ABSTRACT
More than twenty years ago, Hilda Kuper (1973: 348–367) wrote about the indiscriminate way in which anthropologists dealt with clothing. Some focused on the origin of items of clothing, and the modesty and vanity of human beings. Some (Kroeber 1919: 1940) looked at the relationship between changing fashions and social upheavals. Others, in the Malinowski tradition, described the clothing worn by different people in different situations, and the meaning of changes in clothing styles over time in the colonial situation. What emerged from all these writings was a concept of clothing as a ‘universal and visible cultural element consisting of sets of body symbols deliberately designed to convey messages at different social and psychological levels’ (1973: 348). In short, personal appearance was consciously manipulated to assert and demarcate differences in status, identity and commitment.
