Conceptualizing Fashion
in Everyday Lives
Cheryl Buckley, Hazel Clark

1 This work will culminate in a book,
Introduction
Fashion and Everyday Life: Britain and
Despite the recognition of fashion as being intricately intertwined
America, 20C, to be published by
with the development of city living in the twentieth century, the
Bloomsbury in 2014.
need remains for a critical framework for the study of fashion in
2 See Ben Fine and Ellen Leopold’s
everyday life in the urban context. This article undertakes this task
The World of Consumption (London:
Routledge, 1993). In particular, chapters
by offering insights into the broader methodological, historio-
9-11 contain a very useful discussion
graphical, and theoretical questions that underpin fashion studies
of the economics and manufacturing of
and fashion history, while also beginning to develop a critique of
the fashion system.
the fashion system’s overemphasis on modernity.1 Integral to this
3 See, e.g., Thorstein B. Veblen, The Theory
study is a reconsideration of the relationships between fashion and
of the Leisure Class (New York:
the modern world, and a rethinking of the assumption that fashion
Macmillan, 1899); George Simmel,
“Fashion,” International Quarterly 10
is implicitly modern: designed only by professionals, symbolic,
(1904): 130-55; and Charles Baudelaire,
and intrinsic to modernity. In tracing fashion in everyday life, we
Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art
examine three key themes: theories of everyday life that provide
and Artists, trans. Patrick Edward
tools for exploring the routine elements of fashion, historiographies
Charvet (Cambridge: Cambridge
of fashion to understand historians’ approach to everyday dress,
University Press, 1972).
4 Georg Simmel, La Tragedie de la Culture
and research methods that al ow an investigation of fashion as an
(Paris: Rivages, 1988), quoted in Michael
aspect of everyday life.
Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories

Prompted by new technologies (e.g., the sewing-machine,
and Practices from Surrealism to the
paper patterns, machine-made textiles, and ready-to-wear sys-
Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
tems); improved methods of distribution, dissemination, and
2006), 181.
retailing; and shifting social and economic structures, fashionable
5 See, e.g., Hazel Clark and David Brody,
Design Studies: A Reader (Oxford: Berg,
dress permeated ordinary, everyday lives as never before in the
2009); Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church
period from 1900 to 2000.2 Nevertheless, scholarship in fashion
Gibson eds. Fashion Cultures: Theories,
studies and fashion history has tended to focus on the avant-garde,
Explorations and Analysis (London:
the extraordinary, and the unusual, especial y regarding its origi-
Routledge, 2000); Jennifer Craik, The
nation and design. Indeed, within fashion’s discourses, the truly
Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in
Fashion (London: Routledge, 1993);
“ordinary” remains elusive. In part, this oversight has resulted
Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body:
from the positioning of fashion in relation to modernity by writers
Fashion, Dress, and Modern Social
such as Thorstein Veblen, Charles Baudelaire, and Georg Simmel;3
Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press and
as the latter put it, “fashion increasingly sharpens our sense of the
Blackwell Publishers, 2000); Caroline
present.”4 Indicative of modernity, what attracted the interest of
Evans, Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle,
these early theorists of modern life was, to paraphrase Baudelaire,
Modernity, and Deathliness (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2007).
fashion’s transitory, fugitive, and contingent qualities, rather than
6 See, e.g., Barbara Burman Baines,
its adaptability and longevity. We seek to unsettle these dominant
Fashion Revivals from the Elizabethan
Age to the Present Day (London:
© 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
18
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views by understanding fashion as a manifestation of routine daily
lives that remains with people over time; and to do so, we examine

Batsford, 1981); Barbara Burman, The
the ways in which the everyday use, appropriation, circulation,
Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption
and Home Dressmaking (Oxford: Berg,
remaking, and constant remodeling of fashionable clothes over
1999); Elizabeth Wilson and Lou Taylor,
time by diverse social groups run counter to the dominant views:
Through the Looking Glass: A History
these are anti-modern and non-progressive; exemplify continuity
of Dress from 1860 to the Present Day
and tradition; are responsive to regional and national subtleties, as
(London: BBC, 1989); Christopher
well as global ones; and are disruptive of fashion’s structures and
Breward, The Culture of Fashion
systems, as well as its visual codes and norms of consumption.
(Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1995); Christopher Breward,

