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Fashioning Identity: Status Ambivalence in Contemporary Fashion
We dress to communicate who we are, or who we would like others to think we are, telling seductive fashion narratives through our adornment. Yet, today, fashion has been democratized through high-low collaborations, social media and real-time fashion mediation, complicating the basic dynamic of identity displays, and creating tension between personal statements and social performances.
Fashioning Identity explores how this tension is performed through fashion production and consumption,by examining a diverse series of case studies - from ninety-year old fashion icons to the paradoxical rebellion in 'normcore', and from soccer jerseys in Kenya to heavy metal band T-shirts in Europe. Through these cases, the role of time, gender, age memory, novelty, copying, the body and resistance are considered within the context of the contemporary fashion scene. Offering a fresh approach to the subject by readdressing Fred Davis' seminal concept of 'identity ambivalence' in Fashion, Culture and Identity (1992), Mackinney-Valentin argues that we are in an epoch of 'status ambivalence', in which fashioning one's own identity has become increasingly complicated.
Fashioning Identity explores how this tension is performed through fashion production and consumption,by examining a diverse series of case studies - from ninety-year old fashion icons to the paradoxical rebellion in 'normcore', and from soccer jerseys in Kenya to heavy metal band T-shirts in Europe. Through these cases, the role of time, gender, age memory, novelty, copying, the body and resistance are considered within the context of the contemporary fashion scene. Offering a fresh approach to the subject by readdressing Fred Davis' seminal concept of 'identity ambivalence' in Fashion, Culture and Identity (1992), Mackinney-Valentin argues that we are in an epoch of 'status ambivalence', in which fashioning one's own identity has become increasingly complicated.
200 pages, Hardcover
Published February 9, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
June 12, 2023
essential reading for anyone interested in fashion 🤓
July 22, 2019
1 – Introduction: Status Ambivalence and Fashion Flows
p.2 – When considering Kardashian’s nude selfie and Beyonce’s leotard as fashionable acts of performing social identity, they communicate both dread and desire because ambivalence is at the core of fashioning identity.
Sociologist Fred Davis (1994:16) referred to as “identity ambivalence.”
p.3 – Fashion is a complex cultural phenomenon made up of the creative design process of garments, cultural affiliation, commercial industry, and consumer needs. The process of consumer adoption and the cycles of change in the fashion industry have traditionally mirrored each other. Fashion cycles refer here 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, modelling, PR; and styling agencies as well as street culture, popular culture, and subcultures.
p.5 – 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 form an emphasis on class.
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 Kaiser (2002), is suitable for this paradoxical endeavour 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.
p.14 – Fashioning identity requires ambivalence management within shifting social, aesthetic, and symbolic regulations. While it still holds true more than a century later that “change itself does not change” (Simmel 1957:545), the fashion flows have become more complex.
Fashioning identity is personal, intimately linked as it is to our bodies, social bonds, and cultural ties. We tell stories with the way we choose to look, mixing fact and fiction for the desired social effect. Fashion narratives are key vehicles in transmitting these shifting messages of identity.
2 – Yesterday’s Tomorrow: Fashion and Time
p.21 – As argued by Georg Simmel (1857:547) more than a century ago: “Fashion always occupies the dividing-line between the past and the future.” The designers were and still are among the key projectors of this ambiguous present operating as they do in a creative time warp.
p.24 – Ulrich Lehmann (2000:384) thorough treatment of fashion and modernity in which “fashion is modern not despite the old but precisely because it carries the past within itself, or is remodeled by it.”
p.27 – Vintage challenges the perception of novelty and prestige so fundamental to fashioning identity. Wearing second-hand clothes as a fashion statement rather than necessity rose with the youth culture of the 1960s as part of the counter-cultural movement. Since the turn of the millennium, vintage fashion has gained mass momentum from celebrities to thrifty students. Vintage as a term assumes durable qualities similar to those of vintage cars and wine, while trends in fashion are defined by the exact opposite quality, namely, constant change. Vintage resets the clock, so to speak, in arguing that fashion can be outdated and novelty can lie in the conspicuously used.
Vintage represents a redefinition of exclusivity as simply economically out of reach to include something that requires skills or time to acquire. Vintage rose in popularity in line with the development of fast fashion, which especially since the 1990s has provided affordable modern clothing for the masses. This has complicated the process of distinction because of the radical reduction in time lag.
Vintage highlights fashion as an odd jumble of contradiction by being both pre-owned and new, modern and outdated. Taken literally, the linear adoption process implied in the traditional flows of fashion is disturbed when the fashion forward engage in this game of discontinued chic. The lines between inception and demise of a style are blurred, creating what has already been described as a scattered flow.
