Exploring Identity with Lockdown Dressing
The New Yorker (7th December 2020) cover art by Adrian Tomine
When lockdowns first started, they provided people the chance to spend more time on their hobbies, which seems to have consisted primarily of baking given the flour shortages that we experienced here in the UK. At one point they were selling flour in illicit-looking unmarked plastic baggies, so you walked off feeling like Tony Montana’s less successful South London cousin (the world might not be yours, but all the bread you can bake from a single baggie of flour is). The first lockdown was followed by a Summer of mixed messaging and inevitable further lockdowns. As time went on the hobby enthusiasm waned and the reality of extended periods of being stuck at home sunk in, with wardrobe habits changing along with it. As someone who frequently battles bouts of agoraphobia, I basically have professional levels of lockdown training, and so it felt uncomfortably natural to me.
The psychological impact of lockdown (and the pandemic itself) on people is something that I really have been wondering about over the past few months. Will this all seem like nothing but a distant dream when things open up again, because people would prefer to forget it as quickly as possible, or will people carry trauma, however large or small, with them for years to come? My parents have lost several friends to the virus in the past year and that can be a difficult thing to wrap your head around, and will no doubt leave its mark. I think it is something as a society we will have to deal with when this is over, and while it is beyond my ability to talk about it in any meaningful way here, it is still something I do wish to make note of before continuing with this post.
Anybody who knows me knows of my obsession with the relationship between dress and identity. The social self is the dressed self, and so, if we remove or reduce the social aspect of dress, I wonder whether we are able to identify a loss of self? We find ourselves living at home, working from home, and socialising from home. Zoom calls and the like mean that we only really have to look presentable from the chest up. And if Zoom calls are not on the menu, then a number of people seem to have been wearing sweats and pyjamas at home with their “outside” clothing having essentially been sidelined for the past year. That is a significant shift in the dressing practices for the majority of people, and so it stands to reason that our relationship with dress and fashion has been altered because of the pandemic, and I am curious to see how that evolves post-pandemic.
Fashion is a social practice - we dress not just for ourselves, but with the expectation that we will be seen by others, and our dress inevitably helps frame the perception (for better or for worse) others have of us. Our clothes can also help us in terms of framing our day - we have an outfit for the gym, an outfit for work, an outfit we wear to bed, and so on. You put your work clothes on in the morning, and you mentally enter that space and that identity role. You come home, take your tie off and undo your top button or whatever the case might be, and that role is put aside for a different one. I do not personally subscribe to the Goffman view of identity as a collection of the roles we play with essentially nothing behind the masks. But I do believe that impression management when it comes to the roles we play is something that is negotiated in part through dress and has an impact on how we and others understand our identity. Indeed, it has been argued that because dress can serve as an instrument for influencing formal and informal relationships that dress is power (a topic for another time).
You can see impression management at work with Zoom calls where people have realised if they wear a shirt and tie, they can happily get away with wearing sweatpants because nobody can see their whole body. Many of us have adapted how we dress to prioritise comfort to a greater extent than we may have previously done. We are in the comfort of our own homes, but also at work, and so there are times where we have to look professionally presentable for the camera (and thus others). This is also the case with socialising in general, where because we are unable to meet up in person, we socialise more online with our friend network. The in-person performative aspects of dress are supplanted by the digital performative aspects of dress. As a fashion blogger, this is of course something that interests me.
Saulo B. Cwerner wrote an essay for Fashion Theory (Volume 5, Issue 1), which has always stuck with me, arguing that the “modern wardrobe is the space where the multiplicity of contemporary identity unfolds”. He spoke of the wardrobe as a pool of identity tokens, where we are constantly constructing and reconstructing identity. Fashion bloggers are only too familiar with identity construction through clothing and the performative aspects of dress in an online space. I would argue that lockdowns have actually allowed people the opportunity to renegotiate their relationship with clothing and their dressed identity, because in removing a lot of the social aspects of dress (and replacing them with digital representation online), we are able to play around more freely with self-representation. It has been a moment for reflection and introspection where we have been given the opportunity to question what we actually wear, especially when the spaces that our daily lives occupy have been so dramatically altered.
“Outdoor” clothes are reached for less often, as “indoor” clothes take on a newfound importance. To my mind this would seem to be accompanied with a loss of identity, if we consider those outdoor clothes, which usually make up the majority of our wardrobes, to also be the majority of our wardrobe’s identity tokens. However, I have been fascinated to see that social media has actually provided a space for people to explore and experiment with their dressing and thus reclaim a sense of identity in a playful and expressive manner. Remove (or at least severely reduce) the social aspect of dress, and people will still find a way to fulfil the desire to express themselves and to be seen by others. We have more freedom in how we dress when we are at home, because there is less social pressure to dress in a certain manner or to certain social codes - we thus have the opportunity to dress “for ourselves” far more than we might ordinarily have. This inherently allows us to reframe our relationship with our wardrobes.
What I have found is that people have taken to sharing images on social media of their outfits that have a far more creative and playful quality than usual. When nobody is there to see you in person, you can experiment with your style more. And given that many people have not seen each other in person since before lockdowns started, this is the perfect opportunity to reinvent ourselves and emerge with a new wardrobe. We have seen images on social media of people wearing costumes, or dressing up as if they were going to a formal event while sitting in the comfort of their own homes, or simply getting more creative with their wardrobes and experimenting with their style. I believe there has also been a difference where people have been going outside for their daily walks or other small excursions, because some are taking the opportunity to either dress up more or simply experiment more with the boundaries of their wardrobe.
With these shifts in habits I think there has been a change in how people relate to their clothing that they may never have otherwise experienced. Plus people are more willing to take creative risks when it is for a fun photograph posted online. Of course there is intense social pressure linked to the photographs we share of ourselves online, but in knowing that other people are also experimenting more with their wardrobes, even the most dramatic of costumes or the most basic of outfits serve the role of allowing us to renegotiate our dressed identities. I am also curious to see how many people are seeking to emerge from lockdown with entirely new looks.
I do wonder what the long-term impact of this period will be in relation to our dressing habits. I suppose we expect to see a trend in the short term once things open up again of people dressing in a far more performative and expressive manner, but moving forward a year or two, I think that in opening themselves up to dress in this way, people could potentially be profoundly reframing the way in which they see themselves and their relationship with their wardrobes. Dress marks the boundary between the self and other, the individual and society at large, and so in exploring that boundary we necessarily explore our own identity in the process. Thus, while we may have perhaps experienced some small loss of identity in putting aside a portion of our wardrobes, lockdown has actually provided a safe space to explore our relationship with dress and in doing so reframe our perceptions of how we dress and who we are. To my mind, knowing ourselves better can only ever be a good thing.
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