantly monitoring them for imperfections and engaging in forms of improvement and self-surveillance (Bordo 1993).
Holstein (2006) notes the irony that while women have achieved greater status as agents than ever before, they are faced by an escalating set of expectations in relation to their bodies. These pressures are not confined to younger women, but have spread to older women, who increasingly find themselves interrogating their mirrors for the signs of decline that will erode their cultural status (Gullette 1999). Older women are thus not just subject to the traditional male gaze of patriarchy, but the additional gaze of youth that evaluates them in terms of the ways their bodies fall short of the youthful ideal.
p.42 – Failure to look fit, toned and slim here become a new sign of moral laxity, evidence of failure to exert proper discipline over the body. Ageing adds additional pressure, with the visible signs of ageing becoming a mark of personal failure and – particularly for women – letting yourself go.
Under late capitalism these anxieties from the basis for a vast anti-ageing industry centered on the dread of looking old. The cosmetics and pharmaceutical industries in particular have identified anti-ageing products and the “mature” market as hey sectors for development; and their advertising has become one of the most powerful ways in which the face of ageing is constructed and reinforced, reflecting and amplifying the ageist ideology that permeates Western culture. Adverts tell women that they to battle against ageing though beauty work and that youthfulness is vital to their social visibility and cultural worth. Hurd Clarke (2011) shows how, as procedures like Botox injections or cosmetic surgery become available, they are promoted and marketed in such a way that they are normalized, becoming essential tools in the achievement of proper femininity. The market this does not simply respond to demand, but actively shapes it, creating new ways of being older, new normoactivities in relation to appearance and behavior. Social status or education is no protector in this culture of body dissatisfaction and age anxiety. Hurd Clarke (2011) found that women of higher socioeconomic status were more involved in, concerned about and dissatisfied with their physical appearance than were women of lower socioeconomic status. They are also more likely to have internalized health norms that hold individuals morally responsible for the status of their bodies.
p.43 – Contemporary femininity is thus constructed in such a way that it implicitly rests in a norm of youthfulness. That is a central part of its meaning: to be feminine is to be youthful.
p.44 – These pressures are not confined to women. Men suffer from them too, though to a lesser degree, since their status traditionally is less closely tied to their appearance. Ageing is also believed to set in later for men. Whereas women’s status in terms of appearance begins to decline in late youth or early middle age, men’s status largely remains unaffected, protected by other sources of cultural esteem and power associated with work. Indeed, signs of middle age in men – greying temples, smile lines – are often viewed positively since they are associated, for middle-class men in particular, with economic and cultural status.
6 – Magazines, the Media and Mrs. Exeter
p.101 – Magazines operate in a visual culture that systemically devalues and erases age. Its biases towards youth and beauty are long-established, reaching back at least to the Renaissance and its Platonic ideal of beauty.
Women’s magazines sell on their capacity to be a purchase, like a bar of chocolate, aimed at personal enjoyment, often snatched in the midst of the demands made by others.
p.103 – The most prominent way the magazines address the visual presentation of age is through makeovers. These allow magazines to relate directly to the lives of readers, getting around the difficulties posed by classic fashion shoots.
Makeovers thus relate directly to the reader through the use of real women, but showing them in a glamorous, transformed way. To this degree they offer older women the promise – or the fantasy – that they could do the same.
The magazines also relate to their readers through the use of celebrities who are themselves older. Over the last decade all magazines have increasingly featured celebrities on the covers and inside.
p.108 – Vogue is notable for an almost perfect match between editorial and advertising, with the high production values of its fashion spreads reflected in the adverts for major perfume and garment houses. Its high advertising revenue means it is one of the most profitable women’s magazines.
Vogue is not aimed at older women. As the marketing data shows, its readership is heavily biased towards those in their twenties and thirties. In recent years, however, it has made attempts to relate to the older market. This partly arose, as the editor explained in the interview, from the realization that older women represented a growing and affluent part of the market. Women in their fifties and sixties have particularly high disposable incomes, and Vogue is interested in capturing these for the fashion industry.
p.112 – Localization refers to the strategy whereby older women are confined to certain parts of the magazine. Typically, and most strongly, they feature in the beauty pages where anti-ageing strategies are a central concern.
Dilution strategies are used through the decades approach, in which fashions are illustrated on women in their twenties, thirties, forties and so forth.
p.113 – Here the images of older women are diluted by small images and a predominance of younger women. Such pages enable the magazine to reach out to and relate to older readers by showing something of their lives, but without defining the magazine as aimed at this group.
The third strategy is that of personalization. In every case where an older woman is featured in Vogue, she is a named individual. These are always real women, not models, living real lives, though with the proviso that these are Vogue lives and, as a result, far from the lived reality of most people, even most readers.
