Fashion Theory

The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture

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Fashion and Anxiety

Alison Clarke & Daniel Miller

To cite this article: Alison Clarke & Daniel Miller (2002) Fashion and Anxiety, Fashion Theory, 6:2,
191-213, DOI: 10.2752/136270402778869091

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 Fashion and Anxiety 191

Fashion Theory, Volume 6, Issue 2, pp. 191–214

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Fashion and
Alison Clarke and
Daniel Miller Anxiety
Alison Clarke lectures in design Inasmuch as the study of individuals and their relationship to their cloth-
history and material culture at the
ing becomes subsumed within the study of fashion, there is a temptation
Royal College of Art, London, and
acts as Visiting Professor in Design to privilege the commercial arenas within which clothing is produced as
History and Theory at the University the foundation of fashion studies. Yet we want to open up the possibility
of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria.
that fashion may not be merely the result of its own system of production
Daniel Miller is Professor of Material (contra Fine and Leopold 1993: 93–137, 219–237), but rather the result
Culture at the Dept. of of much larger forces that influence consumers to behave in ways which
Anthropology, University College
sometimes, but not always, concur with the interests and intentions of
London. Recent books include The
Internet: An Ethnographic Approach commercial interests. Fashion as the practice of the people (and in this
(with D. Slater), ed. Home paper we restrict ourselves to women’s fashions and the female consumer)
Possessions and ed. Car Cultures.
may emerge despite, rather than because of, the fashion industry. But this
192 Alison Clarke and Daniel Miller

does not mean that fashion is an expression of some simple desire or

requirement of the wearers of clothing. Rather, we want to develop in
this paper a theory of fashion that stems from the contradictions and
problems that beset us and seem to determine much of what we ultimately
do with clothes. At the same time we will repudiate the proposition that
such a focus upon consumption must lead us to a primary concern with
the psychology of the individual, or even, as Simmel (1997) argued in
one of the most influential attempts at a theory of fashion, that fashion
emerges largely from a tension between creativity and conformity. Although
we certainly concede there is a case for the study of such aspirations for
individual expression through clothing, and indeed the study of attempts
by manufacturers to construct or collude in such constructions of identity,
instead we consider how, in practice, it is the larger social context that
determines clothing choices. On the basis of ethnographic evidence we
will suggest that at present the individual female in Britain tends to
experience this social pressure primarily as a form of anxiety over potential
social embarrassment. In short, we will suggest that it is above all anxiety
that determines what people actually wear.
While other volumes deal with the ways in which the fashion industry
mediates social change and anxiety (Arnold 2001) our concerns are
markedly different. We are trying to develop a theory about the relation-
ship between women and their clothing based upon an ethnography of
shopping for clothes that found it was constantly being turned into a study
of anxiety and social embarrassment. In contrast to treatments which
premise the fashion industry itself, to account for our findings we turn
both ethnographically and, in our conclusion, theoretically to the social
context of wearing clothes. Clearly the fashion industry is a complex and
highly differentiated force, but we want to at least open up the possibility
that the dilemmas for women choosing clothing might have little to do
with either the industry or its associated journalism. It is natural to
try to account for consumption from the perspective of production
(since production processes appear to explain the “origins” of clothing
and styles), but this study examines clothes from the other end of this
relationship. We start from our observation of the fears of shoppers
when considering more adventurous or diverse clothing, and the various
relationships and institutions they use to alleviate this fear. When con-
sidering the limited range of clothes that most people actually wear it is
entirely possible that such a restriction on the field of potential purchases
might suit some high-street retailers. However, we also want to consider
the possibility that this is the result of a process of refusal by shoppers
who are not seduced by the potential of post-Fordist manufacturing
and distribution within the industry which might have favored the very
diversity the shoppers feel unable to encompass. Our major concern,
however, is not whether it is the high street or the shopper who should
be considered the prime mover in determining what is worn. Instead we
are motivated by our evidence that the primary experience of most women
 Fashion and Anxiety 193

in relation to their clothing consists of the individual confronting her

wardrobe or shopping experience with the problem of, “What on earth
should I wear?” If this is the case, then there are grounds for suggesting
the same experience should be central to a theory of fashion.
We recognize that an emphasis on the larger social context for fashion
choice is hardly a new observation. Many textbooks on fashion (e.g.
Entwhistle 2000; Wilson 1985) incorporate such concerns within more
general discussion about topics such as sexuality, the relationship of
women to their bodies, and transformations in gender and identity. Never-
theless, we find it extraordinary, given the descriptions that follow below,
how many works on fashion seem almost entirely to ignore the centrality
of anxiety and embarrassment in women’s relationship to their clothing.
In this paper we want first to use ethnography to establish the evidence
for anxiety and the intensive search for the normative in fashion choice,
and then, in the conclusion, we will briefly attempt to account for our
findings in terms of longer- and shorter-term trends.
Our starting point is the social rather than the individual context
that is responsible for what may be termed taste or fashion choice. The
obvious precedent within anthropology for such an argument is the work
of Pierre Bourdieu. What we take from Bourdieu’s Distinction (1984) is
his evidence that matters of aesthetics, taste, and style clearly transcend
the idiosyncrasies of individual agency, instead operating as manifestat-
ions of socialization and power relations in the form of “cultural capital.”
This kind of sociological analysis, however, seems to imply that individual
taste is constructed only in relation to the larger social space and distinct-
ions such as class. In contrast to Bourdieu, however, the ethnography that
follows is used to argue that the social setting of individual choice does
not just operate at this more abstract level, i.e. as a reflection of class
position, but has to be considered at the moment of everyday aesthetic
choices made by shoppers. What we found was that, even where indiv-
iduals are highly knowledgeable about matters of taste and clothing, they
find the everyday encounters of aesthetic choice ostensibly fraught. They
might resort to a wide range of mechanisms from accompanying friends
during shopping trips to consulting external agencies to reassure them-
selves about the selections to be made. That is to say, in many, if not most,
cases individuals do not really know what they like, or what their taste
in clothing is, at least outside of various social and institutional supports
that give them the confidence that they do know. The fieldwork upon
which this paper is based was conducted for a year mainly around a single
street (called here Jay Road) in North London (for the setting see Clarke
2000, 2001; Miller 1998, 2001). The research methodologies included
participant observation relating to both formal shopping (Miller) and
informal provisioning (Clarke) and supplementary interviews.
194 Alison Clarke and Daniel Miller

