ABSTRACT
chapter five was concerned with the ways in which fashion and clothing signalled and reproduced positions and relations of class and gender, and chapter six considered the ways in which fashion and clothing could be used to challenge or contest those positions and relations. chapter five was about the ways in which fashion and clothing could be understood as reproductive activities; chapter six looked at the ways in which they could be understood as revolutionary activities. One way of understanding the present chapter would be to think of it as attempting to explain items of fashion and clothing as, in principle, undecidable between these two things, as potentially both reproductive and critical of dominant or prevalent class and gender positions and relations. As will be seen later, items like the stiletto may be taken as objects of women’s enslavement (this would be the approach of chapter five), or as items used to construct a new identity (as would have been the approach found in chapter six), or as both at the same time. The present chapter, then, will attempt to explain how an item of fashion or clothing may be considered, at least potentially, undecidable.