7 – The High Street Responds: Designing for the Older Market
p.126 – Fashion marketing to older women rests on an essential tension: that of building a market centered around a negative identity.
p.133 – Clothes do more than just fit the body, they aim to enhance it, presenting it in ways that accord with the body ideal of the period. Part of adjusting the cut is, therefore, about producing garments that assist the wearer to appear nearer the current fashionable norm: in the case of women, nearer the body of a slim, young woman. Clothes have always performed this function, enabling individual bodies with their idiosyncrasies to be presented in a form nearer to the current norm. such adjustments reflect systematic ideals about the body.
p.141 – Fashion is part of the cultural economy in which meanings circulate in and through material production. In this, design directors, like journalists and advertisers, operate as cultural mediators, shaping the aspirations of customers, proposing new ways of being and providing the material means of achieving these at a directly bodily level. Increasingly such activities encompass older people. Clothing retail companies, therefore, need to be understood as part of the wider set of cultural influencers shaping the ways ageing is imagined, performed and experienced in contemporary culture.
p.146 – But consumption is Janus-faced. It also comes with a darker, more negative side. New cultural freedoms impose new requirements, new disciplinary demands in relation to appearance and the body. The spread of Fashionability to older women can this be seen as part of a wider colonization of their bodies by new forms of governmentality, an imposition of new normativities in relation to later years, whereby women are increasingly enjoyed to engage in anti-ageing practices in relation to dress, as in other fields. Consumption culture, in proposing new ways of being, implicitly silences other ways of being that involve giving up not bothering, of sourcing clothes in a limited way focussed largely on comfort or utility.
p.151 – Lastly it would be a mistake to view clothing and later years solely through the lens of anti-ageing. Clothes are about a great deal more in the lives of older women than simply the attempt to meet or transcend regulatory structures in relation to age. Dress remains for many older women, despite the cultural limitations, a source of enjoyment and a site of aesthetic pleasure.
p.41 – Modern media culture is intensely youth-oriented. We are surrounded by representations and images in which the body is presented in youthful, idealized form, offering an unattainable level of perfection. The damaging effect of these images on younger women has been widely critiqued by feminists such as Bordo (1993) and Wolf (1990) in terms of the beauty ideal and its malignant effects, evidenced in the pervasive body dissatisfaction that has become the norm among modern Western women. Women are taught to feel insecure about their bodies, constantly monitoring them for imperfections and engaging in forms of improvement and self-surveillance (Bordo 1993).
Holstein (2006) notes the irony that while women have achieved greater status as agents than ever before, they are faced by an escalating set of expectations in relation to their bodies. These pressures are not confined to younger women, but have spread to older women, who increasingly find themselves interrogating their mirrors for the signs of decline that will erode their cultural status (Gullette 1999). Older women are thus not just subject to the traditional male gaze of patriarchy, but the additional gaze of youth that evaluates them in terms of the ways their bodies fall short of the youthful ideal.
p.42 – Failure to look fit, toned and slim here become a new sign of moral laxity, evidence of failure to exert proper discipline over the body. Ageing adds additional pressure, with the visible signs of ageing becoming a mark of personal failure and – particularly for women – letting yourself go.
Under late capitalism these anxieties from the basis for a vast anti-ageing industry centered on the dread of looking old. The cosmetics and pharmaceutical industries in particular have identified anti-ageing products and the “mature” market as hey sectors for development; and their advertising has become one of the most powerful ways in which the face of ageing is constructed and reinforced, reflecting and amplifying the ageist ideology that permeates Western culture. Adverts tell women that they to battle against ageing though beauty work and that youthfulness is vital to their social visibility and cultural worth. Hurd Clarke (2011) shows how, as procedures like Botox injections or cosmetic surgery become available, they are promoted and marketed in such a way that they are normalized, becoming essential tools in the achievement of proper femininity. The market this does not simply respond to demand, but actively shapes it, creating new ways of being older, new normoactivities in relation to appearance and behavior. Social status or education is no protector in this culture of body dissatisfaction and age anxiety. Hurd Clarke (2011) found that women of higher socioeconomic status were more involved in, concerned about and dissatisfied with their physical appearance than were women of lower socioeconomic status. They are also more likely to have internalized health norms that hold individuals morally responsible for the status of their bodies.
p.43 – Contemporary femininity is thus constructed in such a way that it implicitly rests in a norm of youthfulness. That is a central part of its meaning: to be feminine is to be youthful.
p.44 – These pressures are not confined to women. Men suffer from them too, though to a lesser degree, since their status traditionally is less closely tied to their appearance. Ageing is also believed to set in later for men. Whereas women’s status in terms of appearance begins to decline in late youth or early middle age, men’s status largely remains unaffected, protected by other sources of cultural esteem and power associated with work. Indeed, signs of middle age in men – greying temples, smile lines – are often viewed positively since they are associated, for middle-class men in particular, with economic and cultural status.
