THE DAILY SELECTION
SENSORY ANCHORING MODEL
Instead of relating all explanatory frameworks for dress practice as being linked to logics of 'fashion’, I see people as being engaged with various 'landscapes' of reference.
That is, how people make use of bricolaging in the way that they mix styles and
references in order to 'feel right'. If I consider Entwistle's framework, I can see that she distinguishes between 'fashion', 'dress' and 'clothes' while calling, at the same time, for the development of a more universal principle for dress practice (2000:112/117). On the other hand, she argues that style is always a mediation of social factors, and further, that this puts limitations on how much can be explained through the lens of Western fashion (ibid:49). What I propose is that it would be fruitful to look at people's
navigation through their dressing dilemmas by distinguishing more clearly what kinds of references they engage in their wardrobes. In my attempts to try and understand this, I came across sociologist Ann Swidler's book, Talk of Love. How Culture Matters (2001).
In her book, she interviews various people about how they talk about love. Here, she sees how various cultural scripts effect the way they do, ‘scripts’ like Christianity or new wave spiritualism. Within these scripts, there are inherent skills, codes and practices that people re-‐enact. What Swidler comes to realise is that people do not re-‐enact cultural scripts in the same way: there are variations, combinations and differences, which can neither be explained through the Weberian argument that culture influences action, nor be explained through a Parsonian analysis of culture as norms and values.
Therefore, according to Swidler, it is very important to look at how people use culture to learn how to be particular kinds of persons. How they, so to speak, inhabit particular cultural 'repertoires', and anchor themselves in their ideas of self, and in their day-‐to-‐
day practices. For example, Swidler describes how dilemmas that are related, for example, to how to perform a marriage can generate individual solutions which are:
"wide variations and sometimes dramatic shifts in theories and techniques for solving these dilemmas, even while those varied solutions share a common orientation to the institution itself" (Swidler 2001:201)
Swidler bases these considerations on the general perception of culture:
"as repertoire, which one can be more or less good at performing [...] 'a set of skills' which only sometimes 'work'" (ibid:24-‐25)
What is enormously interesting to me is the way that Swidler perceives this as a bricoleurian act, in which people build their practices on a set of available 'repertoires'
or cultural scripts. How they can easily engage with more scripts at the same time, and combine them. And how some scripts are more dominant in their setting than others, which shows in their practices. What I will propose is to view the way people navigate through their dressing dilemmas through this optics. Thus, sartorial systems such as 'fashion', 'pop-‐ and counter-‐culture', 'menswear/tailoring' or 'sportswear' that I see as dominating the social structures around my informants might be seen as cultural scripts or 'repertoires' with which each informant engages in his own personal way and
combination, in order to 'solve' given dressing dilemmas. When I say 'sartorial systems', I am referring to the way that Barthes (1983) and later on, Kawamura (2005) have
defined fashion as a system or an institutionalised network of agencies. I regard each of these systems as having its own distinct historical point of departure and reasoning, its own ritualised and institutional skills, codes and practices, and its own networks and agencies. While 'fashion' as a system is currently overly dominant, the other systems have a huge effect on people's dress practices as well – at least the way I see the
situation. For example, the system of pop-‐ and sub-‐culture reflects ideas of authenticity and membership, and of opposing mainstream culture, or at least opposing adult's way of thinking, as has been argued by Hebdige (1979) and later on, Hodkinson (2002).
Interestingly enough, Hodkinson has showed how members of subcultures in Great Britain maintain their membership throughout their entire lives, and stay true to the 'life philosophy' of a given musical genre (Hodkinson & Bennet (eds.) 2012). With 'skills, codes and practices' that are particular to fashion, I might refer to Rocamora, who has defined fashion as inherently Parisian, and as being connected to the development of industrialism and capitalism in the Western world. From there follows a line of bodily practices that derive from figures such as 'Parisian chic', or 'la passante', which are connected very distinctly to the city of Paris (Rocamora 2009). In relation to the system of 'menswear/tailoring', writers like Hollander have demonstrated how this system builds on virtues of sameness and continuity, and not on change and difference, such as fashion. How the skills, codes and practices that are characteristic of this system evolve around virtues like the elegance of the detail and the perfect fit, and the 'perfect
gentleman', who is aware of etiquette and immaculate dressing (Hollander 1994). The system of 'sportswear', on the other hand, derives from a preoccupation with health and exercise that emerged in the course of the 19th Century, and actually expresses an antipathy towards the whole 'genesis of the suit', which was regarded as being
constrictive of the body and the mind by, for example, the so-‐called 'Men's Dress Reform Party' of the 1930s (Malossi & Abrams 2000). After WW2, American Sportswear came to exert a huge influence on casualwear, and has in many ways been transformed from
dress to wear for sports, and into dress for everyday life. Below, I have suggested how it