Fashion, Possibility and Individual Agency: Theoretical Perspectives

Theorising dress and fashion often remain in isolation in respect to each other. Dress and fashion have been analysed as signs, communication and embodied, material or spatial practice but these accounts have yet to be successfully bridged. This paper is an attempt to bring these various points of view together. This will include, first, discussing dress and fashion in three different realms: discourse, production and practice and, second, theoretically considering fashion as provider of possibilities that are applied according to wearers’ social and cultural understandings of dress customs. Fashion possibilities are based on several kinds of resources, such as, material, technical, technological, geographical, financial, commercial, as well as influenced by the dress norms, customs and history of the (imagined) wearers. Possibilities provided by the dress/fashion system(s) transform and reproduce such norms and customs through the dresses worn by individuals. Hence, society shapes fashion and fashion shapes society through the agency of individuals. Both the fashion system(s) and individuals provide possibilities for further fashion: They reproduce and transform what is socially possible. Possibilities differ depending on each individual’s economic, social and cultural capital that defines whether a particular piece of clothing is desirable, available and/or accessible for the individual. An individual’s wardrobe thus functions as a source of possible dress choices – or lack of them when the individual has ‘nothing to wear.’ That having nothing to wear is by no means connected to the size of the wardrobe illustrates how the situational dress choices are guided by social customs – what is imaginable, desirable and acceptable in any given situation.