6 – Magazines, the Media and Mrs. Exeter
p.101 – Magazines operate in a visual culture that systemically devalues and erases age. Its biases towards youth and beauty are long-established, reaching back at least to the Renaissance and its Platonic ideal of beauty.
Women’s magazines sell on their capacity to be a purchase, like a bar of chocolate, aimed at personal enjoyment, often snatched in the midst of the demands made by others.
p.103 – The most prominent way the magazines address the visual presentation of age is through makeovers. These allow magazines to relate directly to the lives of readers, getting around the difficulties posed by classic fashion shoots.
Makeovers thus relate directly to the reader through the use of real women, but showing them in a glamorous, transformed way. To this degree they offer older women the promise – or the fantasy – that they could do the same.
The magazines also relate to their readers through the use of celebrities who are themselves older. Over the last decade all magazines have increasingly featured celebrities on the covers and inside.
p.108 – Vogue is notable for an almost perfect match between editorial and advertising, with the high production values of its fashion spreads reflected in the adverts for major perfume and garment houses. Its high advertising revenue means it is one of the most profitable women’s magazines.
Vogue is not aimed at older women. As the marketing data shows, its readership is heavily biased towards those in their twenties and thirties. In recent years, however, it has made attempts to relate to the older market. This partly arose, as the editor explained in the interview, from the realization that older women represented a growing and affluent part of the market. Women in their fifties and sixties have particularly high disposable incomes, and Vogue is interested in capturing these for the fashion industry.
p.112 – Localization refers to the strategy whereby older women are confined to certain parts of the magazine. Typically, and most strongly, they feature in the beauty pages where anti-ageing strategies are a central concern.
Dilution strategies are used through the decades approach, in which fashions are illustrated on women in their twenties, thirties, forties and so forth.
p.113 – Here the images of older women are diluted by small images and a predominance of younger women. Such pages enable the magazine to reach out to and relate to older readers by showing something of their lives, but without defining the magazine as aimed at this group.
The third strategy is that of personalization. In every case where an older woman is featured in Vogue, she is a named individual. These are always real women, not models, living real lives, though with the proviso that these are Vogue lives and, as a result, far from the lived reality of most people, even most readers.
7 – The High Street Responds: Designing for the Older Market
p.126 – Fashion marketing to older women rests on an essential tension: that of building a market centered around a negative identity.
p.133 – Clothes do more than just fit the body, they aim to enhance it, presenting it in ways that accord with the body ideal of the period. Part of adjusting the cut is, therefore, about producing garments that assist the wearer to appear nearer the current fashionable norm: in the case of women, nearer the body of a slim, young woman. Clothes have always performed this function, enabling individual bodies with their idiosyncrasies to be presented in a form nearer to the current norm. such adjustments reflect systematic ideals about the body.
p.141 – Fashion is part of the cultural economy in which meanings circulate in and through material production. In this, design directors, like journalists and advertisers, operate as cultural mediators, shaping the aspirations of customers, proposing new ways of being and providing the material means of achieving these at a directly bodily level. Increasingly such activities encompass older people. Clothing retail companies, therefore, need to be understood as part of the wider set of cultural influencers shaping the ways ageing is imagined, performed and experienced in contemporary culture.
p.146 – But consumption is Janus-faced. It also comes with a darker, more negative side. New cultural freedoms impose new requirements, new disciplinary demands in relation to appearance and the body. The spread of Fashionability to older women can this be seen as part of a wider colonization of their bodies by new forms of governmentality, an imposition of new normativities in relation to later years, whereby women are increasingly enjoyed to engage in anti-ageing practices in relation to dress, as in other fields. Consumption culture, in proposing new ways of being, implicitly silences other ways of being that involve giving up not bothering, of sourcing clothes in a limited way focussed largely on comfort or utility.
p.151 – Lastly it would be a mistake to view clothing and later years solely through the lens of anti-ageing. Clothes are about a great deal more in the lives of older women than simply the attempt to meet or transcend regulatory structures in relation to age. Dress remains for many older women, despite the cultural limitations, a source of enjoyment and a site of aesthetic pleasure.
October 18, 2016
This is a great analysis and a great find! I had not realised that there were academic studies of this nature. As Twigg says herself "to be interested in dress places one on the edges of seriousness." Well, this is a serious and illuminating account of the complex relationship that we women have with fashion as we age. What this book does is show how fashion can offer a wider perspective on the territory of ageing.
Twigg shows us through her own research with women over 50 and well researched secondary data that fashion can be positive and life enhancing as much as oppressive and objectifying.
"Being fashionably dressed implies being visible and present in the public world, asserting that you are still part of things."
Twigg shows us through her own research with women over 50 and well researched secondary data that fashion can be positive and life enhancing as much as oppressive and objectifying.
"Being fashionably dressed implies being visible and present in the public world, asserting that you are still part of things."
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews