"'Clothing, as one of the most visible forms of consumption, performs a major role in the social construction of identity. Clothing choices provide an excellent field for studying how people interpret a specific form of culture for their own purposes, one that includes strong norms about appropriate appearances at a particular point in time—otherwise known as fashion—as well as an extraordinarily rich variety of alternatives,' the SCDB—actually is Sudirman Central Business District, a business district with an integrated mixed use development concept, located in South Jakarta, Indonesia, consisting of condominiums, office buildings, hotels, shopping and entertainment centers. But as a slang, it means Sudirman, Citayam, Bogor, Depok. The term mas-mas or mbak-mbak SCBD, synonymous with men or women who wear expensive branded outfits, ranging from lanyards, bags, and shoes—guy responded when I greeted him with a code word, 'Bro, you are tresspassing the handsome line, please move backward a little bit!" Laluna told a story after saying Basmalah and Salaam.
"'One of the most visible markers of social status and gender,' says the SCBD guy, 'and therefore useful in maintaining or subverting symbolic boundaries, clothing is an indication of how people in different eras have perceived their positions in social structures and negotiated status boundaries. In previous centuries, clothing was the principal means for identifying oneself in public space. Depending on the period, various aspects of identity were expressed in clothing in Europe and the United States, including occupation, regional identity, religion, and social class. Certain items of clothing worn by everyone, such as hats, were particularly important, sending instant signals of ascribed or aspired social status. Variations in clothing choices are subtle indicators of how different types of societies and different positions within societies are actually experienced.
Recently, sociologists have begun to understand the power of artifacts to exercise a kind of cultural 'agency,' influencing social behavior and attitudes in ways that we often fail to recognize. Technology embodied in machinery, architecture, and computers—to name a few—is a major influence in modern life and has tended to obscure the fact that nontechnological artifacts, have been influencing human behavior for centuries. Clothes as artifacts, 'create' behavior through their capacity to impose social identities and empower people to assert latent social identities. On the one hand, styles of clothing can be a straitjacket, constraining, literally, a person’s movements and manners, as was the case for women’s clothing during the Victorian era. For centuries, uniforms have been used to impose social identities on more or less willing subjects. Alternatively, clothing can be viewed as a vast reservoir of meanings that can be manipulated or reconstructed so as to enhance a person’s sense of agency. Interviews by social psychologists suggest that people attribute to their “favorite” clothes the capacity to influence the ways they express themselves and interact with others.
Changes in clothing and in the discourses surrounding clothing, indicate shifts in social relationships and tensions between different social groups that present themselves in different ways in public space. In previous centuries, increases in the availability of clothing to members of different social classes that were related to a gradual decline in the cost of clothing affected the origins and accessibility of fashionable styles. In the late Middle Ages, clothes in European societies began to resemble those we know today: shapeless gowns were replaced by tailored, fitted garments whose forms were generally influenced by fashions, originating in the courts of kings or the upper classes. In some countries, sumptuary laws specified the types of material and ornaments that could be used by members of different social classes. In relatively rigid social structures, attempts to use clothing to negotiate status boundaries were as controversial as analogous attempts to use clothing to negotiate gender boundaries in the twentieth century.
Until the Industrial Revolution and the appearance of machine-made clothing, clothes were generally included among a person’s most valuable possessions. New clothes were inaccessible to the poor, who wore used clothing that had often passed through many hands before reaching them. A poor man was likely to own only a single suit of clothes. For example, among 278 people arrested in and around Paris in 1780, only twenty-eight possessed more than one outfit of clothing. Those rich enough to own substantial wardrobes considered them valuable forms of property to be willed to deserving relatives and servants when they died. Cloth was so expensive and so precious that it constituted in itself a form of currency and frequently replaced gold as a form of payment for services. When funds were scarce, clothes were pawned, along with jewels and other valuables.
In preindustrial societies, clothing behavior indicated very precisely a person’s position in the social structure. Clothing revealed not only social class and gender but frequently occupation, religious affiliation, and regional origin, as well. Each occupation had a particular costume. In some countries, each village and region in the countryside had its own variations on the costume of the period. As Western societies industrialized, the effect of social stratification on clothing behavior was transformed. The expression of class and gender took precedence over the communication of other types of social information. The essence of social stratification in industrial societies can be understood in terms of hierarchies of occupations, occupation being an indicator of control over property and other economic resources. Clothes for specific occupations disappeared and were replaced by clothing for types of occupations and by uniforms that signified a particular rank in an organization. Regional identification became less salient.
