The debates about communication of gender and class identities through dress and fashion seem particularly relevant for the study of sartorial practices adopted by key British female politicians in the second half of the 20th century. Admired or detested for their politics, Margaret Thatcher or Betty Boothroyd for many citizens were emblems of gender equality in British politics, forever securing their places in history almanacs and school books as the first female Prime Minister and the first female Speaker in the House of Commons, respectively. Because of this, they were also expected to be more sensitive to women’s issues in terms of the standards they set for normative femininity. How they related to the dominant notions of female identity could be found not only in directly expressed opinions but also in their visual presence for example in the ←33 | 34→media. The way their looks were managed either by themselves or by professional advisers reflected the tastes and norms dominant in the society. And it seems that like the fashion in the 1950s embraced conflicting femininities, so their styles were meant to negotiate conflicts between diverse modes of gender and class identities.
Although more recent theories on fashion and class identity deviate from the understanding of fashion as a marker of status, copied by the lower classes, Georg Simmel’s view of fashion as “a form of class differentiation” (Blumer 234) frequently forms the theoretical backdrop of new conceptualisations of fashion. Herbert Blumer proposes a view that while Simmel’s ideas may be applicable to the mechanisms of fashion before the 20th century, it fails to explain the phenomenon of the 1960s fashions. Unlike in the past centuries, Blumer argues, “in our contemporary epoch with its many diverse fields and its emphasis on modernity” (235), fashion is no longer ‘dictated’ by the social elites and emulated by the masses, “The design has to correspond to the direction of incipient taste of the fashion consuming public. The prestige of the elite affects but does not control the direction of this incipient taste” (237). According to Blumer, contemporary fashion operates in relation to “historical continuity”, “modernity”, “collective taste”, and “psychological motives”. Its constant dialogue with the past trends ensures that new styles are always created in response to the ones in the past. Changes in fashions depend more often on “shift in interests and taste” (239) than on “the nature of the medium” itself, as when for example a mini skirt cannot be any shorter, and the fashion for a long skirt appears. Moreover, fashion embraces modernity in the form of novel production technologies, innovative fabrics, but also and most importantly it responds “to political happenings, and to major social shifts such as the emancipation of women or the rise of the cult of youth” (239).
Far from having “only trivial or peripheral significance”, the domain of fashion from Blumer’s perspective looms large over many fields such as the arts, architecture, medicine, industry, literature, and even politics (232–233). Therefore, he proposes to free debates about fashion from the constraints imposed by psychological studies, which tend to concentrate on fashion as a form of expression of the individual’s psychological needs. Such an approach, notes Blumer, fails to explain the “collective process which constitutes fashion” (241) and does not adequately account for the role fashion “plays in modern group life” (241).
Highlighting the need for a comprehensive sociological analysis of fashion mechanisms, Blumer observes that changes in dress styles always correspond to wider socio-political transformations. In fact, he goes on to argue that a certain observable uniformity of styles that at a given time appears as fashionable ←34 | 35→suggests the existence of “a common ‘apperception mass’ ” (235–136) among the producers and the consumers of fashion. This is largely due to the fact that fashion designers are inspired by “expressions of modernity” in such areas as literature, culture and politics, and in their creations “translate themes from these areas and media into dress” (236). Because fashionable dress reflects the present reality and at the same time already is “an orderly preparation for the immediate future” (245), common and shared tastes ensue. Fashion facilitates the existence of a “common approach to the world” and offers shared ways of “handling and digesting the experiences which the world yields” (Blumer 245).
Such an approach seems to justify analysis of sartorial practices as reflected and embedded in the socio-political context. Even though the sender-receiver communication model is not in operation in the mechanism proposed by Blumer, dress can be clearly interpreted as communicating meanings which correspond to the set of values and power relations governing specific societies at specific times. Consequently, dress, clothes, and fashion (which Blumer clearly perceives as the change in styles) appear to form society’s outer layer. To borrow a linguistic term, they are society’s signifier.
That fashion is a form of communication and a language of identities is widely proved by theories on subcultural styles. Scholarly research on hip hop fashions by Emil Wilbekin, subcultural fashions in general by Dick Hebdige, or oppositional dress by Elizabeth Wilson demonstrate that styles are invented, used and marketed as conveyors of specific beliefs and worldviews which distinguish one group from another. In selecting specific attire, these groups seem to be guided by the metaphorical meanings of specific garments. For example, as noted by Wilson, the adoption of “traditional working-class clothes” by skinheads signified their “conservative proletarian” (2007, 253) values, while the wearing of Afro hairstyle after the 1960s was “a much more openly ideological reassertion of the distinctive nature of the black experience” (254).
In fact, Wilson points to the centuries-long practice of expressing social and political rebellion through attire. The 16th and the 18th centuries saw the implementation of official bans on wearing respectively Irish and Scottish national dress in recognition of their revolutionary connotations; the 19th century witnessed the appearance of rebellious masculinity expressed through dandy clothes. According to Wilson dandyism and its narcissistic preoccupation with looks was a sartorial response to social transformations at the end of the 18th century. Through adoption of less ornamental and less excessive dress styles, the dandy communicated more democratic ideals of the European societies after the French Revolution. Turning impressions into realities and his life into an artwork, he became the aristocrat of the new times (Wilson 2013, 182), for as ←35 | 36→observed by Wilson, “his perfection in all the inessentials of life was a kind of performance of aristocracy” (2013, 182). Dandy’s sartorial practices combined with his celebratory attitude to the self and openly practiced idleness was ultimately an expression of rebellion against the middle-class ideals of masculinity; “the dandy, whether aristocrat, artist or romantic radical […] was and is above all anti-bourgeois” (2013, 183).
Equally expressive of radicalism and revolutionary in character was another sartorial transformation, namely the appearance of “aesthetic dress” in women’s fashion. Adopted by bohemian women, particularly the famous Bloomsbury set, the aesthetic dress communicated opposition to the socially accepted femininity and signalled the wearer’s affiliation with anti-bourgeois, progressive thinking circles of the society (Wilson 2013, 185). Similarly to dandyism, which was viewed as expressive of democratic principles, the reformed female dress began to be associated with socialism, for,