At its roots, fashion studies is interdisciplinary and,
Fashioning London: Clothing and the
like design studies, it seeks to integrate history, theory, and prac-
Modern Metropolis (Oxford: Berg, 2004);
tice.5 Exemplary work examining aspects of everyday fashion
Joanne Eicher, ed., Encyclopedia of
can be found in the disciplines of fashion studies and fashion
World Dress and Fashion, 10 vols.
history; influential writers include Barbara Burman, Carol Tul och,
(New York: Oxford University Press,
2010); Margaret Maynard, Dress and
Christopher Breward, Elizabeth Wilson, Joanne Eicher, Lou Taylor,
Gobalisation (Manchester: Manchester
and Margaret Maynard.6 Scholars from other disciplines also
University Press, 2004); and Carol Tulloch,
address aspects of the everyday in fashion, including Dick
Black Style (London: V&A, 1995).
Hebdige from cultural studies, Raphael Samuel from history, Anne
7 See, e.g., Anne Hollander, Seeing
Hol ander from art history, John Harvey from literature and visual
Through Clothes, (Berkeley & Los
culture, and Frank Mort from gender studies.7 Some scholars, such
Angeles: University of California Press,
1975); Dick Hebdige, Subculture:
as Angela McRobbie, have reassessed fashion’s multiplicity and the
The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen,
recirculation of styles since the 1970s, while others have shown
1979); Raphael Samuel, Theatres of
that one person’s “everyday” is part of another’s fashion state-
Memory (London: Verso, 1994); Frank
ment.8 However, a predominant interest remains in the fashion
Mort, “Boy’s Own? Masculinity, Style
“syntaxes” of the young, the novelty of the “look,” and the cur-
and Popular Culture,” in Male Order:
Unwrapping Masculinity, eds. Rowena
rency of the latest style—whether recycled, second-hand, revival-
Chapman and Jonathan Rutherford
ist, or new. Although such issues without a doubt remain an
(London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1988),
important part of what constitutes fashion, other vast swathes of
193-224; and John Harvey, Men in Black
fashionable dressing remain outside the scope of these categories.
(London: Reaktion, 1995).
This aspect of fashion—“design in the lower case,” to quote
8 See Angela McRobbie, Zoot Suits and
Judy Attfield—comprises the ordinary and mundane practices of
Second-Hand Dresses: An Anthology of
Fashion and Music (London: Macmillan,
wearing, where items are drawn from the personal wardrobe in
1989); also see Caroline Evans and
a routine manner.9 Accumulated over time, such fashion can
Minna Thornton, Women and Fashion: A
encapsulate at least one lifetime—particularly as clothes are
New Look (London: Quartet Books, 1989),
handed down, recycled, or remodeled.10
particularly chapters 2, 3, and 4.

The critical framework that we propose draws its methods
9 Judy Attfield, Wild Things: The Material
Culture of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg,
from different disciplines (i.e., design history, social history, visual
2000), 6.
culture, urban studies, and gender studies), but using a micro-
10 McRobbie,
Zoot Suits and Second-Hand
history approach, it prioritizes archival investigation, visual and
Dresses, Alexandra Palmer and Hazel
textual analysis, and oral history.11 The project’s conceptual frame-
Clark, eds. Old Clothes New Looks:
work derives from the theories of everyday life first articulated
Second Hand Fashion (Oxford: Berg,
by social theorists and then reinterpreted by subsequent writers.
2005).
11 For an articulation of microhistory, see
In the former category are Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, and
John Brewer, “Microhistory and the
Walter Benjamin, while Ben Highmore, Barry Sandywell, and
Histories of Everyday Life,” Cultural and
Michael Sheringham have offered useful insights into the applica-
Social History 7, no. 1 (2010): 87-109.
tion of such ideas in a variety of domains.12 In attempting to
12 See Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and
“write the real,” we also examine the work of social, cultural, and
Cultural Theory: An Introduction (London:
Routledge, 2002); Barry Sandywell, “The

