ABSTRACT
The ubiquitous nature of dress would seem to point to the fact that dress or adornment is one of the means by which bodies are made social and given meaning and identity. 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. A sociological perspective on dress requires moving away from the consideration of dress as object to looking instead at the way in which dress is an embodied activity and one that is embedded within social relations. For the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, the body is shaped by culture and he describes in detail what he calls the ‘techniques of the body’ which are ‘the ways in which from society to society men know how to use their bodies’.