The Anxiety of Taste: Mothers, Daughters, and Floral

Print Dresses

The anxiety generated by the pressure of “knowing what to like” is evident

in Sharon’s desire to completely re-evaluate the contents of her wardrobe
and change what she views as a consistently unsatisfactory relation to
fashion. Although few women can afford to completely reassemble their
wardrobes (as encouraged by image consultancy companies discussed later
in the paper), the desire to “chuck out” clothing was commonly referred
to by women either “emerging” from their roles as young mothers, or
entering a new life stage involving (or desiring) a new set of social relations
(see Banim and Guy 2001). The reformulation of a wardrobe or a cosmetic
“make-over” often marks a rite of passage (or desire to prompt such a
transformative event) into a new or unchartered stage in a woman’s life.
Sharon, for example, is reaching her fortieth birthday and sees this as a
watershed in terms of consolidating her appearance and her wardrobe,
for she is “fed-up with getting it all wrong.”

It’s my fortieth next month and so I thought if I don’t do it now

then when? I’ve just coloured my hair and I’m going to lose some
weight this year and chuck out all my old clothes. The girl next
door sells Mary Kay [cosmetics] so I’m going to look after my skin
and stuff with some of them things.

Sharon, a full-time mother of three children living on a council estate

(public housing), contrasts herself with a close friend who, she comments
“could wear a piece of rag and look gorgeous.” But the desire to redesign
herself and her wardrobe is not merely indicative of a stereotypical mid-
life crisis. Rather she considers herself as the victim of a succession of
events in which “fashion,” and what she considers to be her inept relation
to it, has badly let her down. Sharon’s “fashion disasters” (as she refers
to them) culminated in a recent incident at a family party organized to
celebrate her mother-in-law’s seventieth birthday. The female kin of her
in-laws have a reputation for dressing extremely well, in the latest classic
fashions, whereas Sharon prefers to wear casual leggings in the winter
and lurid “scrunch-up” sun dresses in the summer. As the party, organized
in a prestigious local venue, spanned both lunch and dinner, Sharon had
been advised to bring outfits appropriate for both day and evening wear.
Desperate to “fit in,” she sought the advice of her mother-in-law in the
making of a long evening skirt to wear at the party. She also spent several
days looking for a top to perfectly match the evening skirt. As the party
wore on, Sharon nervously went to change into the long skirt to pre-empt
the transformation of the other guests. However, after returning from
the ladies’ room, and waiting several hours, Sharon realized that she
was the only person who had bothered to change into evening dress and
that, despite “looking like a dressed up tart!,” she could not insult her
 Fashion and Anxiety 195

Figure 1
Two similar blue summer
dresses, the stylistic detail of
which forms the focus of
Sharon’s anxiety over choosing
the most appropriate outfit for
a contentious family event.

IMAGE AVAILABLE ON HARDCOPY

mother-in-law by removing the skirt she had kindly helped her to make.
She therefore spent the entire evening feeling let down by her in-law’s
fashion advice and too self-consciously “over-dressed” to join in the
festivities.
On another occasion Sharon set off by car with her family to attend a
niece’s christening taking place fifteen or so miles away from her house
on the other side of London. After driving for over thirty minutes, Sharon
had a “change of heart” regarding the appropriateness of the dress she
had chosen to wear and persuaded the entire family to turn back to North
London so that she could dash to purchase an alternative item she had
seen previously in a high-street shop. Although the garments, blue cotton
summer dresses, when placed side by side were very similar in terms of
their relation to a genre of casual dresses (see Figure 1), for Sharon the
196 Alison Clarke and Daniel Miller

significance of their stylistic detail warranted this drastic action. In the

course of the journey she had been pondering whether or not the “T-
shirt”-style neckline of her chosen outfit might be deemed “too casual”
by the family and guests at the christening. After a long internalized debate
with herself, she finally opted for the more expensive option of buying a
replacement with a “less-T-shirt”-style neckline.
The examples of Sharon’s anxieties may at first seem extreme and may
be attributed to some deeper insecurities regarding her familial relations.
However, the incidents she describes are fully indicative of a broader
ambivalence expressed by almost all women around fashion and clothing
choices at some point in their lives. Indeed, in many ways, Sharon was
an unusually confident informant in self-deprecatingly “laughing off”
such dilemmas and embracing her “fashion disasters” as an integral part
of her biography.
While Sharon laments her lack of stylistic maturity, Charmaigne, a
highly fashionable eighteen-year-old who is extremely self-conscious of
her “ideal” figure (she dances in videos for vanguard pop music), excels
in choosing items which she considers most appropriately draw attention
to her body. While relishing her youthfulness she is also aware of herself
becoming older and the pending problem involved in placing herself in
relation to the symbolic relationship between clothing and age. Until
recently she has tended to favor clothing which might be regarded as more
childlike, since she looks a good deal younger than she is. However, she
is no longer sure if she wants to continue within a “girl” genre, or start
wearing clothing intended more for her own age. These dynamics are
played out in young women’s clothing shops such as Topshop and Kookai,
each of which provides a particular aesthetic of dress sense and niche in
terms of these dynamics and tensions of age.
Like many younger women shoppers in North London at the time of
the ethnography, Charmaigne will tend to buy as fashion garments “any
item as long as its black.” She, as most such women, is aware of the
processes that lie behind this lack in the exercise of choice. Black fashion-
wear is understood to be less individualizing or expressive than some
alternative choice, so that wearers are often both more secure in their
sense of the approval of others, but disappointed by their failure to
attempt a more ambitious projection in the world. The problem with any
alternative to black is that it presents a much greater risk at the same
time that it provides for greater possibilities of creative self-expression in
the buyer as fashion “artist.”
This particular shopping trip, however, is dominated by Charmaigne’s
concern to buy a floral print garment. After several weeks’ gestation of
the idea she has come to feel a potential affinity with the floral print as
an aesthetic concept she might like, and a sense that she could perhaps
afford to become a little more adventurous in the range represented by
her wardrobe. Clearly though, the success or otherwise of this broad
concept of a floral print depends upon the particular item chosen, not
 Fashion and Anxiety 197