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19

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feminist historians, such as Edward P. Thompson, Sal y Alexander,
and Carol Steedman, who have grappled with the everyday experi-
ences, actions, and habits of ordinary people.13 Both Benjamin and
Lefebvre were drawn to fashion as they explored the ordinary,
mundane aspects of life; meanwhile, de Certeau, in studying
the everyday, exposes the “instruments of analysis” that underpin
specific disciplines. Thus, by developing a critical framework for
tracing fashion in everyday lives, this article also highlights a
number of theoretical and methodological questions for fashion
history and fashion studies.
Everyday Life Theories and Fashion
Discussing his “Critique of Everyday Life,” Seigworth and
Gardiner note that for Lefebvre everyday life is “defined by ‘what
is left over’ after all distinct, superior, specialized, structured
activities have been singled out for analysis.”14 Fashion—as typi-
cally studied through the fashion system—has comprised the
“distinct, superior, specialized, and structured.” It is not “what
is left over;” rather, says Entwistle, it “refers to regular (conven-
tional y, bi-annual) stylistic innovation, and a production system
that is geared toward making and distributing clothes.”15 Nonethe-
less, everyday clothes as routinely worn by people in the West in
the twentieth century reveal an on-going engagement with fashion
on a scale ranging from extraordinary to ordinary; indeed, “where
the ordinary is exemplified by commonplace phenomena that
are taken for granted and unnoticed, the extraordinary marks
the disturbing eruption of the rare and the highly valued. Like
other forms of extravagant experience, the extraordinary exceeds
the limits and boundaries of ordinariness.”16 While the extraordi-
nariness of “high fashion” has been clearly visible, “ordinary”
fashion has been resolutely invisible. Yet visual sources that

Myth of Everyday Life,” Cultural Studies
18, no. 2 (2004): 160-80; and Sheringham,
depict people going about their daily routines show how they
Everyday Life.
have interpreted fashion’s cycles, even if these interpretations were
13 See Edward P. Thompson, The Making
not always the latest nor articulated as a coherent “look.” Such
of the English Working Class (London:
fashion was heterogeneous and represented a bringing together
Pelican, 1963); Sal y Alexander, Becoming
of familiar garments, accumulated in closets and wardrobes over
a Woman (London: Virago, 1994); and
Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good
time. To these might be added something new—a latest coat or
Woman: Two Women’s Lives (London:
hat—but most often they remain ensembles of clothes acquired
Virago, 1986).
during a number of years. Arguably, this complex relationship
14 Gregory J. Seigworth and Michael E.
between everyday fashion and modernity was sharpened after
Gardiner, “Rethinking Everyday Life: And
1970 by the effect of post-structuralist and postmodern dis-
Then Nothing Turns Itself Inside Out,”
courses—particularly the reassessment of modernity’s progressive,
Cultural Studies 18, no. 2 (2004): 147.
15 Joanne Entwistle, The Aesthetic
technological agenda. Some theorists have argued that the ordi-
Economy of Fashion: Markets and
nary and the routine are representative of tradition; in effect, these
Values in Clothing and Modelling,
are the mundane practices that “predate the differentiated idioms
(Oxford and New York: Berg, 2009), 9.
of modernity.”17 In this context, the ordinary or everyday is indica-
16 Sandywell, “The Myth of Everyday Life,”
tive of a pre-modern world, whereas the extraordinary is what
162.
17 Ibid.
20
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has characterized modernity, representing the ordinary punctu-
ated by “the ‘effervescence’ of social orders rendered fluid and
mobile.”18 Responding to this characterization, Highmore proposes
the notion of an “everyday modernity:” “Everyday life registers
the process of modernization as an incessant accumulation of
debris: Modernity produces obsolescence as part of its continual
demand for the new (the latest version becomes last year’s model
with increasing frequency).”19 From the late nineteenth century,
with seasonal regularity, fashion has complied with this regime;
however, these cyclical acquisitions have been discarded only
by those with the wealth or the cultural capital to do so. Inspired
in part by Baudelaire’s observations about the crowd, Walter
Benjamin saw the modern city as a place for “increased accumu-
lation and intensified sensation.”20 This understanding of acquisi-
tion as a key feature of “everyday modernity” is crucial for this
discussion because the capacity to consume ordinary fashion grew
exponential y as the twentieth century progressed. Only in the
past 20 years has the price accessibility of fashionable clothes in
the West (the likes of Primark in Britain and Forever 21 in the
United States) enabled those on low incomes to regularly and
routinely consume and discard fashionable clothing. Meanwhile,
Benjamin’s interest in the haptic experiences of the modern city
points to an “everyday modernity” shaped by “feel” and “touch,”
as well as by the visual. Indeed, if touch and feel are as indicative
of everyday modernity as seeing, consider the physical, tactile
sensation of wearing rayon (artificial or every woman’s silk) in
1930s’ London and New York.21 Nevertheless, writers remain
entranced by fashion that is technical y and visual y innovative,
determined by regular, seasonal change, and “of its time.”22 Com-
bining this fascination with a zealous commitment to fashion’s
spectacular—although frequently transitory—qualities, some
writers have proposed that fashion, by its very nature, cannot be
“everyday.” While not ignoring these fundamental qualities of
fashion and its historically close relationship to the wealthier
18 Ibid.
members of society (via one-off luxury items, couture, and
19 Highmore,
Everyday Life and Cultural
designer fashion), we nevertheless want to argue that fashion can
Theory, 61.
20 Ibid. We note the gendered nature of
be ordinary as well as extraordinary. A central problematic of the
this particular urban modernity, which
everyday—the relationship between valuing the latest styles on
ignores the domestic arena of home and
the one hand and valuing tradition on the other—is nevertheless
foregrounds the public space of the city.
intrinsic to it, as Sheringham argues: “What sets the tone is with-
Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural
out doubt the newest, but only where it emerges in the medium of
Theory, 28.
the oldest, the longest past, the most ingrained.”23
21 Highmore,
Everyday Life and Cultural
Observing that
Theory, 26.
“the everyday” typically is antithetical to the modern in that
22 A good example of this perspective
“everyday experience is what happens in typical form today as it
is the relatively recent 20th-Century
has done yesterday and will do tomorrow,” some theorists of the
Dress in the United States by Jane
everyday have proposed that in the first part of the twentieth cen-
Farrell-Beck and Jean Parsons (New York:
tury, there was a conjunction of modernity and everydayness
Fairchild, 2007).
23 Sheringham,
Everyday Life, 182.
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around the notion of consumption.24 Re-conceptualized as mass
experience, “the everyday” is a construction of modernity that is
“couched in terms of the commercialization, trivialization, and
banalization of experience as a consequence of the new technolo-
gies of cultural (re)production and dissemination.”25 Commonality,
mass-experience, and accelerated consumption have been funda-
mental to fashion at specific historical junctures—for example, in
relation to female mass magazine readership in the 1920s and
1930s, Hollywood cinema in the 1930s, men’s magazines in the
1980s and 1990s, and Internet shopping in the 2000s. At the inter-
section of modernity and the everyday, mass-culture has contrib-
uted to both the ordinariness and the extraordinariness of fashion.