3 – Perfectly Wrong
p.40 – Staged Ageing – Older women as beauty icons can be seen to represent an inversion of youth as a status maker expressed through image and discourse. A physical illustration of this subversion of age is the style trend for young women to dye their hair grey. This trend is disseminated through fashion campaigns and runways by brands such as Jean Paul Gaultrier as well as by celebrities on the red carpet, online tutorials, and Instagram.
Referred to as granny hair, silver, and stone wash, dying your hair grey before your follicles lose their pigmentation naturally is a demonstration of affected ageing. While greying hair has previously been something to hide, going artificially grey is an example of logic of wrong because it is about inverting status markers of age rather than challenging age stereotypes. The visual impact relies on the contrast between the young face and the appearance of aged hair. In this way, grey hair is not about chronological age but symbolic age performed through the feat of being able to pull off looking aged.
Granny chic is engaged in proposing an age-irrelevant society to the extent that the social currency of looking old relies on the personal courage to go against cultural norms.
p.41 – Granny chic is ambiguous because it represents the old in a young way. The ambivalence might at first be perceived as an attempt to challenge age stereotypes by applying a performative approach to age.
5 – Sartorial Shrugs and Other Fashion Understatements
p.60 – Being fashionable always requires a calculated effort in the management of appearance. These “status attitudes” (Davis 1994:65) become particularly clear in the case of understatements that may seem to celebrate a nondescript look but are distinctly premediated in claiming status through blurring the line between being fashionable and fashion indifferent in what Fred Davis (1994:66) describes as fashion’s “calculated affront to reigning status conventions.”
p.66 – Normcore may be read as deliberate lagging behind in fashion, being intentionally indifferent and out of fashion. Fashioning identity rests on time lags in releasing new items in cyclical rhythms and the gradual adoption by the fashionably inclined toward a point of saturation that is at least at a structural level thought to coincide with each new fashion season.
9 – Fashioning Zeitgeist
p.141 – Psychologist Ernest Dichter argued that the relation between fashion and context is dialectic: “fashion expresses the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, and in turn can influence it” (Dichter 1986:29).
Zeitgeist is seen to be materialized through dress or style but must be “read” in order to become socially meaningful. This often takes place through the media when journalists or bloggers articulate the Zeitgeist as a fashion narrative to create a bridge between fashion and consumers.
p.2 – When considering Kardashian’s nude selfie and Beyonce’s leotard as fashionable acts of performing social identity, they communicate both dread and desire because ambivalence is at the core of fashioning identity.
Sociologist Fred Davis (1994:16) referred to as “identity ambivalence.”
p.3 – Fashion is a complex cultural phenomenon made up of the creative design process of garments, cultural affiliation, commercial industry, and consumer needs. The process of consumer adoption and the cycles of change in the fashion industry have traditionally mirrored each other. Fashion cycles refer here 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, modelling, PR; and styling agencies as well as street culture, popular culture, and subcultures.
p.5 – 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 form an emphasis on class.
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 Kaiser (2002), is suitable for this paradoxical endeavour 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.
p.14 – Fashioning identity requires ambivalence management within shifting social, aesthetic, and symbolic regulations. While it still holds true more than a century later that “change itself does not change” (Simmel 1957:545), the fashion flows have become more complex.
Fashioning identity is personal, intimately linked as it is to our bodies, social bonds, and cultural ties. We tell stories with the way we choose to look, mixing fact and fiction for the desired social effect. Fashion narratives are key vehicles in transmitting these shifting messages of identity.
2 – Yesterday’s Tomorrow: Fashion and Time
p.21 – As argued by Georg Simmel (1857:547) more than a century ago: “Fashion always occupies the dividing-line between the past and the future.” The designers were and still are among the key projectors of this ambiguous present operating as they do in a creative time warp.
p.24 – Ulrich Lehmann (2000:384) thorough treatment of fashion and modernity in which “fashion is modern not despite the old but precisely because it carries the past within itself, or is remodeled by it.”
p.27 – Vintage challenges the perception of novelty and prestige so fundamental to fashioning identity. Wearing second-hand clothes as a fashion statement rather than necessity rose with the youth culture of the 1960s as part of the counter-cultural movement. Since the turn of the millennium, vintage fashion has gained mass momentum from celebrities to thrifty students. Vintage as a term assumes durable qualities similar to those of vintage cars and wine, while trends in fashion are defined by the exact opposite quality, namely, constant change. Vintage resets the clock, so to speak, in arguing that fashion can be outdated and novelty can lie in the conspicuously used.
Vintage represents a redefinition of exclusivity as simply economically out of reach to include something that requires skills or time to acquire. Vintage rose in popularity in line with the development of fast fashion, which especially since the 1990s has provided affordable modern clothing for the masses. This has complicated the process of distinction because of the radical reduction in time lag.