just dress or skirt, but the particular print. During the course of the
expedition we encounter hundreds of possible floral prints. The issue of
cost is not raised, only of suitability. There is not the sense here, as
sometimes occurs, that the goods on offer are all the same and there is a
lack of choice, rather the concern is only that she should be able to have
the confidence to select the particular item that might forge a relationship
between her and this genre of garment. The presence of others, such as
her mother and the researcher, is a constant sounding board upon which
to exchange opinions, with the sense that our approval might be seen as
much as evidence against as for the garment in question. Even with all
this support, the difficulty that was evident for Charmaigne, again and
again, was knowing whether she actually liked a print or not and therefore
being able to determine what her taste was or could be. The mere discrep-
ancy represented by choosing a particular print as opposed to a simple
color is enough to make her feel unable to make a choice. Material culture
here becomes part of a larger array of objects that include the actuality
of other persons and the fantasized image of those persons as “internal
objects.”
Charmaigne is a self-acknowledged expert on subtle matters of fashion
and style, where her sense of the slightest nuance of cut and design is
prodigious. She could tell the shift in the growing or diminishing accept-
ability of a particular color on the dance floor to within a week. Yet,
despite this immense confidence in knowing about style, such knowledge
does not in and of itself tell her what she “likes,” because to know what
one likes is knowing who one wants to be in relation to others, and how
others will react to what you are doing, not merely a knowledge about
what the possible range is. One can have a fine sense of the nuances of
language without knowing what one wants to say. Each array of objects
provides its own constraints. Buying the first flower print is important
since it may determine the future relation to a whole genre.
Further along Jay Road, Katie, the mother of six-year-old Johnnie, is
also striving to transform her wardrobe. In the course of the ethnography,
Katie described suffering from mild depression which she aligned with
more general feelings of inadequacy regarding her father’s perception of
her failure to pursue a career and her choice to be a “stay-at home” mother
living on a restricted budget. This ambivalence manifested itself, in part,
through Katie’s desire to rethink her taste in and attitudes towards her
clothes:

I’ve got to get rid of so much stuff. If I’m not wearing them why
have them there crowding up everything? I’ve reached an age where
I realise there are only seven days in the week and whereas Jim
[husband] spends a quite large proportion of money on suits, he
does need them for work.

The paring down of Katie’s wardrobe is part of a broader move towards

the paring down of the couple’s household economy in an attempt to
198 Alison Clarke and Daniel Miller

counter the debts they are trying to manage. However, despite Katie’s
feeling that many of her clothes are redundant (she rarely socializes and
does not go out to work) her wardrobe is testament to a kind of cyclical
dynamic in which she periodically tries to summon up the confidence to
rejoin what she describes as “the mainstream.” After bouts of clearing
out her wardrobe and donating the contents to charity shops, Katie has
indulged in clothes shopping which she feels forced to conceal:

I mean, I have in the past bought clothes that I didn’t think I should
buy, you know? When we’re paying off these debts or saving up
for something, and I’ve hidden them. I’ve put them in the wardrobe
and haven’t displayed them and showed them like you usually do—
and I’ve made sure he [husband] couldn’t see me bring them in and
then I sort of appear in them three weeks later and lied about it—
I’ve only done it a few times as I actually feel guilty about it.

The linking of compulsive or inappropriate purchases with depression,

guilt, and uncontrolled emotions was prevalent in discussions around
the acquisition of clothing and cosmetics. Women most often located
this practice in relation to internalized feelings about themselves, their
own self-esteem, which they viewed as being qualitatively different from
anxieties regarding external factors related to their families, work, or
broader concerns, as illustrated in the following extract from a discussion
with Linda:

If you feel a bit down on yourself particularly, you’ll go out and

buy something to make yourself feel better. I suppose it’s image,
isn’t it? You feel, I suppose you feel, if you feel you look good you
might feel better about yourself. That’s why you’re down on your-
self, not necessarily what’s going on in life, not if I’m depressed,
I’m depressed like when we were moving. I was anxious about
moving. I don’t think that made me go out and buy clothes, if I’m
feeling particularly down on myself about something then I’m more
likely to do it.

It would be very misleading, however, to associate such anxieties with

the “compulsive clothes shopper” or “shopaholic.” Rather, what emerged
from the ethnography is the ubiquity of anxiety in relation to clothes
shopping as the normal condition for most women. Although our research
was on the topic of provisioning, we also had plenty of anecdotal evidence
that women experience these fears and uncertainties on a daily basis when
faced with the question of what to wear when they get up in the morning
or have to go out in the evening. Rather than concentrating on examples
of anxiety over the self or fear of social embarrassment, however, we want
to turn to the various negotiations that women employ to overcome these
problems. In particular, we focus upon the array of supports that women
find, ranging from social relations to the use of commercial bodies, that
 Fashion and Anxiety 199

take the place of actual persons in this regard. Just as there are varieties
of physical “underwiring” and other techniques that support women’s
bodies because of anxieties they have about their physical selves, so there
are a range of often barely visible social and psychological supports that
allow women to purchase such goods.