In tracing fashion in everyday life, it may seem—as
Highmore has argued—that what is everyday might be perceived
to be obvious, readily exposed by searching out alternative sources
(e.g., diaries, letters, and photographs, rather than, for example,
government papers).26 In fact, it can be stubbornly invisible and
difficult to interpret; and, as Lefebvre observes, “The unrecognised,
that is, the everyday, still has some surprises in store for us.”27
One surprise in particular is that it is hard to know: “Either way,
you somehow have missed it because the everyday passes by,
passes through.”28 The ordinary escapes notice because it fails to
stand out; here again, fashion provides an exemplar. The clothes
worn by most people going about their daily lives have been
typical y a synthesis of new, old, bold, and mundane. This percep-
tion that the everyday is hard to locate, difficult to know, and out-
side of traditional fields of knowledge demands an alternative
approach when dealing with a subject such as fashion because
of the need to counteract fashion’s “distinct, superior, specialized,
structured activities.” By looking beyond fashion’s familiar
24 Sandywell, “The Myth of Everyday
terrain—the catwalk, the magazine, the boutique, the department
Life,”163.
store, the designer—we can trace a complementary, everyday
25 Ibid., 165.
fashion trajectory over the past hundred or so years. We argue
26 Ben Highmore, The Everyday Life Reader
that fashion has been embedded and contingent in the practices of
(London: Routledge, 2002), 1.
people’s daily lives, and it has been located in some familiar
27 Henri Lefebvre, “Toward a Leftist Cultural
Politics: Remarks Occasioned by the
spaces, including the street—although not only on the major thor-
Centenary of Marx’s Death,” in Marxism
oughfares of the modern city but also at its margins. It has taken
and the Interpretation of Culture, eds.
shape in some intimate places—the wardrobe or the sewing box—
Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg
as well as in the rituals and commonplace social interactions of
(London: Macmillan, 1988), 78.
weddings, and evenings out on the town or dancing. Gilbert has
28 Seigworth and Gardiner, “Rethinking
noted the symbolic ordering of cities such as Paris, New York, and
Everyday Life,” 140.
29 Christopher Breward and David Gilbert,
London by the fashion system and the conjunction of designer
eds. Fashion’s World Cities (Oxford: Berg
names, famous brands, and specific districts to create the identity
Publishers, 2006); David Gilbert, “Urban
of fashion’s world cities; however, he also points to the city as a
Outfitting: The City and the Spaces of
place of “local taste constellations” arranged around fashion,
Fashion Culture,” in Fashion Cultures:
music, dance, and clubs, as well as also around family and work
Theories, Explorations and Analysis, eds.
activities and events.29 In these other city spaces—interstitial and
Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson
(London: Routledge, 2000),12.
22
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peripheral to the city’s traditional fashion centers—fashion in
everyday lives can be observed. These places are not only for
the young; indeed part of our argument is to question the gen-
erational, market-driven myth of fashion, as we examine, for exam-
ple, getting married, dressing for church or for grocery shopping,
going to the races or the soccer game, or heading to work.

