Theorizing Dress Stories

On March 6, I had the opportunity to attend Sandra Weber's talk at the McCord Museum, which largely incorporated excerpts from her and Mitchell's chapter on Theorizing Dress Stories from their book, Not just any dress: Narratives of dress, body and identity. Though I was disappointed that new themes and points of discussion were not raised in the talk, I was happy to have had the opportunity to view the photos missing from my copy of the chapter and displayed on PowerPoint slides throughout her presentation. Similar to my earlier posting discussing Mitchell & Weber's work on undressing the teacher, a point of the pedagogy of clothes is made early on this work, highlighting "...clothing is not only a means of identifying oneself as teacher, but is also a pedagogical strategy in itself, a means of commanding respect and order, of establishing a serious working atmosphere, and of exerting control."  The authors further call attention to the significance of clothes:

"Clothes thus mediate the personal and idiosyncratic ways we construct and express and live, in relation to community, as individuals. How we dress provides clues to detailed aspects of ourselves that can be read by people who know u in our particular context - things like personality traits, how we may be feeling that day, how much of a hurry we were in when we got dressed, how much weight we are trying to conceal, what concerns we may have about fitting in or standing out, whether we have an important meeting, who we are trying to impress, and so forth. And always, whatever else they represent, dresses express extensions and connections to the body, and are, we contend, themselves a mode of embodiment."

Poignantly noted, the dresses and other garments on display were embodied by bodyless frames, which produced the appearance of a body wearing the dresses, but in fact were entirely empty save for the wire meshing constructing their pseudo-embodiments. Weber & Mitchell write, "Clothes walk that invisible and ambiguous line between body and not body, mediating our sense of embodiment, and helping us enact or perform our embodied identities, both to our own eyes and to others." Several aspects of the display and Weber's talk made me uncomfortable. My gender identity precluded significant modes of empathy many of the audience members verbally and nonverbally affirmed with the speaker during specific examples of dressing the female body, confronting the imagined sexualized gaze in wardrobe sessions. Though a limited discussion of upper class benefits of women's dresses contrasting middle class options was made, no discussion of working class or poor women was provided. Thus, my mixed class identity again distanced me from the speaker, the audience members and the exhibit. The personal cultural and class values related to materially what one has in order to create a particular image can be disconcerting to those who spent a significant portion of their lives having very little, and when later having acquired more, desires even less. As I walked through the exhibit, I wondered of these "embodiments:" Were they Canadian? Were they white? Were they middle class? Were they religious? Were submissive or dominant women? Were they constantly conscious of what others ascribed to their identity based on the embodiment of their dresses? How did they too ascribe to others particular judgments and conclusions? What dresses did they aspire to? Which did they dismiss, refuse to acknowledge, or could not consider because its perceived counternormative production? As I walked out of the exhibit, I remembered the museum attendant insisting that I pay the usual admission charge of $20, until confirming that I was Dr. Mitchell's student. Who gets to see this exhibit? How is a particular gender, class, and race identity preserved between these walls by a barrier fiscally embodied?