Genres of Support

Elia (30) and her mother (women of Greek Cypriot origin living together
in their family house) share an uncannily similar taste in clothing. Despite
their age difference they are regularly drawn to identical garments as
potential purchases and pre-empt each other’s preferences in matters of
style. So profound is their understanding of each other’s taste that they
have generated a form of syncretism—a frequent manifestation of which
is the duplication of garments as gifts, as described by Elia’s mother Maria:

Once I saw a top in DH Evans and a skirt but I thought it was too
expensive so I thought “no I’m not going to buy it.” And Christmas,
when I opened the present—my daughter was living in Manchester
at the time—when I opened the present in the morning, the present
from my husband it was the top that I saw. He just bought me this
top so I went out and bought the skirt. But my daughter was living
in Manchester at the time so she didn’t know that I saw this suit
and liked it but she came down for that day she came down on
Saturday and she went and bought it [the skirt] for me . . . and
another time I bought her a watch for Christmas morning and she
bought me one and I bought her a Marks & Spencer cardigan in
grey and she bought me the same one in blue! Oh yes! And she
bought me a waistcoat from Next I bought her a small one she
bought me a large one! We bought each other the same things!

In the case of Elia and her mother, both women view their conflation
of taste as a positive indication of their close relationship born from
consistent attention to each other’s preferences or, as Maria puts it, “this
is how you know, when you go out together all the time, you know what
the other person likes.” The numerous shopping trips that Elia and Maria
have shared as mother and daughter sustain their “joint” taste even when
they are physically separated and shopping as individuals. Elia is a highly
sociable young woman with many friends in the locality, yet the taste
relation she proudly maintains with her mother is seen to take precedence
over those with her younger more “fashionable” friends.
In Elia’s case it might be easy to assume that the prominence of the
mother/daughter relation in issues of aesthetics is merely indicative of their
sharing the physicality and provisioning of the family home. However,
the mother/daughter relation proved highly relevant, in the course of the
200 Alison Clarke and Daniel Miller

ethnography, even for women with their own established families and
partners, as a means of measuring the appropriateness of given articles
or aesthetic choices. In many cases the “mother” might be present as a
voice or an external “other” against which choices might be judged. In
Sandra’s case even in situations where she is “100%” sure of her judge-
ment she would rather forego a purchase and “save it” for her mother’s
opinion:

If it’s something that’s caught my eye and I’ve felt absolutely 100%
that I know that I will look nice then I don’t need another opinion,
. . . I can always hear my mum’s voice saying “oh, it really suits
you” or “it doesn’t do anything.” So usually I will wait, except my
mum lives in Australia, so I have to choose my moments and wait
for her to come back and then I’ll take her back with me [to the
shop] and try it on for her.

This somewhat idyllic sense of taste as an expressive practice within

sociality, and through specific relational configurations, is perhaps more
unusual. More often ethnographic research brought out the tensions
within relationships and a strong sense of ambivalence rather than con-
sensus. Indeed, mothers can exemplify the problem faced as much as the
solution, as in the following example:

My mother’s a shopaholic, she’s bordering on being quite danger-

ous, she spends money like there’s no tomorrow and hers is always
clothes. She’s always buying things for herself, she’s got so many
clothes I think she could wear a different outfit every day of the
year and she just goes on and on and on buying.

It is not just that certain relationships are found to be supportive; this

very activity can help build the relationship or test its compatibility.
Consequently most relationships within couples reveal both support and
tensions.
Janet and Robert are an established married couple with children. In
some areas they have clearly developed a sense of themselves as “we.” In
food, for example, most of the things purchased are because “we” rather
than “I” like them. But consider the following discussion regarding dress-
ing for a social meeting with her husband’s friends:

Janet: Well, we don’t entertain them but we do go out with

them, you know, to a restaurant occasionally. And that’s
when I feel really, you know, that I haven’t got anything
to wear [laughs]. Because they’re usually really well
dressed. And have, you know, are much better off . . . I
mean one of them’s single so he hasn’t—I mean he just
hasn’t got the responsibilities, he still lives at home and
he’s 35, he still lives at home with his mother. Irons his
 Fashion and Anxiety 201

shirts and takes his suits to the cleaners and—And his

girlfriend works for Benetton [clothing chain] and is
very sort of, you know, very trendy. So I always feel
really scruffy and [laughs] like I haven’t worn the right
thing when I see them. But they’re very nice. It usually
passes off.
Question: Do you think your husband would like you to be more
“dressy”?
Janet: Yeah, I think he would, yeah.

Question: But you’re obviously not comfortable in those . . .

Janet: No, I’m not actually. I always feel—I always make the
mistake when I go out of trying to live up to that kind
of thing and then I don’t feel comfortable in what
I’m wearing. And last week we went out with them—
admittedly we didn’t go to a very smart restaurant, we
went to a fairly casual restaurant, and I just thought
I’m going to wear what I feel comfortable in, to hell with
it, you know. And that’s what I did and I felt much more
comfortable. I just think, you know, be yourself.
Question: You wouldn’t want to be that sort of person?

Janet: Well, there is part of me that would, yeah. But I think

it’s—you know, I can’t be and there’s no point in even
trying to think really.

