ABSTRACT
‘There Is An Obvious and prominent fact about human beings’, notes Turner at the start of The Body and Society, ‘they have bodies and they are bodies’. Dress is a basic fact of social life and this, according to anthropologists, is true of all known human cultures: all people ‘dress’ the body in some way, be it through clothing, tattooing, cosmetics or other forms of body painting. The individual and very personal act of getting dressed is an act of preparing the body for the social world, making it appropriate, acceptable, indeed respectable and possibly even desirable also. Studies of fashion and dress tend to separate dress from the body: art history celebrates the garment as an object, analysing the development of clothing over history and considering the construction and detail of dress. Dressing requires one to attend unconsciously or consciously to cultural norms and expectations when preparing the body for presentation in any particular social setting.