Vintage highlights fashion as an odd jumble of contradiction by being both pre-owned and new, modern and outdated. Taken literally, the linear adoption process implied in the traditional flows of fashion is disturbed when the fashion forward engage in this game of discontinued chic. The lines between inception and demise of a style are blurred, creating what has already been described as a scattered flow.
3 – Perfectly Wrong
p.40 – Staged Ageing – Older women as beauty icons can be seen to represent an inversion of youth as a status maker expressed through image and discourse. A physical illustration of this subversion of age is the style trend for young women to dye their hair grey. This trend is disseminated through fashion campaigns and runways by brands such as Jean Paul Gaultrier as well as by celebrities on the red carpet, online tutorials, and Instagram.
Referred to as granny hair, silver, and stone wash, dying your hair grey before your follicles lose their pigmentation naturally is a demonstration of affected ageing. While greying hair has previously been something to hide, going artificially grey is an example of logic of wrong because it is about inverting status markers of age rather than challenging age stereotypes. The visual impact relies on the contrast between the young face and the appearance of aged hair. In this way, grey hair is not about chronological age but symbolic age performed through the feat of being able to pull off looking aged.
Granny chic is engaged in proposing an age-irrelevant society to the extent that the social currency of looking old relies on the personal courage to go against cultural norms.
p.41 – Granny chic is ambiguous because it represents the old in a young way. The ambivalence might at first be perceived as an attempt to challenge age stereotypes by applying a performative approach to age.
5 – Sartorial Shrugs and Other Fashion Understatements
p.60 – Being fashionable always requires a calculated effort in the management of appearance. These “status attitudes” (Davis 1994:65) become particularly clear in the case of understatements that may seem to celebrate a nondescript look but are distinctly premediated in claiming status through blurring the line between being fashionable and fashion indifferent in what Fred Davis (1994:66) describes as fashion’s “calculated affront to reigning status conventions.”
p.66 – Normcore may be read as deliberate lagging behind in fashion, being intentionally indifferent and out of fashion. Fashioning identity rests on time lags in releasing new items in cyclical rhythms and the gradual adoption by the fashionably inclined toward a point of saturation that is at least at a structural level thought to coincide with each new fashion season.
9 – Fashioning Zeitgeist
p.141 – Psychologist Ernest Dichter argued that the relation between fashion and context is dialectic: “fashion expresses the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, and in turn can influence it” (Dichter 1986:29).
Zeitgeist is seen to be materialized through dress or style but must be “read” in order to become socially meaningful. This often takes place through the media when journalists or bloggers articulate the Zeitgeist as a fashion narrative to create a bridge between fashion and consumers.
December 1, 2022
life changing..
January 13, 2025
About a year ago, I decided that I wanted to read a good book about fashion (and by fashion, I mean fashion theory, with ample historical context) but this was surprisingly hard to find. I settled on this text because it was recommended by Parsons students on Reddit. It was also highly rated on this site.
I am giving Fashioning Identity three stars because, while it was thought-provoking, I'm not sure that it scratched my itch, so to speak. The theory was scattered at best, and the historical context was nonexistent. (I did supplement with several chapters of Bonnie English's A Cultural History of Western Fashion, which itself was only so-so.)
The structure of this book is as follows: each chapter focuses on an item, or trend, and describes how that item or trend subverts traditional fashion paradigms in some novel way. (By traditional fashion paradigms, I mean the class-based ones, where the tastes of an urban aristocracy are emulated by the provincial illiterati, and then lose cultural cachet in a cyclical process.) The structure is risky, because the credibility of each chapter depends on how well the chosen example resonates with the reader. In my case, I found the latter chapters (on band T-shirts, soccer jerseys, and lumberjack shirts, all male fashions) more interesting than the earlier ones. (Does anyone even remember the vintage dress Julia Roberts wore at the 2001 Oscars? My fashion-forward wife does not.)
I also felt the writing style was too academic (and hence, inaccessible) for its content, although it may just be that the author is not a very talented writer. She uses the term "dialectical" as if it never went out of fashion (pun intended) and has a tendency to cram in several words ending in "-tion" in most of her sentences. She repeats herself a lot and summarizes, at the end of each chapter, all of the main points in the earlier chapters. My wife suspects she was a grad student who published her thesis, but the math doesn't quite work out in this particular case.
Basically, I think the book lacks a certain theoretical coherence (recall that each chapter investigates different kinds of subversion) and a longer historical perspective, and it suffers as a result. Besides, it is not really all that complicated: as societies become wealthier, socioeconomic distinctions become a lot less influential, and so modern fashion reflects the rise of a more fragmented (or, to use her word, ambivalent) culture. A few words about postmodernism and pastiche are probably warranted here but I recognize this may be inconsistent with, you know, coherent historical narratives.