At first glance this seems to assert that Janet is an individual with her
own independent taste, coming to a point where she chooses to assert
this in defiance of accepted canons of dress sense. But the ethnographic
context allows for a more subtle interpretation. A longer acquaintance
with Janet suggests that what is being called “casual” here is not actually
Janet’s core sense of comfortable dressing with which she identifies. In
other contexts she could be observed working in exactly the opposite
direction, in effect asserting her relatively expensive and dressy clothing
against those she interacted with who had neither the money nor the desire
to dress up to the same degree. In short, of all the informants Janet was
among the most commonly disdainful regarding other people’s prefer-
ence for what would commonly be called “casual” clothing.
Understood within that larger context the conversation reveals that in
this case she is simply unable to compete in a contest in which she would
usually consider herself a major player. Instead she backs down with
dignity and good grace from a competition she perceives as offering her
little chance of winning. Taken from this perspective the taste preference
is not an assertion of individualism but rather a form of taste, and a
definition of “casual,” that is created by the set of relationships.
202 Alison Clarke and Daniel Miller

Catalogs and Colour me Beautiful: Domesticating the

Chaos of Choice

The cases described so far suggest that aesthetic preferences for material
culture most commonly emerge out of the routine workings of the family
and relationships where people are constantly bearing others in mind. It
is often where this process is failing to operate along normative lines that
the evidence is most compelling. One can see into, as it were, the fissures
of normal expectations as the cracks open up for people whose relation-
ships are not seen as satisfactory or who are without the relationships
they ideally desire. In such cases individuals may feel they lack the basic
condition of alterity—that is a firm sense of an “other” in relation to
which the concept of the self with a given opinion is most commonly
formed. This may lead people to seek alternative sources of opinion.
Where there is no clear subject against which the sense of taste can
be constructed there is no shortage of commercial institutions that are
only too willing to perform this role. Much of this relates to issues of
convenience and knowledge, but there are other uses of catalogs as sources
of advice that seem to suggest more subtle relationships being constructed
between the persons concerned and the source of information. One of
the major contentions for many women is the transition, after child-
rearing, back to the workplace. Clothing catalogs are often used as less
risky forms of purchase and knowledge accumulation used to mediate
the transition from home to workplace culture. Similarly the ethnography
highlighted informants’ concerted efforts to obtain a sense of “what’s
going on out there” (as one informant put it). Women talked of con-
sciously scrutinizing passengers they identified as “career women” or
non-mothers, while traveling on public transport, to reacquaint them-
selves with the latest or most appropriate styles of dressing. Having lived
in a confined world of childcare and its concomitant social relations,
women returning to full- or part-time work regularly sought the advice
of their mothers or working female relatives regarding fashion and dress.
While the mother, through her extended taste relations with the daughter,
provides a kind anchoring advice (in which garments are understood in
relation to the daughter’s trajectory of clothing in general), women friends
or acquaintances provide a type of advice more in keeping with the
“general” styles or clothing mores of the moment. Entwhistle (1997)
provides a case study around power dressing of such anxieties and forms
of reassurance in the world of work.
For a couple of years now Jacqui, a mother of three young children,
has been toying with the idea of returning to work as a clerical assistant.
Despite securing an interview for a position at a local office, she laments
that she has yet to feel fully confident about the proposition:

But if I get this job I don’t know what I’d wear. For five days running
I’ll have to go out and buy myself a few things because I haven’t
 Fashion and Anxiety 203

really got any “officey” type clothes left. Even I couldn’t think I’d
be wearing things that I wore 11 years ago. Oh God . . . the thought
of it. My Mum’s away on holiday for the next week and I won’t be
able to bend her ear on it. I’ll have my nervous breakdown.

In an attempt to prepare and inform herself, Jacqui borrowed a Next

Directory mail-order clothing catalog (known for its high-quality “classic-
ally” designed separates) from a working, middle-class mother living in
an adjacent street. She finds the thought of reinvesting, emotionally,
aesthetically, and financially, in fashion as a daunting, even traumatic,
prospect. Fashion knowledge formed an integral part of her relationships
when she was a single, sociable working woman, but after motherhood
that previously acquired knowledge has been made redundant. While
middle-class mothers on and around Jay Road might be identified as
“clothes conscious,” this particular consciousness revolves around an
aesthetic generated through the particular locality of their social relations
as mothers. While Jacqui may, therefore, be fully versed in that particular
aesthetic she is fully aware that it will not transfer to a different set of
relations demanded by a new workplace.
Now, as well as having to re-familiarize herself with high-street fashion
styles, Jacqui has to operate with an unfamiliar concept of “officey;” a
style formulated around the ideal of fitting in, neutrality, and the avoid-
ance of offending convention as against the expression of individual taste.
Despite practicing with her clothing during a preliminary training course
(throughout which she was prepared to admit she “managed to sort of
turn out looking respectable”), Jacqui desperately seeks consensus
over a suitable appearance. As Carrier (1990) suggests in his analysis of
catalogs, many such publications deliberately illustrate commodities in
the form of goods that have already been integrated into the lives of
potential purchasers (here represented by models). As such they provide
the kind of reassurance that such objects can be appropriated as part of
people’s lives. This is clearly directed to just the kinds of concerns being
expressed by Jacqui.
As noted in Clarke (1998), mail-order catalogs have a strong historical
link with British working-class credit provision, a cultural association
challenged in the early 1980s with the introduction of the Next Directory
clothing catalog, a limited-edition publication costing £5 featuring the
product range of the exceptionally successful high-street fashion retail
outlets of the same name. The Next Directory (and subsequent catalogs,
La Redoute, Racing Green, and Land’s End), while offering a credit
instalment scheme, promoted fashion catalogs as a convenient but more
exclusive form of mail order aimed at a middle-class market. During the
first years of its launch, the Next catalog, in particular, used contemporary
graphics and design in order to distinguish the publication from trad-
itional forms. Catalogs such as Next, Racing Green, and Land’s End,
unlike mainstream mail-order publications, built on their reputation for
204 Alison Clarke and Daniel Miller

providing wearable “classics” as opposed to highly temporal fashion

items. Staple garments include white linen blouses, generously cut swim-
ming costumes, and classic-cut chinos. In this sense, such catalogs are
ideally appropriated as a “safe” means of moving aesthetically from a
child-centric life stage to a more public one. Although such catalogs are
generally consulted in the context of social relations (passed as they
are between friends, neighbors, and family), they constitute a form of
distanced objectivity as regards the navigation of a daunting and temporal
fashion world. They do not simply provide images of succinctly categ-
orized dress types (“work,” “evening,” “leisure,” etc.) and the safety of
the tasteful “classic,” they act as an objective, shared medium through
which the vagaries of fashion have to some extent been filtered and
processed.
Cathy, like Jacqui, is contemplating applying for a new part-time job
after six years working full-time as a parent. Although she is aware that
she needs to familiarize herself with the latest “work-wear,” she is also
very wary of over-investing in this proposition as she is, as yet, unsure as
to the ramifications of her returning to work in general:

My friend who lives across the road has just got the Next Directory
and she asked me if I was interested in ordering anything through
that. And I’ve not actually had the time to look through it yet but
I’m probably in a better financial position than Rachel [neighbor]
but we’re still, you know, when you’re on one income, you know,
she looks for things for herself for going out to work in the Next
Directory. I just think that probably it’s a bit too pricey for me.

