Review

Author(s): Henri Peretz

Review by: Henri Peretz
Source: Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Fall 1994), pp. 337-340
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/si.1994.17.3.337
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 Reviewed by
Fashion, Culture and Identity Henri Peretz
by Fred Davis University of Paris
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992
226 pp. $24.95

Fred Davis was an attentive observer of fashion until the end of his life in 1993. In his
last book, he engages in a dialogue with scholars and professionals about the
interpretation of the meaning of the ever-renewing stock of articles that, today worn with
flair, will soon be hung, obsolete, in a closet to make room for newer articles. The book
deals with the diffusion of international fashions in clothing, particularly since the 1950s.
I advise readers to turn to the conclusion first: they will find there the conceptual
framework with which the author explores dressing codes, the fashion cycles, and
its processes. In the conclusion, Davis clearly distinguishes between two explanatory
models of the diffusion of clothing styles. The first model, the so-called “populist
model,” is centered around the consumer’s role. This model takes “the dress and
the appearance innovations of lay individuals and social groups (e.g., teenagers,
surfers, gays, skateboarders, feminists) as constituting the analytic stuff of fashion
study” (p. 202). Despite living in California where he could readily observe this street
fashion scene, Davis himself does not adhere to the populist model. Instead, he prefers
a second model, the “fashion system model.” Theoretically, this model is based on
a confrontation between a classical European sociological approach (e.g., Simmel)
and a North American interactionist one (e.g., Blumer). The “fashion system model’’
takes for granted that a center of innovation (Paris, Milan, fashion shows, designers,
editors, wholesalers, stylists, etc.) still radiates toward a periphery (stores,salespeople,
consumers in a segmented market).
Following this model, the book focuses on how interactions between actors in the
center and those in the periphery take place. Nonprofessional innovators-the key
group in the “populist model-play a role only in the chapter devoted to “antifashion”
(p. 180). The two major questions that Davis addresses in this book are: (1) how do
the various actors in the fashion system attribute meaning to clothes?; and (2) how
can the cycles of fashion and its processes be explained?

Symbolic Interaction, 17(3):337-340 Copyright @ 1994 by JAI Press, Inc.

ISSN 0195-6086 All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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338 Symbolic Interaction Volume 17 / Number 3 / 1994

THE AllRlBUTlON OF MEANING TO CLOTHES

In the beginning of the book, Davis quotes from an unpublished text by Blumer, who
asserts “While clothing may ‘speak,’ it rarely engages in dialogue” (p. 8n). Specifying
this statement, Davis shows that clothing speaks through visual codes, rather than
linguistic ones. These visual codes are unstable. They depend on their contexts, on
the relations between the persons who wear clothes and those who watch. The codes
that are being assigned to dress differ according to the viewing public. With the
exception of uniforms, very few clothes have a fixed meaning. “Undercoding” is the
term used by Davis in order to describe the process by which meanings are being
ascribed to dress. In the author’s view, the meaning that is given to clothes is always
ambivalent, because it fluctuates between opposite polarities.
The book is especially concerned with women’s dress. The gender difference is
one of the major sources creating ambivalence in the meaning of clothes: whereas
men are subject to a “restricted” dressing code, women are, instead, allowed to follow
a more “elaborate” code (p. 39).They may borrow items and fashion styles from men,
whereas the converse seldom happens (p. 42).The career woman’s suite best
exemplifies this: a “dress for success ... leavened by such feminine touches as silk
blouses ... earrings, manicured nails, and Chanel-style link necklaces and belts” (p.
50). Yet another example is the “Annie Hall look’with “its comic undercutting of claims
to masculinity through a gross oversizing of men’s clothes (p. 42,photo on p. 44).
Ambivalent meanings of dress can also originate from class differences. From
Simmel to Bourdieu, sociology has a long tradition of studying clothing as an indicator
of status differentiation.Davis discusses the relationship between social status and
clothing in another way: “The sartorial dialectic of status assumes many voices, each
somewhat differently toned from the other but all seeking, however unwittingly, to
register a fitting representation of self, be it by overplaying status signals, underplaying
them or mixing them” (p. 63).Davis takes the history of blue jeans as an example
of “de-mocratization” of dressing codes: once only worn by workers, blue jeans have
now become an acceptable and even chic item for other classes as well.
A final source of ambivalence is sexuality: in line with Flugel, Davis deals with this
ambivalence in terms of the dialetics between the erotic and the chaste and the
“existential tension of their opposition” (p. 92).

