The dressed and styled human body is irresistible to analyse. Framed by the idea that people’s dress and engagement with Fashion is a fundamental component of how we all conceive, create and convey personal and shared histories, the following ‘mini-essays’ are my attempt to unpick the cultural threads that hold our wardrobes together. Aide-mémoires, tongue-in-cheek, discursive, works-in-progress, I began writing them in 2013 in the spirit of Roland Barthes’ Mythologies and Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyper Reality, although rarely with the same perspicacity, precision and pace.
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31. The Clutch Bag
Men’s penchant for accessorising could be likened to a surging tidal wave: it started slowly with tie bars and crisply folded monotone pocket squares; grew stronger and faster with brighter colours and floral prints; became powerful, even menacing, with cigars and a profusion of facial hair that was, at extremes, impossibly manicured and irreverently messy.…
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30. The Sock
They are inexpensive, gender neutral, almost completely concealed by leg coverings and footwear and worn over an inconspicuous part of the body. Socks would seem to be a humble sartorial staple. But we shouldn’t be fooled, for they are one of the clearest communicators in the language of dress. Brightly coloured or boldly patterned, holed…
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28. The Desire to Belong
During a recent trip to America, I attended a lecture in which thirty-three students, teenaged boys from schools around the globe, made an address to the audience. The boys’ presentation, about service leadership in a global community, was impressive, but what struck me the most was the array of school uniforms they wore. The boys…
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27. The Ordinary
In April, I delivered a lecture at the Condé Nast College of Fashion & Design about ‘The Sounds of Style: How Clothes Communicate’. I argued that our dress conveys personal messages, regardless of whether we are cognisant of this when donning our glad-rags in the morning, and used the theories of Norbert Elias, Erving Goffman,…
Dr Benjamin Wild 