Many middle-class informants regularly used catalogs such as Land’s

End and Racing Green (both of which promote the use of natural fibers
and neutral colors and styles, such as crew neck jumpers and polo shirts)
but disassociated this practice entirely from “traditional” mail-order
purchase (and its credit schemes). Instead they use terms indicative of
the “rational” shopping associated with department stores such as
John Lewis, in which value for money and “sensible” styling prevail, as
expressed by Flora, a part-time working mother:

I don’t use catalogues in a traditional sense, but I do use Land’s

End. I buy a lot of stuff through them. I wanted to buy myself a
sort of canvas brief case and a friend of mine had one and I asked
him where he got it and he said “Land’s End” and I thought he
meant the end of the pinnacle—but then I realised, because my
husband told me, it was a catalogue and I rang up. It just happens
to have things I like. Like this skirt [pointing to skirt worn], for
example, it’s a nice length and good quality, I sound like a sales-
woman don’t I? I just think it’s quite convenient to buy that way
but it’s a bore if you have to send it back so I tend to be quite
cautious about what I buy.
 Fashion and Anxiety 205

Outside of this use of the catalog, particularly as a guide to work-related

apparel, many people want still more support in their search for their
own taste. Jacqui, for example, has a fantasy of another voice that will
help her determine what she should have or be: “I could really do with
someone coming in and saying ‘you need this and this and this’”. It is
this demand that has led to commercial institutions going well beyond
the conventional representations of the mail-order catalog to provide
active advice in the form of both personal help and a cosmology within
which a person can understand themselves to be located. The most vivid
example of this phenomenon that emerged during the fieldwork is the
company Colour Me Beautiful (CMB) which, since its introduction to
the United Kingdom in the early 1980s, has developed as a prominent
direct-sales concern, addressing women in relation to issues around their
appearance.
Georgina is one of a number of keen clients of CMB encountered during
the ethnography. As an image consultancy CMB specializes in using
color and style advice to enhance the confidence of women. Although
CMB incorporates the terminology of the fashion industry, referring to
“seasonal palettes” and contemporary accessories, the company promotes
a form of anti-fashion to its clients. It advocates instead what it claims to
be a rational calculation of appropriate individual style. CMB operates
in a similar fashion to party plan direct-sales systems (such as Tupperware)
in which a consultant or salesperson creates a network of clients (ostens-
ibly through word of mouth) and then promotes the company to women
informally gathered as a party. This allows CMB to combine professional
advice with sociability and the building of consensus among a woman’s
friends and family. Out of what may seem the chaos of fashion choices,
CMB claims to offer objective advice and the skills which will ensure that
“whatever you buy is making the most of you” (CMB 1998).
Georgina is part of a nuclear family with a secure middle-class income
and, in general, expresses contentment about her life. Nevertheless, as in
most such families, there are tensions and unresolved aspects of relation-
ships that emerge on closer acquaintance. In this case the couple themselves
can properly be termed happily married, but this contentment masks some
basic incompatibilities between the partners which they have learnt to
live with. This emerges in the discussion of the objects in the home.
The husband is a professional artist with strong views on art and many
other aesthetic matters. This makes it difficult for the aesthetics of the
home to become the medium for expressing the couple’s relationship.
Georgina is fully aware that the interior design of their home should
include far more compromise and shared forms than are likely to emerge
within a sphere where his opinions are so clear and strong. She would
have liked romantic pictures, such as Pre-Raphaelite prints; he is tending
towards minimalism. As a result, there are no decorations on the wall.
Pictures lean (as if in anticipation of finally being hung on the walls)
against the skirting boards around the living room, evidence of the as
206 Alison Clarke and Daniel Miller

yet unresolved “stalemate” that defines the couple’s taste. Instead, Georgina
displays objects that represent the fortuitous results of relationships, such
as gifts and souvenirs. By ending up with objects as tokens of relationships
(with friends, relatives, and neighbors) they avoid potentially acrimonious
disputes about aesthetics.
By the same token, Georgina’s husband, whose views tend to the ascetic
and austere, cannot be the basis on which she builds up her confidence
to know what she likes in the field of clothing and fashion. Considering
her return to work she initially relied, unsuccessfully, on mail-order
catalogs for fashion guidance: “I have used a catalogue to buy clothes
with little success” she comments. “It was a black dress [I sent back] it
was absolutely vile.” Instead of using her partner (or an inanimate and
untrustworthy catalog), Georgina has found another solution through
the influence of her mother. It was her mother who initially attended a
CMB meeting where, for a fee, the company’s consultant will inform a
subject about the colors they “ought” to select, using seasonal definitions
as a way of distinguishing ‘”colorings.” Just like Jacqui, Georgina was
nervous about returning to work, in this case, as a banker expected to
confidently meet clients in a competitive and commercial domain. She
felt unequipped in every sense. While she found other forms of direct
selling, such as Tupperware parties, embarrassing and patronizing, she
had no such feelings about CMB. The procedure used is intended to give
the aura of a rationalized criterion for making aesthetic choices—a range
of color swatches are put next to the face of the customer in front of a
group of other women who sanction sometimes controversial suggestions—
such as yellows described as “mustard” and “watermelon.”
Chua (1992), in her observational study of clothes shopping in a
Singapore designer store, describes how women use the experimentation
of trying on different clothing and “looks” as a form of self-display and
narcissism in which the boutique acts as a stage. In the presence of shop
assistants and overseen by their male partners, women actively work on
themselves as objects in direct relation to the “male gaze” (the male
partner, Chua argues, invariably acts as the ultimate voice of veto). In
contrast, the all-female context of the CMB party entirely negates the
power of the “male gaze” in preference for a rationalized system, which
also takes into consideration the localized context of the social relations
in which it takes place. The opinions of husbands and partners are rarely
alluded to, and most frequently cited in disparaging, rather than con-
structive, terms.
CMB is promoted as a rational form of budgeting, as one can adhere
to prescribed colors therefore avoiding expensive fashion mistakes: “It’s
actually very helpful when you’re flitting around sales and things as you
know what colours are going to suit you,” as one “converted” informant
commented. Taste decisions are reduced to an objectively selected range
of options based purely on color and naturalized through the notion
of seasons. “You are a season and can relate to other women’s seasons
 Fashion and Anxiety 207

