The Dressed Society: Clothing, the Body and Some Meanings of the World

Abstract

This is a book about the meaningful adventures of dress in the world. Like any material object, clothing can be looked upon in terms of its brute concrete reality or as an element in some greater conceptual scheme transcending its mere materiality. For the social scientist, the relationship between the concrete and the conceptual is of central interest because it reveals in practice how we may make sense of the world in which we find ourselves - and even of the worlds that we have imagined.