Dress and age: the intersection of life and work

In this article I outline the influences, intellectual and personal, that have led me to the subject of dress and age, a topic that I have explored with great enjoyment over the last decade. These have their roots in earlier academic and personal interests, and one of the aims of the article is to show how these different spheres of life and work intersect. I discuss this under three broad headings: intellectual and academic influences; longterm personal interests, particularly in history and the aesthetics of dress; and the impact of becoming an older woman

Materialising memories: exploring the stories of people with dementia through dress

In this article, we use clothes as a tool for exploring the life stories and narratives of people with dementia, eliciting memories through the sensory and material dimensions of dress. The article draws on an Economic and Social Research Councilfunded study, ‘Dementia and Dress’, which explored everyday experiences of clothing for carers, care workers and people with dementia, using qualitative and ethnographic methods including: ‘wardrobe interviews’, observations, and visual and sensory approaches. In our analysis, we use three dimensions of dress as a device for exploring the experiences of people with dementia: kept clothes, as a way of retaining connections to memories and identity; discarded clothes, and their implications for understanding change and loss in relation to the ‘dementia journey’; and absent clothes, invoked through the sensory imagination, recalling images of former selves, and carrying identity forward into the context of care. The article contributes to understandings of narrative, identity and dementia, drawing attention to the potential ofmaterial objects for evoking narratives, and maintaining biographical continuity for both men and women. The paper has larger implications for understandings of ageing and care practice; as well as contributing to the wider Material Turn in gerontology, showing how cultural analyses can be applied even to frail older groups who are often excluded from such approaches

The challenge of cultural gerontology

Over the last decade, Cultural Gerontology has emerged as one of the most vibrant elements of writing about age (Twigg, J., & Martin, W. (Eds.) (2015). The Routledge handbook of cultural gerontology. London: Routledge). Reflecting the wider Cultural Turn, it has expanded the field of gerontology beyond all recognition. No longer confined to frailty, or the dominance of medical and social welfare perspectives, cultural gerontology addresses the nature and experience of later years in the widest sense. In this review, we will explore how the Cultural Turn, which occurred across the social sciences and humanities in the late 20th century, came to influence age studies. We will analyze the impulses that led to the emergence of the field and the forces that have inhibited or delayed its development. We will explore how cultural gerontology has recast aging studies, widening its theoretical and substantive scope, taking it into new territory intellectually and politically, presenting this in terms of 4 broad themes that characterize the work: subjectivity and identity; the body and embodiment; representation and the visual; and time and space. Finally, we will briefly address whether there are problems in the approach

Consumption and the constitution of age: Expenditure patterns of clothing, hair and cosmetics among the post war "baby boomers"

The article addresses debates around the changing nature of old age, using UK data on spending on dress and related aspects of appearance by older women to explore the potential role of consumption in the reconstitution of aged identities. Based on pseudo-cohort analysis of Family Expenditures Survey, it compares spending patterns on clothing, cosmetics and hairdressing, 1961–2011. It concludes that there is little evidence for the ‘baby boomers’ as a strategic or distinctive generation. There is evidence, however, for increased engagement by older women in aspects of appearance: shopping for clothes more frequently; more involved in the purchase of cosmetics; and women over 75 are now the most frequent attenders at hairdressers. The roots of these patterns, however, lie more in period than cohort effects, and in the role of producer-led developments such as mass cheap fashion and the development of anti-ageing products

Looking out of place: analysing the spatial and symbolic meanings of dementia care setting through dress

The article explores how clothing exposes – and troubles – the ambiguous location of care homes on the boundaries of public/private, home/institutional space. It deploys a material analysis of the symbolic uses and meanings of dress, extending the remit of the new cultural gerontology to encompass the “fourth age,” and the lives of older people with dementia. The article draws on an ESRC-funded study “Dementia and Dress,” conducted in the United Kingdom (UK), which explored everyday experiences of clothing for people with dementia, carers and careworkers, using ethnographic and qualitative methods. Careworkers and managers were keen to emphasise the “homely” nature of care homes, yet this was sometimes at odds with the desire to maintain presentable and orderly bodies, and with institutional routines of bodywork. Residents’ use of clothing could disrupt boundaries of public/private space, materialising a sense of not being “at home,” and a desire to return there

How does Vogue negotiate age?: fashion, the body and the older woman

This article addresses the role played by clothing and fashion in the constitution of age, exploring the changing ways in which aging is experienced, understood, and imagined in modern culture through an analysis of the responses of UK Vogue. As a high fashion journal, Voguefocuses on youth; age and aging represent a disruption of its cultural field. How it negotiates this issue is relevant to both students of fashion and of age. Older women in Vogueonly feature sporadically, and predominantly in ways that dilute or efface their age. The current ideal is one of “Ageless Style” and cultural integration. But this has not always been the case. In the 1950s UK Vogueregularly featured a distinctly older women in the form of the fictional Mrs Exeter. No such figure appears—or could appear—today, and this article explores the reasons behind this, in the changing social and cultural location of older people in contemporary consumption culture

Clothing, age and the body: A critical review

Clothes are central to the ways older bodies are experienced, presented and understood within culture, so that dress forms a significant, though neglected, element in the constitution and experience of old age. Drawing on a range of secondary literature, the article traces how clothing intersects with three key debates in social gerontology: concerning the body, identity and agency. It examines the part played by clothing in the expression of social difference, exploring the role of age ordering in determining the dress choices of older people, and its enforcement through moral discourses that discipline the bodies of older people. Dress is, however, also an arena for the expression of identity and exercise of agency, and the article discusses how far older people are able to use clothing to resist or redefine the dominant meanings of age. Lastly it addresses questions of the changing cultural location of older people, and the role of consumer culture in the production of Third Age identities

Carers, families, relatives: Socio-legal conceptions of care-giving relationships

Abstract: In I990 for the first time the term “carer” was employed in legislation in the NHS and Community Care Act. The word had emerged in academic literature in the I970s, spreading to professional discourse in the 1980s; and it marks a change in emphasis from earlier usage in terms of families, relatives and next of kin. The law had previously touched on the areas of care-giving and family relations but within different frames of reference. This paper explores four of these: the “liable relatives” tradition of the Poor Law; the inheritance laws; medical decision-making by next of kin; and the role of the “nearest relative” in mental health legislation. It then discusses the significance of the emergence of the new terminology and the welfare debates within which it is embedded

Clothing, Embodied Identity, and Dementia

Clothes are central to how we perform our identities. In this article, we show how these processes continue to operate in the lives of people with dementia, exploring the ways in which dress offers a means of maintaining continuity of self at a material, embodied level. The article thus contributes to the wider cultural turn in aging studies, showing how material objects are signifcant in meaning-making, even for this mentally frail group. The article draws on the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded study “Dementia and Dress,” which examined the implications of clothing for people with dementia, carers, and care workers, using ethnographic and qualitative methods. It showed, despite assumptions to the contrary, that dress remained signifcant for people with dementia, continuing to underwrite identity at both the individual level of a personal aesthetic and the social level of structural categories, such as class, gender, and generation. The article explores how identity is performed through dress in social interaction, and the tensions that can arise between narrative and embodied enactment and around the “curation” of identity. Dress provides a lens for understanding the lives of people with dementia, while at the same time, focusing on dementia expands discussions of fashion, consumption, and cultural meanings of aging