A University of Queensland academic has written what is believed to be the first survey of dress around the world today.
In a new book entitled Dress and Globalisation (Manchester University Press, $49) Associate Professor Margaret Maynard dispels the myth of universal “world” attire.
“I started writing this book with the idea that everybody was dressing more and more like everyone else, and that a universal dress code was developing,” she said.
“However, the more I looked into it, the more I realized this was not the case. While western-style dress is widely adopted across cultures, in no part of the world do we see fully homogenized dressing for there is a powerful desire to express personal taste and local difference.
“This is because all societies are made up of various income levels, professions, religious beliefs and other affiliations.
“People who do assume international clothing of one sort of another, business suits, jeans, baseball caps and the like, and those who dress in local attire, be it ‘ethnic’, regional, national or customary, are all engaged in multifarious style accommodations and resistances in their day-to-day choices of self-presentation.”
As an example of this, large European and US companies exported huge quantities of baled generic secondhand clothes and footwear for resale in Africa or India, or charities exported cast off dress to poorer regions.
However, consumers in countries such as Ghana were not undiscerning, picking and choosing from goods on offer in markets and stalls, with local tailors altering clothes in ways to match their own personal styles and sartorial conventions.
Dr Maynard said her book looked widely at the ways in which cultures and individuals interacted and engaged with each other at the level of appearance.
“What we find is shifting, often uneven, patterns of consumption expressed in the garments we wear, our hair, headwear and our beautification, all taking place as consumers come to terms with a new world order,” she said.
Dr Maynard, a reader in UQ’s School of English, Media Studies and Art History, draws together issues of consumption, ethnicity, gender and the body in her new study.
Her book examines international-style dress, including jeans and business suits, headwear and hairdressing, ethnicity but also so called “ethnic chic”, clothes for the tourist market, the politicization of traditional dress, the dress of politicians, national clothing, alternative dressing, and T-shirts as temporary markers of identity.
Dr Maynard examined responsible clothing choices in one chapter of the book. She discusses environmental issues associated with dress, including use of pesticides in growing materials such as cotton, and environmental problems in some countries resulting from dyeing and bleaching of jeans to achieve the right blue colour.
She said many consumers might think twice about their clothing choices if they knew more about global production methods.
“If we look beyond the marketing rhetoric and untroubled face of huge corporations, scientific evidence shows much of the world’s textile product and clothing maintenance is far from benign,” she said.
“It causes significant amount of pollution and impacts heavily on ground water and soils.
“In fact all the fibres we use today, whether man-made or otherwise, have some environmental impact.
“An interesting issue is that eco sensitivity about clothing is not as intense as other concerns. So while many feel guilt about driving a car, express sympathy with oil spills and complain about yet more bulldozed forests, not so many realize the clothes they wear may derive from an equally significant environmental hazard.”
Dr Maynard trained as a dress historian at the Courtauld Institute of Art London, and has published extensively on dress, cultural studies and Australian colonial art and photography.
Her first book was entitled Fashioned from Penury: Dress as Cultural Practice in Colonial Australia (1994) and was followed by Out of Line: Australian Women and Style (2001).
Media: for further information, contact Dr Maynard (telephone 07 3365 2960, 07 3379 7640, mobile 0417 784 377)
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