Appearance: Its Social Meaning
By Lorne Tepperman
In his classic sociological work Asylums, Erving Goffman notes that the first step taken by a total institution, suchas a prison or mental hospital is to re–socialize an inmate, by separating the inmate from old identities and identifiers.1Interestingly, this process begins by changing
the inmate’s appearance—for example, by forcing the inmate to wear an institutional uniform, while removing allindividual identifiers such as jewellery or personal assets. Often the inmate is forced to wear a generic hairstyle, whichis another way of regimenting the body and
eliminating individuality. The loss of one’s own clothing signifies the loss of an old identity and social status. Theadoption of an institutional uniform represents entry into a low–status community of identical inmates or subjects. Inthis real sense, the old maxim is true that “clothes make the man“ (or woman). Humble clothes make humble people.
Consider the humble uniforms worn by members of the Salvation Army—a religious organization devoted tourban good works, originally involving the moral uplift of fallen people. Winston notes that the popular image of Salvation Army women changed during the period
1880–1918, due in part to their adoption of plain, unfashionable clothing, which enabled them to enter public placessuch as saloons to do their work without criticism.2 So dressed, Salvation Army women practised spiritual warfare onestablishments that promoted sin and vice. Their uniform, dramatically severe, came to represent traditional serviceand old-fashioned virtue.
The connection between appearance, clothing, and self has been known and commented on for a long time.The nineteenth–century Scottish novelist and essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote about clothing metaphorically in his comicwork Sartor Resartus. There he used clothing to stand in for all symbols of self. People use clothing and other items related to their appearance to construct their personal identities within the context of their daily lives. However,personal identities are linked to social identities. Clothes define our place, role, and position in the social order.Carlyle believed that “clothes present us to ourselves and to the world” as we negotiate our freedom of dressed self–expression.3
In turn, society affects both what we reveal and conceal of our bodies.4 Social pressures
constantly undermine our choice and reduce the basic right of self–expression. As a result, clothes never reveal thewhole self, since they may be imposed on us or we may use clothes to conceal ourselves. However, given some choicein how we dress, the choices we make tell the world who we think we are, and who we want to be.
Not surprisingly, appearance norms are gendered—like manyother social norms. Not only are men and women judged by different appearance standards; they also wear differentkinds of clothing, according to their different social roles and statuses. Take pockets:
1 Irving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor,1961).
2 Diane Winston. “Living in the Material World: The Changing Role of Salvation Army Women, 1880–1918,†Journal of Urban History 28(2003), 4: 466–87.
3 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (Boston, Mass.: Ginn and Company, 1896).
4 William J.R. Keenan, Dressed to Impress: Looking the Part (Oxford: Berg, ed. 2001).
historically, pockets on women‘s clothing have been smaller and fewer than pockets on men‘s clothing. For women,pockets have been decorative, for men practical. Even today, men and women use their pockets differently (that‘s whywomen carry purses), and pockets play a part in the construction of gender.
Underwear is also gendered, though usually unseen except by their wearers and intimate acquaintances. Men‘sunderwear tends to be sturdy and plain. Women‘s underwear tends to be flimsy and decorative, as though it was ondisplay as part of the mating game. When middle-class women began to wear underpants in the early 1800s, their”drawers” were feminized by fabric, ornamentation, and an open crotch.5 Such open drawers on respectable, supposedly passionless women presented female sexuality as both erotic and modest. In the twentieth century,however, women demanded crotches in their drawers, to establish their sexual prop
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