THE FASHION CYCLE AND ITS PROCESSES

Davis defines the fashion cycle as the time span between the introduction of a fashion
and its “supplantation” by a new one (p. 103).These cycles have been becoming
shorter, especially since the 1960s.A cycle’s process refers to the influences and
acts that invigorate it.
Again, Davis distinguishes between two major sociologicalexplanations of a fashion
cycle’s process: the trickle-down approach and Blumer’s interactionist approach. The

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The Effect of Social Class on the AQudication of Criminal Cases 339

trickle-down approach explains the fashion process in terms of class differentiation:

“Fashion is launched at the top of the social structure and works its way down to
the bottom” (p. 110).According to Davis, this approach fails to answer several very
important questions, such as: “What does the shortened hemline or double-breasted
suit mean to those who, cautiously, are among the first in their social circle to adopt
it?” or why do some trends “click while others fizzle?” (p. 1 13).
As opposed to the trickle-down perspective, Blumer argued that the fashion process
generates from collective choices. However, accordingto Davis, Blumer does not pay
enough attention to what fashion communicates nor does he “offer a methodology
for assaying what clothing’s meanings are” (p. 1 19). Moreover, Davis demures that
Blumer does not identify stages in the fashion process and that most actors in the
fashion process remain silhouettes.
Though not claiming to present a complete theory, Davis does “point to some more
incidental influences and constrains on the (fashion) process” (p. 124) from creation
to consumption and extinction.” Davis uses a slightly modified version of Sproles’ six
stages of the fashion process. But, in contrast to Sproles, he assigns a specific role
to each actor-from the designer to the wearer-at each stage of the process. For
instance, about the stage of inventing fashion, Davis maintains: “Short of accrediting
the questionable ‘change for the sake of change’ theory of fashion it seems altogether
possible to assume, albeit difficult to prove, the existence of subtle, nonverbal,
exchanges between couturiers.. . and their publics. The more difficult task is to specify
what such communications consists of“ (p. 132). By means of several detailed
analyses, Davis exposes how complicated the fashion process is: stages are not very
clearly separated from each other. But, like Blumer emphasized before, Davis also
discovered that buyers act as go-betweens among all actors at every stage in the
fashion process. Interpretations of the fashion processes should therefore evolve
around buyers, whereas-at every stage-they are the central actors.
Davis’ ideas are indeed most suggestive when interpreting dress code
ambivalences, the fashion cycles, and its processes. Yet, I am surprised that a
sociologistso closeto symbolic interactionism (andto Blumer, whose ideas continually
come up for discussion) has dealt with the meaning of fashion without providing
readers with actual observations about how ordinary people interpret their own and
other people’s ways of dressing. Like an art critic, Davis has based his interpretations
on: (1) comments made by manufacturers and “mediators” (either to him or in the
media); and (2) his own commentary about ways of dressing drawn from his
observations of stores, catalogues, or various other situations (especially during the
many fashion shows he attended). Although he has tried to put order in all this, “much
depends on the ‘sophisticationof audience’; on how the wearers and the viewers can
appreciate the qualifications, contradictions, calculated ambiguities and paradoxes
[that] designers, however intuitively and gropingly, seek to communicate by their
stylings” (p. 198).

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340 Symbolic interactlon Volume 17 / Number 3 I 1994

However, this book should not be seen as one more theory to be added onto the
long list of analyses of the fashion process. Davis has opened new possibilities for
empirical research, not least by creating interpretative categories that differ from the
functionalist approach, which studies of dress still often adopt He has not yielded to
the postmodernist temptation; his comments on the ambivalent effects of dress codes
have nothing to do with explanations in terms of “simulacre.” Davis constantly draws
parallels betweenthe logic underlying fashion cycles and the developments in science
and technology.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This review was translated from the French by Noal Mellot, CNRS, Paris.

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