Early 20th century women’s rights campaigners not only wore and promoted dresses that were looser and more comfortable, but also used clothing to stress their sense of community and group cohesion. Emmeline Pankhurst and other members of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) used dress “as reinforcement of belief, custom, and values” (118) by creating their own dress code, which was meant to connote freedom from the social constraints, independence, equality and fraternity. The WSPU’s colour scheme, badges and sashes on the one hand were expressive of political views, while on the other hand they served the purpose of establishing a visual code that helped female activists to forge their new identities of liberated women. The marches of thousands of white-dressed women made a terrific visual impact of which the suffragettes were perfectly aware. If a white dress became a suffragette’s uniform, the badges, pins and brooches adorned with WSPU colours became “medals” for courage and commitment to the cause. Therefore, it can be noted that it was through the connotation with the military attire that the women’s movement metaphorically communicated its political power (one of the notable WSPU members, Flora ‘General’ Drummond famously posed for a portrait photograph wearing a military attire including a jacket with epaulettes, and a military hat).
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Despite covering a vast range of topics related to the meanders of meanings in fashion in relation to gender and social class, major works on fashion theory, including the seminal reader entitled Fashion Theory by Malcolm Barnard (2007), fail to discuss dress in the context of age or even more specifically aging. In part six of Malcolm’s Reader, diverse topics connected with fashion, identity and difference are grouped under the four main headings: “Sex and gender”, “Social class”, “Ethnicity and race”, and “Culture and subculture”. Age, despite being a vital component of individual’s identity, and having a substantial influence on any person’s sartorial choices, fails to appear in the list. Such omission, though striking for anyone investigating the trajectories of meanings related to dress and vestimentary habits that underpin construction of social identities, might only testify to the deeply entrenched conviction that fashion is for the young. Yet, while it is largely true that fashion industries are targeting consumers whose spending powers are at their peak, clothing and dress is of some concern to most people regardless their age; according to Entwistle (2000) “the social world is a world of dressed bodies” (6), so dress involves everyone on a daily basis.
The sartorial performativity of individual identities cuts across gender, class, ethnicity and age, since garments as well as complete attires tend to metaphorically communicate more than one identity at a time. Though expression of class through dress has been widely explored by sociologists (Veblen 1953; Simmel 1957), in modern youth-dominated cultures research on aging has been concerned primarily with addressing the problems (such as ill health) rather than pleasures (i.e. consumption of beauty and fashion products) of old age. The imbalance in the social perception and construction of aging has been only recently redressed, with the cosmetics industry offering products segmented by age groups (Gilleard, C. J., Higgs, Paul, 116). Also, the formerly more restrictive regulations concerning age appropriate clothing, in the last decades have become more relaxed, as “some older women are being drawn into the sphere of fashion” (Twigg 2015, 60). One may have an impression that designers such as Vivienne Westwood, who has consistently challenged the stereotypical representations of not only gender, but also class and age identities through dress, play the key role in this transformation. Westwood’s predilection for wearing oversized, ripped and torn garments visibly clashes with the mainstream view summarised by Twigg as “the harsher judgements (…) apply [to] torn, stained clothing when displayed by the old, compared with the easy tolerance of ripped jeans and scruffy dress in the young” (58).
According to Gilleard, C. J., Higgs, Paul (2013), recent developments that led to the establishment of a valid connection between aging and the fashion/beauty industry followed and mimicked the class revolution of the 1960s, when youth ←40 | 41→groups undermined vestimentary class distinctions in search of “self-expression” (117). The same market mechanisms that supported self-expression of youth cultures since the 1960s have gradually expanded to engage the elderly, assisting their defiance of aging, as well as providing “model ways of ‘ageing without becoming old’ ” (Gilleard & Higgs, 117). Yet, with the 1960s emphasis on modernity and democracy of youth styles, fashion industry found it hard to bridge the age gap by attracting middle-aged customers. As noted by Gilleard & Higgs (126–127) everything about the 1960s fashion connoted opposition to the older, class and age-conscious generation, as the “process of ‘informalisation’ became one of the key cultural tropes of the time” (126). However, the aging of the 1960s youth that occurred around the 1980s entailed inclusion of the older women and men into the fashion industry, as those who initiated the sartorial revolution were hardly willing to embrace the styles against which they used to rebel.
The ageing of 1960s’ youth undermined the very age segmentation system that these cohorts had helped establish. By the mid-1980s, the 1960s youth were approaching middle age, reaching the chronological ages of those earlier cohorts whom they had once been exhorted to ignore or disregard. Few were ready to abandon the investment in clothes and fashion that had made them once feel so distinct and so not old. (127)
For example, Westwood, who in her Punk days was at the forefront of the sartorial questioning of class distinctions, developed a personal dress style that helped navigate the sartorial expression of old age in a less limited way, opening up a range of opportunities for women over 70, which in the not so distant past would not be available to that age group, for example wearing asymmetrical minis accessorised with colourful tights. Based on research into older women’s attitude to fashion, Gilleard & Higgs stress that despite their age, most of these women express both interest in fashion and willingness to shop for clothes in fashionable stores (128). The authors also note that in recognition of that tendency “The clothes industry has shifted increasingly from ‘lifestage’ toward ‘lifestyle’ ” while “fashion is and remains age conscious, but it is no longer designed to exclude” (129). “Dress practices encode and reflect meanings about age, and in doing so help constitute age like class and gender as a social category” (Twigg 2015, 60).
Sartorial metaphors of youth seem crucial for the construction of the fashionably-aged identity. While beauty industry markets their anti-aging lines of products by referring to a range of orientational metaphors such as HEALTH IS UP, ALIVE IS UP (Lakoff and Johnson 18) and offering lifting creams that help defy sagging of the aging skin, the fashion industry offers styles that establish metaphorical connections with such youth conceptual spaces as active leisure and sports or subcultural aesthetics. Youthfulness of attire and appearance ←41 | 42→connotes not only physical attractiveness but also superior mental and psychological well-being. In the case of women, who while aging lose their reproductive abilities and hence a vital component of their feminine identity, youthful style of dressing might help to assert femininity. As observed by Sharron Hinchliff and Merryn Gott (2008), Western women are encouraged to hide symptoms of aging and tend to be represented as “useless” when they reach menopause. Based on interviews with women aged over 50, Hinchliff and Gott concluded that sexual activity is viewed as essential for healthy aging and that the majority of the interviewed women “rejected the asexual discourse of aging” (65). Therefore, the dress styles that metaphorically communicate sexual attractiveness when worn by older women not only help to camouflage age but also play an important role in reconfirming their gender identities.
The intersection of gender and age identities in dress, like the interconnectedness