Affective clothing

What is it about?

We tend to think about clothes as something that we choose and wear to represent ourselves. The academic literature about clothes and fashion mostly focusses on the analysis of the ways in which clothes reflect or construct our identities. In this framework, the choice of what to wear is explained as a rational or at least conscious effort to express ourselves, or parts of our personalities. In contrast to this approach, this article focusses the attention on how clothes make us feel, trying to understand our relationship with clothes in terms of an affective bond. To do this, it draws on an alternative notion of the body as a composition of forces capable of creating relationships with other human and non-human bodies. To explore the clothed body in these terms enable us to capture the emotional bond we establish with garments and to make sense of some preferences that we might show for some of them.

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Why is it important?

This article uses a non-representational approach to study the relationship between people and their clothes. It therefore applies some of the main principles of the so called “affective turn” in the human sciences to the area of fashion studies. Although there has been recent recognition of the need to rescue the study of fashion from a purely representational stance, to date most attempts to apply an affective approach have been limited to the area of fashion design and art criticism. This article summarizes the recent sociological literature on fashion and identity and proposes a widening of its perspective to capture the affective dimension of our relationship with what we wear.