on this basis. What you might think as bad taste is actually legitimate
taste for another woman,” commented Georgina. In this way, women
are offered simultaneously the individualism of a specific color palette
and the comfort of a broader, consensual sanctioning of its associated
aesthetics.
CMB demands a new set of skills in deciphering a complex array of
colors, as clients are given a color chart and swatches of color to practice
their choices after the initial consultation. The colors are graded in suit-
ability and also aligned to specific parts of the body. “The woman who
did it with us had the other girls commenting as to which one they thought
was right,” recounted Georgina. “I mean I was a bit worried because the
colours . . . I’m not terribly keen on, and the winter ones were things like
black which I like a lot,” she continued. The account reveals subtle
differences in the way an individual identifies with their given colors.
“Reds aren’t pillar box reds, they’ve got to be bluey reds, more scarlet
red, and sort of the royal blue. That electric royal blue’s very good.” This
agreement need not be total: “I actually disagree with some of it, because
I don’t actually like ice lemon, another yellow that was 25%. That was
sort of a real ‘no no’ in my colour range.” In the course of this specific
consultation, the ambivalence expressed by Georgina was remedied with
a reassuring statement coalescing the individual’s preference with the
company’s recommended choices: “you’re the only season that can
wear black and that you’ve probably a winter anyway,” concluded the
consultant.
Like similar female-based direct-sales concerns (see Clarke 1999), the
CMB party plan works ostensibly through word-of-mouth recommend-
ation and relies on the social network of women within specific social
groups. Many women of thirty-five years and upwards, on or around
Jay Road, have been invited to at least one CMB event. As consultants
are usually local women (recruited through attendance of a party), they
offer not only a corporate interpretation of aesthetics but one which is
mediated by the relations of the specific locality. The formal advice of
the image consultant is also melded with that of significant relations such
as that between mother and daughter. This was evident even in circum-
stances where mothers lived hundred of miles apart from their daughters,
as in the case of Chloe, who after hearing of her mother’s transformation,
booked her own party:

My mother was designated by Colour Me Beautiful as “an autumn.”

It was all the colours she had never worn before and she looked a
million dollars—she chucked out most of her wardrobe and she’s
a real success story—she now wears mustard and watermelon!

Impressed by her own mother’s transformation, following her own

CMB consultation, Georgina had a big clear-out of her clothes taking
everything to the Oxfam charity shop (see Figure 2). She felt transformed
208 Alison Clarke and Daniel Miller

Figure 2
A collection of discarded
garments “expelled” from a
woman’s wardrobe following a
session with Colour Me
Beautiful image consultants.
Copyright A. Clarke

IMAGE AVAILABLE ON HARDCOPY

by the confidence of finding her own colors, and began to practice the
technique on her friends with a new-found aesthetic perception: “It’s funny
once you leave one of those things and you’ve worked out what your
colours are and what’s good on you, you start looking round your friends
and you think no, that’s the wrong colour for you mate!” Georgina also
felt that this newly found aesthetic principle, in fact, supplanted her
previous values: “I used to spend a heap of money on clothes and loved
clothes, very beautiful clothes, but a lot of them are completely crap. So
 Fashion and Anxiety 209

there you are.” Cut, fabric, style, designer labels are all replaced by the
primacy of color choice which freed the consumption process up.
In this case, CMB provides an ideal solution for the absence of effective
and immediate social relations. Just as in the choice of living-room objects,
Georgina comes to apply the alternative strategy of using the fortuitous
detritus of events and relationships, in this case CMB provides the highly
acceptable alternative of a façade of rationalism. For, as against the
hazards of fashion in constructing aesthetic choice, and as against the
sheer level of work involved in obtaining knowledge, from magazines
and peers about fashion (Evans and Thornton 1989; Winship 1987),
CMB provides a certain form of stability and certainty. Once one knows
one’s colors this stands for longevity in a field of material culture defined
by its fickleness. Within this new regime one can identify with “classics”
without the need for designer labels and a couturier’s knowledge of
fashion and cut. Garments in the wardrobe can be reappraised according
to a new consensus—publicly sanctioned and ceremonially acknowledged,
during the sessions held by the company in women’s homes. This appeals
particularly to older professional women who would normally pride
themselves on their relative knowledge and experience and yet, with
respect to fashion, are faced with a field of knowledge in which younger
woman are advantaged. Of course, not everyone who uses CMB will
actually reduce themselves to its proclaimed rationalism; rather, such
strategies are incorporated into a range of other, often contradictory,
relations with fashion and style.