Breward proposes that fashion is “a kind of contemporary
Esperanto, immediately accessible across social and geographical
boundaries,” while Craik describes fashion as “a technique of
acculturation—a means by which individuals and groups learn
to be visually at home with themselves in their culture.”30 As a
form of communication and a process of acculturation, fashion
both accelerated and proliferated during the twentieth century as
various social groups (shaped by race, class, gender, age, and geog-
raphy) perpetually used and reused fashion’s past and present
languages in their everyday lives. In fact, it has been possible
to recognize within fashion the “overarching structure” that
articulates an aesthetic or “look” and to discern an “accumulation
of particularity.”31 By this, we mean that fashion as a practice of
everyday life involves the acquisition of single garments that
add to a wardrobe and help to reconfigure it, but at the same
time, it can mean the purchase of a complete outfit that encapsu-
lates “a look.”

Michel de Certeau regards everyday life as a set of practices
that, although established, offer the potential for creativity. In
addition to “making do” with this everyday culture, people have
also been “making with” it and thus transforming and inventing
by appropriating and redeploying it; as he suggests, “Creativity is
the act of reusing and recombining heterogeneous materials.”32
Characteristic of self-fashioning and refashioning, this articulation
of the everyday also recognizes the possibility of reinvention and
resistance as the fashion system is refused, recycled, and redefined
from within the realm of the everyday. At various points in the
twentieth century, women re-cut and re-made existing clothes for
a variety of purposes, including fashionability. Some groups of
people—teenagers being an obvious example—refused fashion per
se to create their own “identities” in opposition to an increasingly
homogenous consumer marketplace, while in paral el the fashion
system appropriated and redefined the ordinary as extraordinary
with the annexing of sub-cultural street styles. This dialectical
relationship between the past and present has been noted by Ben-
jamin: “Each time, what sets the tone is without doubt the newest,
30 Breward,The Culture of Fashion, 229;
Craik, The Face of Fashion, 10.
but only where it emerges in the medium of the oldest, the longest
31 Highmore,
The Everyday Life Reader, 5.
past, and the most ingrained. This spectacle, the unique self-con-
32 Highmore,
Everyday Life and Cultural
struction of the newest in the medium of what has been, makes for
Theory, 148.
the true dialectical theatre of fashion.”33
33 Walter Benjamin,The Arcades Project
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2002), 64.
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History and Fashion
Because of the proliferation of production, distribution, market-
ing, and retailing (particularly after 1900, initial y in the West but
later global y), the effect of fashion on people’s lives has been diffi-
cult for historians to ignore. Mass-production and mass-consump-
tion meant that an array of goods—including clothes—became
more visible as they were made in factories; sold in retail stores;
promoted and advertised in magazines, newspapers, at the cin-
ema, on television, and eventual y on the Internet; and worn by
people on the street. In response, histories of fashion have been
produced by writers from different but adjacent fields, including
economic and social historians, those working in cultural studies
and gender studies, and those working within art and design
history, as well as film studies. Prompted by new methods and
approaches, fashion scholars have been increasingly interested
in the multitude of clothes worn by ordinary people. Fashion
history’s engagement with ideas originating in psychoanalysis,
Marxism, feminism, and post-structuralism has created an arena
for critical questioning about the nature of fashion and its histo-
ries. An interdisciplinary approach is evident in Lou Taylor and
Elizabeth Wilson’s Through the Looking Glass: A History of Dress from
1860 to the Present Day. Published to accompany a British BBC
television series of the same name, it set out to “explore what ordi-
nary women and men, as wel as the rich and fashionable, wore in
the past and are wearing today, their strategies for fol owing the
fashion, or simply getting by.”34 It built on earlier works by both
authors that had also addressed aspects of everyday fashion—par-
ticularly Taylor’s Mourning Dress: A Costume and Social History, a
work on Victorian mourning dress, and Wilson’s Adorned in
Dreams, a ground-breaking study of the relationship between fash-
ion and modernity, both of which were published in the 1980s.35
Taylor and Wilson share an interest in social history, but they also
brought other influences to bear: Taylor with her extensive knowl-
34 Wilson and Taylor, Through the Looking
edge of dress history and Wilson with her expertise in women’s
Glass, 12.
history and gender studies.36 With a strong interest in social class
35 Lou Taylor, Mourning Dress: A Costume
and gender, together they articulate an approach to fashion
and Social History (London: Allen and
Unwin, 1983) and Elizabeth Wilson,
grounded in careful historical analysis that rejects “a tradition in
Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and
dress history which overemphasises the fashion of the rich, and
Modernity (London: Virago, 1985).
haute couture in particular.”37 They propose that fashion is “a kind
36 In fact, Wilson, with a social sciences
of meeting point for intersecting aspects of our culture. Fashion is
background, had already written two
perhaps most useful y seen as a field where economics and indus-
influential accounts of women in
try meet aesthetics and art; where individual psychology meets
post-war Britain: Women and the
Welfare State (London: Tavistock, 1977)
the social organisation of a group, a class, an age.”38
and Only Halfway to Paradise: Women

