ABSTRACT
In recent years, media discourse has buzzed about people wearing pajama bottoms, yoga pants, or “sagging” pants (with underwear showing) in public. In the context of what could be described as a “sumptuary panic” or a form of cultural anxiety, some commenters lament what they see as a kind of devolution of taste and respectability. At the same time, metaphorically, many garments bring the “inside out”: seams are on the outside, hems go unfinished, and zippers are generic silver instead of a matching color. This chapter draws on a modified version of the “circuit of culture” model from cultural studies and suggest the need for a feminist-intersectional analysis of contemporary “inside-out” phenomena, highlighting the ways in which gender, “race,” ethnicity, sexuality, and age complicate Bourdieu’s class-based concepts of taste, cultural capital, and habitus.
