Abstract
Based on research with eight to eleven-year-old girls from the South of England, I discuss the relationship between their clothes, identity, temporality, life course and the ageing process. Despite media accounts suggesting the passivity of pre-teen girls’ fashionable dress consumption, unknowingly becoming prematurely sexualised through hyper-feminine dress, by using the interlinking of materiality and life course as a lens to explore girls’ understanding of fashion, my research showed that girls engage with popular debates about age-appropriate dress. I demonstrate that the participants were aware of sexual generationing and explored older, hyper-feminine, sexualised identities at specific, socially-approved times. Most significantly, this materiality/life course approach offers new insights into how girls explore the past, present and the future, feeling the passing of time and the ageing process on their bodies, through the materiality of their clothes. It is through dress that girls come to understand age, temporality and where they are on their life course.
Highlights
Based on research with eight to eleven-year-old girls from the South of England, I discuss the relationship between their clothes, identity, temporality, life course and the ageing process
It was during this PhD research that the importance of agedness, and the little explored experiences of young girls of temporality, ageing and positioning on their life course through dress, came to light
In order to extend sociological writing about the construction of pre-teen feminine identities through dress, it is this under-explored relationship between time, age and dress for young girls, which is the focus of this article
Summary
Based on research with eight to eleven-year-old girls from the South of England, I discuss the relationship between their clothes, identity, temporality, life course and the ageing process. Few academic studies have explicitly explored the dynamic between girls, their embodied interactions with dress, and their agency in these processes of constructing themselves as gendered, raced, classed and aged (see Cook, 2008; Pilcher, 2010 for critiques of this dearth) This gap prompted my doctoral research with young girls about fashion and their constitution of identity so as to enrich the sociology of childhood, fashion and consumption (Blanchard-Emmerson, 2017). It was during this PhD research that the importance of agedness, and the little explored experiences of young girls of temporality, ageing and positioning on their life course through dress, came to light. In order to extend sociological writing about the construction of pre-teen feminine identities through dress, it is this under-explored relationship between time, age and dress for young girls, which is the focus of this article
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