Deciphering Folk Costume: Dress Codes among Contra Dancers

Abstract

Abstract For many schorlars, "folk costume" is an outmoded term that refers to a narrow range of ethnic, sectarian, and occupational clothing traditions. At the same time, folklorists tend to overlook some kinds of clothing choices because they seem merely to reflect "everyday dress." In this article, the authors examine how and why contra dancers choose what they wear to dance events as an example of how semiotic approaches introduced by Bogatyrev and others can reveal underlying clothing traditions-dress codes-applied to a subset of so-called everyday dress. Two instances of clothing behavior in particular, namely, the use of tee-shirts by dancers of both sexes and the growing use of skirts by male dancers, serve to "unpack" the complex communicative resources available to participants and suggest that folkloric research in this relatively unexplored area may produce rich results.