Cultures, Identities, Historiesdown the notion of culture as a neutral descriptive category in the first place.
T.S. Eliot in a famous passage from his Notes towards the Definition of
Culture could state categorically that “culture... includes all the character-
istic activities and interests of a people: Derby day, Henley Regatta, Cowes,
the Twelfth of August, a cup final, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale
cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth
century gothic churches, and the music of Elgar.”^7 Ten years later at the
birth of cultural studies in Britain as a specific discipline, Raymond Williams
rejected this largely pastoral, romantic and commodified vision to present
what he saw as a more inclusive, realist definition of culture that encompassed
“steel making, touring in motor cars, mixed farming, the Stock exchange,
coal mining and London transport”.^8 Forty or fifty years on, both readings
of English culture are marked by the effects of nostalgia and the subjective
positions of their narrators, but Williams, together with Richard Hoggart,^9
incorporated the idea that culture is a contested and social field in which
production and consumption find no easy union and the activities, customs
and philosophies of the working class conflict with, or differ from, those of
the gentry. Their work established that culture is political as well as aesthetic
in its forms and effects.
Between the two positions evolved the formation of a modern school of
British cultural studies which aimed to examine precisely the circulation of
such constructions and their social power. A purer history of the discipline
would trace its roots back to the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social
Research established in Germany in 1923, before moving to the United States,
with its largely pessimistic and critical take on the effects of mass culture.
There isn’t the space here to outline the continuing development of cultural
studies as a discrete discipline, and I’m not sure that I could do it the justice
it deserves anyway. Graeme Turner’s recent British Cultural Studies: An
Introduction provides a more than adequate overview of the historiography
and its emergent methods.^10 What I do propose to offer instead is a broad
discussion of the key areas in which cultural considerations have made a
direct impact on the writing of fashion history over the past decades. These
fall largely under the categories of textual analysis (semiotics, film and
magazines), the consideration of audience and consumption (ethnography,
history and sociology), the role of ideology (hegemony, subcultures and
pleasure) and the political question of identities (race, gender, sexuality). These
- Eliot, Thomas Stearns, Notes towards a Definition of Culture, London: Faber, 1948.
- Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society 1780–1950, London: Penguin, 1958.
- Hoggart, Richard, The Uses of Literacy, London: Penguin, 1958.
- Turner, Graeme, British Cultural Studies, See above, London: Routledge, 1996.