The author does cite three works extensively. While I have not read any of them, I will list them here for all others interested in reading a good book about fashion:
La Moda by Georg Simmel
Fashion, Culture and Identity by Fred Davis
Adorned in Dreams by Elizabeth Wilson
I am giving Fashioning Identity three stars because, while it was thought-provoking, I'm not sure that it scratched my itch, so to speak. The theory was scattered at best, and the historical context was nonexistent. (I did supplement with several chapters of Bonnie English's A Cultural History of Western Fashion, which itself was only so-so.)
The structure of this book is as follows: each chapter focuses on an item, or trend, and describes how that item or trend subverts traditional fashion paradigms in some novel way. (By traditional fashion paradigms, I mean the class-based ones, where the tastes of an urban aristocracy are emulated by the provincial illiterati, and then lose cultural cachet in a cyclical process.) The structure is risky, because the credibility of each chapter depends on how well the chosen example resonates with the reader. In my case, I found the latter chapters (on band T-shirts, soccer jerseys, and lumberjack shirts, all male fashions) more interesting than the earlier ones. (Does anyone even remember the vintage dress Julia Roberts wore at the 2001 Oscars? My fashion-forward wife does not.)
I also felt the writing style was too academic (and hence, inaccessible) for its content, although it may just be that the author is not a very talented writer. She uses the term "dialectical" as if it never went out of fashion (pun intended) and has a tendency to cram in several words ending in "-tion" in most of her sentences. She repeats herself a lot and summarizes, at the end of each chapter, all of the main points in the earlier chapters. My wife suspects she was a grad student who published her thesis, but the math doesn't quite work out in this particular case.
Basically, I think the book lacks a certain theoretical coherence (recall that each chapter investigates different kinds of subversion) and a longer historical perspective, and it suffers as a result. Besides, it is not really all that complicated: as societies become wealthier, socioeconomic distinctions become a lot less influential, and so modern fashion reflects the rise of a more fragmented (or, to use her word, ambivalent) culture. A few words about postmodernism and pastiche are probably warranted here but I recognize this may be inconsistent with, you know, coherent historical narratives.
The author does cite three works extensively. While I have not read any of them, I will list them here for all others interested in reading a good book about fashion:
La Moda by Georg Simmel
Fashion, Culture and Identity by Fred Davis
Adorned in Dreams by Elizabeth Wilson
May 28, 2024
- Fashion in itself is more than mere clothing. It's a self-expression of self-identification of where one belongs in terms of their social group
- Fashion itself is meant to deceive other people: it's meant to be "read by the fashion literate while deliberately misguiding those less versed in cracking dress codes"
- During different times, different fashion trend emerges that depicts the motif of the era of the individuals
- Often times, people don't dress for the opposite sex. Many of the women's fashion item is arguably intentionally un-sexy. However, women wear those not to show off to men, but rather to other women that the wearer is successful enough to wear such item, and is confident enough to wear them
- Fashion itself is meant to deceive other people: it's meant to be "read by the fashion literate while deliberately misguiding those less versed in cracking dress codes"
- During different times, different fashion trend emerges that depicts the motif of the era of the individuals
- Often times, people don't dress for the opposite sex. Many of the women's fashion item is arguably intentionally un-sexy. However, women wear those not to show off to men, but rather to other women that the wearer is successful enough to wear such item, and is confident enough to wear them
December 31, 2024
"We are what we wear, but only some of the time and not literally. Fashioning identity is taken in symbolic stride as a serious and fun game of communication with social, creative, cultural, and economic implications."
Amazing book. Really put into words ideas that have been in my head for years but didn't know how to ground them and back then (like the biological capital). Very interesting research and interviews, this book is definitely a must for anyone interested in the intersection of fashion and social commentary. Made me think a lot about my own choices when getting dressed.
Amazing book. Really put into words ideas that have been in my head for years but didn't know how to ground them and back then (like the biological capital). Very interesting research and interviews, this book is definitely a must for anyone interested in the intersection of fashion and social commentary. Made me think a lot about my own choices when getting dressed.
September 12, 2023
Incredible read! Provided such unique insight into the subconscious mediation of fashion and status. Will be rereading! The only part i was put off by was the chapter “Transglobal narratives” seemed to come into the research with paternalistic dispositions, I may change my mind/be able to articulate this better upon reread.
January 5, 2023
4.5
insane
insane
January 10, 2023
“We are what we wear, but only some of the time and not literally.” This was great. Leopard print as a rhizome was the highlight.
October 23, 2023
"We are what we wear, but only some of the time...and not literally"
Barz
Barz
Read
April 27, 2024Took me four months but very transformative..binary thinking is over we understand everything in fashion as a tension between movements trends and ideas…the tension is what makes clothing sexy!!
May 12, 2024
I have a lot of love for this book.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews