Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing (review)

Diana Crane's study of fashion in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, England, and America is a must-read for folklorists wishing to grapple with the dynamics of fashion and its effects on Euro-American culture. Her familiarity with clothing history is wonderfully demonstrated throughout, and she makes good use of four essential sources of data: her own case studies of Paris, London, and New York fashion industries; interviews with focus groups regarding responses to fashion photographs and clothing advertisements; studies of family budgets in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, with particular attention to clothing expenses; and a remarkable collection of eighty-one case studies of French working-class households conducted between 1850 and 1909 by sociologist Frédéric Le Play and his collaborators. She adroitly evaluates the strengths and shortcomings of major fashion theories, including those of Simmel, Bourdieu, and mainstream fashion historians, demonstrating how each theory explains some facets of the subject but not others. Overall, Fashion and Its Social Agendas lives up to its title and will amply reward readers strongly interested in the subject.

For folklorists, Crane's study raises some intriguing questions. Folkloristics is not sociology, but the fields often overlap in significant ways. Among disciplines with common interests, much may be gained by crossover studies. For example, Crane notes the demise of the monolithic, relatively self-contained society of the industrial era, when class was a major determinant of clothing choice. In our postindustrial, globalized, and fragmented age, "lifestyles," reflected in specialized interests, are more likely to direct our attentions and tastes, resulting in idiosyncratic self-presentations. This change raises questions about the nature of tradition and patterns of material behavior. Today, fashionable attire is as likely to emerge from the street as from the catwalk. What would a folkloristic study of fashion traditions entail? Are folklorists still "slouching toward ethnography" such that the demographics of fashion influence are critical to a folkloristic analysis? For Crane, agendas of social control and of individual expression are paramount in understanding the social role of fashion. Do these agendas have the same significance for folklorists? How would various folkloristic approaches such as the historic-geographic method, structural-functionalism, contextualism, and performance analysis take such agendas into account? Would contemporary folklorists problematize the subject the same way as Crane, and, if not, what would be the principal differences?

Some items raise more specialized questions. For example, although nineteenth-century working-class men might adopt certain kinds of upper-class apparel, they avoided using accessories such as gloves, canes, and top hats. One might account for this by supposing that such items were de trop, subjecting their wearer to ridicule. But why? Crane suggests that this was due not to the articles themselves, but to rituals associated with their use. Mastery of such rituals was impossible without extensive exposure to the class they "properly" reflected. Therefore, the risk lay in exposing one's ignorance of the ritual. Such behavior would be understandable in a class-dominated society with a certain degree of upward mobility. In our highly mobile society, people invent personal rituals as freely as they adopt articles of clothing that might once have been considered "inappropriate" (given the socioeconomic class of their wearer). To what extent are such invented rituals—or, for that matter, any piece of idiosyncratic behavior—subject to adoption by others in a group bound by common interests? Do the means of transmission of folk practices differ today from what they were a hundred years ago and, if so, how? In other words, what is tradition today?

Much as I admire Crane's book, I find some aspects problematic. Despite a solid chapter titled "Men's Clothing and Masculine Identities," the book seems strongly skewed toward fashion's effects on women. She also indulges in some unfortunate...