In nineteenth-century industrializing societies, social class affiliation was one of the most salient aspects of a person’s identity. Differences in clothing behavior between social classes were indications of the character of interpersonal relationships between social classes in industrializing societies. The social 'chasm' between the middle and upper classes and the lower class was enormous. At the end of the century, the lower class constituted the overwhelming majority of the population in this period—73 percent in France, 85 percent in England; and 82 percent in the United States. Contacts between this class and other social classes occurred largely through services performed by members of the working class for the middle and upper classes. Such contacts were restricted, for the most part, to artisans and tradespeople, who were generally men, and to servants, who were usually female.
Even in the nineteenth century, clothes represented a substantial portion of a working-class family’s possessions. In France, a working-class man’s suit, purchased at the time of its owner’s marriage, was often expected to last a lifetime and to serve a variety of purposes, including Sunday church services, weddings, and funerals. A young woman and her female relatives typically spent several years preparing her trousseau, which represented an important part of the resources she contributed to her future household and which contained clothes, undergarments, and bed linens that were intended to last for decades. In England, poor families formed clubs for the purpose of saving to buy clothes. Clothes were relatively unavailable to the working class but abundantly accessible to the upper class, for whom fashions were created. Members of other classes who wished to have a fashionable appearance were required to emulate that class.
By the late nineteenth century, clothes had gradually become cheaper and therefore more accessible to lower class levels. As the first widely available consumer item, clothes were sometimes an indulgence for rich and poor alike. Young, employed working-class women spent their wages on fashionable items. Middle- and upper-class women devoted substantial proportions of their families’ incomes to clothes.
Costume historians have concluded that clothing was democratized during the nineteenth century, because all social classes adopted similar types of clothing. They argue that this transformation was most pronounced in the United States because of the character of its social structure. Class structures in industrializing societies during the nineteenth century were not identical. Since groups of people with similar positions in a class hierarchy tend to share distinctive, life-defining experiences, variations in the nature of class hierarchies were visible in clothing behavior. The United States in the nineteenth century was widely believed to be a classless society, characterized by a high level of upward mobility. Tocqueville’s assessment of the country in 1840 as one in which, 'at any moment, a servant may become a master' apparently reflected popular attitudes at the time. The obsession with fashion among American women in the nineteenth century has been attributed to the high level of 'status competition' engendered by 'the fluidity of American society, the universal striving after success, the lack of a titled aristocracy, and the modest past of most Americans. Ironically, although expectations of upward mobility were higher in America than in other countries, actual levels of mobility were not.
The large numbers of immigrants in the second half of the nineteenth century, made clothing in the United States particularly salient. Immigrants divested themselves of their traditional clothing as soon as they arrived, using clothes as a means of discarding their previous identities and establishing new ones. The United States also experienced high levels of geographical mobility owing to internal migration from East to West, meaning that large numbers of people were establishing identities in new locations. In France, there was enormous variation in social environments. In Paris, which was at the forefront of social change and modernity and the focus of internal migration, the demand for fashionable clothing was very high. By contrast, in provincial cities, which were pale imitations of Paris, and farming communities in the countryside, which remained steeped in tradition, new clothing was less accessible.
Fashion, which appeared to offer possibilities for a person to enhance his or her social position, was only one aspect of clothing during this period. It has to be seen in relation to the various ways in which clothing was used as a form of social control, through the imposition of uniforms and dress codes. Although men’s clothing was becoming simpler in comparison with the previous century, clothes in the workplace were becoming more differentiated as uniforms proliferated in bureaucratic organizations to indicate ranks in organizational hierarchies. In the workplace, social class differences were being made increasingly explicit by the use of uniforms and dress codes.
In the twentieth century, clothes have gradually lost their economic but not their symbolic importance, with the enormous expansion of ready-made clothing at all price levels. The availability of inexpensive clothing means that those with limited resources can find or create personal styles that express their perceptions of their identities rather than imitate styles originally sold to the more affluent. While, in the past, the occasional working-class street style was documented, the proliferation of street styles representing diverse subcultures within the working class has only occurred in the past fifty years. Theoretically, fashion is available to people at all social levels, both for creating styles that express their identities and for adopting styles created by clothing firms.
The nature of fashion has changed, as well as the ways in which people respond to it. Nineteenth-century fashion consisted of a well-defined standard of appearance that was widely adopted. Contemporary fashion is more ambiguous and multifaceted, in keeping with the highly fragmented nature of contemporary postindustrial societies. Kaiser, Nagasawa, and Hutton refer to 'the complex range and multitude of simultaneously ‘fashionable’ styles of clothing and personal appearance…. the range of choice in the marketplace contributes to a state of confusion bordering on chaos.' Clothing choices reflect the complexity of the ways we perceive our connections to one another in contemporary societies.