Barbara Burman, another writer whose work contributed to
in Postwar Britain: 1945-1968 (London:
the rethinking of fashion history, has expertise and interest in both
Tavistock, 1980).
art history and dress history. Her book, Fashion Revivals from the
37 Wilson and Taylor, Through the Looking
Glass, 12.
38 Ibid., 13.
24
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Elizabethan Age to the Present Day, made a significant contribution to
the subject by showing that fashion was not driven solely by new,
novel, and original designs. Demonstrating how historical memory
has played into fashion via revivals, Burman instead argues that
these revivals are “overlaid with fresh style and rearranged by
affectionate nostalgia. In many cases, revivals alter the originals
sufficiently to turn them into arrivals, and some old favorites, never
out of use, are as much survivals as revivals.”39 This understanding
of fashion as being recycled and re-invented time and again is very
useful for tracing the mundane practices of fashion in everyday
life. More recently in The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and
Home Dressmaking—a compilation of essays published in 1999—
Burman offers further evidence of fashion’s everydayness: “The
ordinariness and domesticity of home dressmaking would seem
to have contributed to its invisibility and the lack of analytical
purchase on the part of historians in related fields.”40 Noting that
historians regarded clothing as peripheral to historical inquiry
because it was “too ephemeral or too everyday,” she observes that
some historians have also been indifferent “to the real world of
objects without high aesthetic value.”41 By focusing on home dress-
making, Burman’s book brings us firmly into the realm of the
everyday—in terms of both the production and the consumption
of fashion.

