Clothing In Peter Corrigan's The Dressed Society

Improved Essays
Fashion has been a topic of research for many decades and people have used it as a means of communicating their identities (Crane, 2000; Davis, 1992; Kaiser, 1990). Peter Corrigan (2008), in his book The Dressed Society: clothing, the body and some meanings of the world, talks about how people dress, their choices of certain kinds of attire as well as the various social meanings of clothing in our societies. He also goes further to describe what all this implies as well what it communicates in terms of identity, class and social status (Corrigan, 2008). Individuals use their appearance and style to announce who they are to the world (Kaiser, 1990). Therefore fashion is used as a tool to construct their appearances, as they want to communicate them to others. Identities are fluid and as such are susceptible to change based on how individuals understand themselves in the larger context of fashion change (Kaiser, 1990).
According to Davis (1992) individuals communicate things such as, which groups, classes, races and sexualities they belong to, through the clothing they choose to wear and in doing so they place and attach themselves to certain groups of people. He also asserts that individuals should be careful to ascribe exact meanings to all clothing as things develop over time and what a piece of clothing communicated this year could have a
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Although men were not unconcerned with their appearance, qualities such as status, strength, virility and business success were very much a part of their appearance (Davidovitsch & Bertrand, 2008). Men are traditionally not supposed to have more than one personality, this means that they do not have to dress for the way they feel on a particular day, lately, however, this has been encouraged by self-styled “wardrobe engineers” to expand their outward appearance for practical reasons (Lurie,

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