Conclusion: The Roots of Anxiety

The evidence presented here suggests that the relationship of individuals

to fashion is socially mediated. Individuals are frequently too anxious
about the choices to be made to proceed without various forms of support
and reassurance. Where possible, support involves close friends and
family who are trusted to give advice reflecting care and concern. Where
these forms of support are themselves too fraught or are unavailable
there may be recourse to catalogs and commercial advice or, finally,
to fully structured regimes of clothing advice such as that provided by
CMB. In practice, individuals may use a combination of such supports.
Certainly, we do not wish to deny the existence of women who do not
resort to any of these devices and who are, indeed, relatively unanxious
about their clothing choices. Nevertheless, generalizations appear to be
warranted about a pervasive and, we suspect, increasing anxiety around
the evaluation of any particular choice of clothing alongside an intensive
concern to know what the normative fashion choice should be. The term
“normative” appears appropriate in that it is used to infer both a tendency
to return to an imagined homogenizing norm (e.g. the little black dress)
but also a vague, but present, sense of morality associated with this.
210 Alison Clarke and Daniel Miller

Indeed, even where individuals make an effort to be distinct, they seem

just as concerned to properly establish what it is they are being distinct
from.
The reasons for the contemporary stress on normativity are too
complex to be dealt with in any detail here, but, as in most nuanced
understandings of particular trends, they amount to a combination of
longer and slower historical processes together with particular and more
recent ones. Since the writings of Braudel (1981) we are aware that there
exist quite slow historical shifts that can be studied in part through
the changes or lack of them in material culture such as clothing. In this
case our primary source for an account of the move to normativity
might be a trajectory of social analysis that develops from Durkheim
(1961 [1915], 1987 [1952]; see also Giddens 1971) to Habermas (1987).
Over two centuries we have seen a progressive emancipation of individuals
from many more structured forms of “collective conscience” such as
religion and more immediate moral authorities imposed by, for example,
the Victorian family. Given an increasingly differentiated society, a new
form of moral consolidation is sought. But as Habermas (1987) has noted
with respect to modernity more generally, under conditions where we no
longer respect the authority of institutions and rules that determined how
we should act, we become, as individuals, increasingly burdened with the
task of creating normativity for ourselves. This is even more difficult given
our increasing self-awareness, that this is what we are engaged in. We
can no longer say this is our “custom” or our “religion”; instead we have
to face up to the degree to which we are making up our own moral rules.
All of this pressure to create our own normativity in turn produces a
tremendous desire for self-reassurance (for details of this argument see
Miller 1994: 58–81). Many of these tendencies are the negative results
of otherwise welcome transformations, such as a genuine rise in demo-
cracy, equality, and work for both genders, and most relevant here, the
successes of feminism, such that there are fewer clear distinctions within
which women have to see themselves as merely positioned.
Such philosophical and sociological characterizations of long-term
change need to be grounded in the specific experiential evidence of our
daily lives. Fortunately, this evidence for an intensive search for the
normative is overwhelming. Why else, when flooded with advertising,
should women spend money on buying yet more magazines largely con-
sisting of advertising-like copy showing how they, their homes, their food,
and their children might look in relation to others? This complex dialectic
between the aspirational and the actual leading to a restless search to
determine the normative is just as evident in the task of house decoration
in North London as it is with clothing (see Clarke 2001). Not surprisingly,
the same phenomenon can be seen even more acutely in areas such as
bringing up children where Parker (1995) maps a relentless concern
with how other mothers and their children are coping. Indeed, almost
any form of shopping can be understood in relation to the importance
 Fashion and Anxiety 211

of establishing normativity in kinship. Shopping is used to resolve the

discrepancy between how we feel parents, children, and siblings ought
to be and how our particular ones actually are (see Miller 2001: 17–56).
With respect to the world of fashion and clothing, we can see all these
general trends and their consequences exemplified in a microcosm. The
last three decades have seen a clear decline in what had become the trad-
itional form of fashion authority, that is an authoritative claim as to what
fashion is for a given year in terms of lengths of skirts or colors of the
season. This went together with a democratizing of individuals’ relat-
ionships to fashion and greater freedom to create particular niches by
the population of consumers rather than merely the industry; a trend
manifested in punk and other subcultural movements. All of this produces
precisely what Durkheim predicted in terms of increased anxiety and, as
Habermas argued, an intense desire for self-reassurance. These exacerbate
long-term changes. So that a tendency for women to be anxious about
clothing choices, that may well be at least as old as anything we can
reasonably call fashion, has been accentuated by recent changes that
have acted in some ways as the culmination of these longer-term trends.
Furthermore, the short-term specific trajectory of fashion, sloughing off
commercial control over normativity, follows and articulates with the
long-term trajectory of modernity and its search for the experience of
freedom. When the two are considered together, we may have found the
underlying historical dynamics that might account for what has been
found in the ethnography. Individuals’ anxieties over fashion choices are
seamlessly integrated into their anxiety over relationships to people more
generally. The result is an overwhelming sense of fear that an individual—
even one with extensive fashion knowledge—may not actually know what
they themselves like. They can only determine what the desired garment
is and, beyond this, what is the right thing to buy or to wear, through
searching for a social support. This might manifest itself in the form of a
friend who comes shopping with you, or the reassurance that a color is
all right since it is really “the new black,” or a return to a structured
“authority” such as CMB consultancy.
In conclusion, it is important to recognize that what we see around us
cannot be reduced to any simple moral agenda, since what has been
presented here is inherently contradictory. You cannot have democratic
liberty and equality without a concomitant sense of anxiety that is the
precise result of that experience of freedom. It is above all the emancip-
ation that was achieved through feminism that has left women with this
huge burden of freedom and this further accentuation of much older fears
and concerns over social embarrassment. But if the alternative is a return
to those older forms of authority, of the constraints of officially sanctioned
sartorial codes, and an unwarranted respect for the voice of industry elites
about what fashion “is,” then it may well seem that an anxiety that
requires still more shops to be visited before making a choice, or that
makes a full wardrobe appear to have “nothing in it,” may, on reflection,
be a price worth paying.
212 Alison Clarke and Daniel Miller

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