In addition to these, the academic field of film studies
has also made an important contribution to the debate about
fashion and everyday life—perhaps a surprising one, given that
film glamour more closely approximates high fashion than ordi-
nary life. In fact, this relationship between high fashion, film
glamour, consumption, and everyday life is what film scholars
such as Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog have explored. Informed
by feminism and gender studies, they have been interested in
the “construction” of the female image and its consumption
by ordinary women. In Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body,
they write, “We are trained in clothes, and early become practiced
in presentational postures, learning in the age of mechanical
reproduction to carry the mirror’s eye within the mind, as
39 Burman Baines, Fashion Revivals, 12-13.
40 Barbara Burman, The Culture of Sewing:
though one might at any moment be photographed.”42 Reiterating
Gender, Consumption and Home
this, film historian Jackie Stacey discussed the ways in which
Dressmaking (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 3.
working-class and middle-class women in Britain learned these
41 Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing:
skil s via the cinema—particularly in its heyday in the 1930s and
Dress and Fashion in the Ancien Regime
1940s.43 The relationship between (self) representation, fashion
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994) cited in Burman, The Culture of
and consumption is exemplified in the essay, “The Carole Lombard
Sewing, 3.
in Macy’s Window,” by Charles Eckert, reproduced in Gaines
42 Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog,
and Herzog’s volume; in effect the essay explores modernity, mass
Fabrications: Costume and the Female
culture, and the everyday. Demonstrating how department stores
Body (New York: Routledge, 1990), 4.
used tie-ins with Hol ywood films to sell their goods, the essay
43 Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood
Cinema and Female Spectatorship
(London: Routledge, 1994).
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shows how merchandising “imagined” the ordinary working
girl and targeted her with a range of products from LUX bubble
bath to a $40 copy of Carole Lombard’s gown in the film, Rumba.44

In the past 20 years, scholarship on fashion’s histories has
taken an interdisciplinary “turn;” it has experienced a qualitative
and quantitative shift, but it has also become more self-reflective.
Note, for example, Lou Taylor’s The Study of Dress History (2002)
and Establishing Dress History (2004) and consider the effect of the
journal, Fashion Theory, which began in 1997. Together, this scholar-
ship has contributed to a remapping of the field that has led to the
questioning of the subject’s fundamental premises.

Defining fashion, Breward writes, “It is a bounded thing,
fixed and experienced in space—an amalgamation of seams and
textiles, an interface between the body and its environment. It is
a practice, a fulcrum for the display of taste and status, a site for
the production and consumption of objects and beliefs; and it is an
event, both spectacular and routine, cyclical in its adherence to the natural
and commercial seasons, [innovative] in its bursts of avant-gardism, and
sequential in its guise as a palimpsest of memories and traditions”45
(emphasis ours). Breward thus recognizes both the routine and
the spectacular, while also pointing to fashion as a site for the
accumulated layers and traces of preceding looks. This complex
view is vital because on close inspection, certain fashions have
had a particular resilience and resistance over time; certain
garments, shapes, fabrics, and styles persist; they are recirculated
and reframed within different contexts. This endurance can be
unintentional, representing “the unmanaged construction of the
past in the present.”46 But at the same time, in creating a current
“look,” fashion provides a means to “go from one configuration
of daily existence to another.”47 This configuration can be and
has been a subversive act that defines agency: it can be avowedly
“fashionable” and “of the time,” representing “a look” that
refuses the everyday, and it can be an “accidental heterology,”
where the past coalesces with the present and strongly connects
to the everyday.

