The Fashion Businessempirical analyses and therefore led to a split in terms of methodology and
theory between structuralists and culturalists at the moment when cultural
studies was gaining ground in Britain during the 1960s.
Structuralists viewed culture as their primary object of study, with the forms
and structures that produced meaning drawing their attention at the expense
of cultural specifics, empirical quantitative evidence and the process of
historical change. Culturalists, amongst whom most British social historians
of the left placed themselves, resisted this trend as overly deterministic and
comprehensive – in a word “ahistorical”. For E.P. Thompson in particular,
human agency retained a stronger hold than abstract ideology and the work
of British culturalists tended to look inwards to English historical experience
rather than outwards to European theory.^21 The two positions rather falsely
represent polar opposites for the sake of illustration and more recent work
predicated on a broad cultural studies perspective productively knits ideology
and experience together through the notion of “discourse”. This is a term,
owing much to the work of French theorist Michel Foucault,^22 that “refers
to socially produced groups of ideas or ways of thinking that can be tracked
in individual texts or groups of texts, but that also demand to be located
within wider historical and social structures or relations” (Turner 1996). Here
the scope for dress history has been wide, as it has for art history and literary
criticism, and in my view some of the most exciting examples for a cultural
dress history have resulted from this vein. I would offer the work on shopping,
department stores and the negotiation of class and gender in the nineteenth
century as one manifestation of the approach, incorporating as it does authors
as varied as Rosalind Williams,^23 Rachel Bowlby,^24 Valerie Steele,^25 Philippe
Perrot,^26 Mica Nava^27 and Elaine Abelson.^28 It is perhaps significant that
only two of these would associate themselves with the discipline of dress
history, though all have something to contribute to the development of the
discipline.
- Thompson, E.P., The Making of the English Working Class, London: Penguin, 1963.
- Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Harmondsworth:
Peregrine, 1979. - Williams, Rosalind, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth Century
France, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. - Bowlby, Rachel, Just Looking, London: Methuen, 1985.
- Steele, Valerie, Fashion and Eroticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
- Perrot, Philippe, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie, New York: Princeton University Press,
- Nava, Mica and Alan O’Shea (eds.), Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English
Modernity, London: Routledge, 1996. - Abelson, Elaine, When Ladies Go A Thieving, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.