The impact of these scholars has been profound as they
have enriched and chal enged the ways in which the production
and consumption of clothes have been interpreted. However, the
study of fashion as part of routine, mundane lives remains erratic,
occurring largely when the ordinary impinges on the extraordi-
nary, such as when fashion from the “street”—influenced by popu-
44 Charles Eckert, “The Carole Lombard
lar cultures—affects designer-led fashion. In contrast, our proposal
in Macy’s Window” in Fabrications:
Costume and the Female Body, eds.
is that by probing fashion’s multi-layered complexities, a study of
Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog
fashion can help to unearth the “never quite heard” or the “inner
(New York: Routledge, 1990), 100-21.
speech” of identity and everyday life that de Certeau tried to
45 Breward,
Fashioning London, 11.
describe.48 Indeed, by examining fashion as a practice of everyday
46 Highmore,
The Everyday Life Reader, 2.
47 Sheringham,
Everyday Life, 180.
48 Highmore,
The Everyday Life Reader, 13.
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life, the networks of power and the repetitive practices that perme-
ate fashion’s broader discourses are thrown into sharp relief.
Indeed, as de Certeau explained, “We know poorly the types of
operations at stake in ordinary practices, their registers and their
combinations, because our instruments of analysis, model ing, and
formalization were constructed for other objects and with other
aims.”49 By developing a robust, critical framework that al ows an
interrogation of such ideas and by deploying appropriate research
methods, we can begin to explore fashion in everyday lives.
Research Methods
Historical focus and theoretical priorities are interdependent with
research methods. To study the ordinary, mundane practices of
fashion requires a different set of procedures or methods than
those that provide a “single, superior point of view.”50 In this final
section, we identify our research methodologies—in particular,
the case study approach. Raphael Samuel describes history as
“a social form of knowledge. .the ensemble of activities and
practices in which ideas of history are embedded, or a dialectic of
past–present relations rehearsed.”51 This is our view of fashion.
What people wore constituted an on-going practice that rehearsed,
among many things, the complexities of modernity and tradition,
progress and stasis. One method that al ows a focused discussion
of these practices is the case study. Writing on histories of every-
day life, Brewer outlines two approaches: “prospect history,” so
named because it looks down from above and surveys a broad
scene, and “refuge history,” which is “close-up and on the smal
scale.”52 Researchers adopting the latter method look at “place”
rather than “space;” they emphasize “interiority and intimacy
rather than surface and distance.”53 In proposing histories that
are focused and smal -scale and by critical y examining historical
metanarratives—particularly those that privilege modernity and
modernization—Brewer’s ideas illuminate our study. Rejecting
the prerogative of modernization that depends on “a single,
linear progressive model of time against which all societies are
measured,” he draws on the work of social historians and micro-
49 Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and
Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday
historians who have proposed that “inexorable modernization”
Life vol. 2, (Minneapolis, MN: University
has been univocal—both in its exclusion of different voices and
of Minnesota Press, 1998), 256.
in its failure to recognize the contradictions and conflicts of
50 Brewer, “Microhistory and the Histories
modernization.54 Such ideas have a bearing on our work by pro-
of Everyday Life,” 89.
viding the theoretical and methodological tools that al ow us to
51 Samuel,
Theatres of Memory, 8.
re-conceptualize fashion’s relationship to modernization; in
52 Brewer, “Microhistory and the Histories
of Everyday Life,” 89.
particular, we question the assumption that the drive of moder-
53 Ibid.
nity was progressive, consistent, and pervasive. Insofar as a
54 Brewer, “Microhistory and the
significant portion of this design—in “the lower case”—has
Histories of Everyday Life,” 93. He
remained “hidden” in the domestic and private spheres, we see a
cites, in particular, Carlo Ginzburg and
Giovanni Levi writing about Italy, as
well as Carolyn Steedman in Britain, 90.
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paral el here with the work of feminist historians who, like Sal y
Alexander and Sheila Rowbotham, have mapped that which
was “hidden from history.”55 The on-going methodological chal-
lenge, then, is to find the means to research the things, people, and
ideas that have remained unobserved, to locate and interpret
the intimate, rather than take a “prospect” approach that delin-
eates the surface and distance of fashion. The everyday offers us
that opportunity.
Conclusion
One of the outcomes of researching fashion in everyday life is
that we become keenly aware of the paucity of information on the
ordinary, especial y in comparison to the extraordinary in which
fashion is typically located. Designer names, celebrity wearers,
sensational performances, and extravagant visual images have
prevailed. Within such a context, the everyday can remain over-
looked and can appear to lack significance. However, being at the
intersection of the personal and the social, we would argue that
fashion is and has been both “things with attitude” and “design
in the lower case.”56 Over time and within an everyday context,
these two categories of fashion both can “evade notice” and can
avoid doing “as they are told.”57 They exist in a dialectical relation-
ship to fashion’s rules—sometimes in response to straightforward
practical necessities or circumstances but nevertheless providing
the material stuff of self-identification within routine, ordinary
lives. Central to these arguments, fashion’s “ordinariness becomes
a generic index of hitherto un-investigated processes through
which people make sense of their lives given the material and
cultural resources available to them.”58 As a material and cultural
artifact, fashion has been instrumental in defining the self—
55 See Alexander, Becoming a Woman
and Sheila Rowbotham, A New World
whether consciously or unconsciously. In this discussion, our aim
for Women: Stella Browne, Socialist
has been to question key assumptions about the nature of fashion,
Feminist (London: Pluto Press, 1977);
its relationship to modernity, and its presumption of change. By
Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden From History,
focusing on a number of theoretical, historiographical, and meth-
(London: Pluto Press, 1973).
odological themes, we have begun to articulate the ways in which
56 Attfield,
Wild Things, 6.
57 Ibid.
fashion has been integral to the practices of everyday life, and in
58 Sandywell, “The Myth of Everyday
doing so, to expand the critical framework for the study of fashion
Life,” 176.
in the future.
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