Clothing semiotics and the social construction of power relations

Abstract

Henry David Thoreau once said: “It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes”. Indeed, clothes do much more than meet our physical and physiological needs. Clothes convey meanings in society beyond the superficial, enacting and even creating power relations between people. Considering the indispensability of clothes in our lives and the empowering, or disempowering, effects of clothes, this paper seeks to provide a framework with which clothing semiotics may be meaningfully explored and discussed.

Keywords:

• clothing
• clothing semiotics
• systemic-functional theory
• multimodal discourse analysis
• power
• gender relations

Acknowledgements

The author would like to express her gratitude to her supervisor, Dr Kay O'Halloran, for her feedback on this paper and her encouragement to submit this paper for publication. Figure 1(a) to 1(d) were reproduced from the website www.crystalink.com/egyptafterlife/html with the permission of the owner, Ms Ellie. Figure 2 was reproduced from the website www.classicartrepro.com with the permission of the owner, Ms Teresa Spencer. Special thanks to Business Consultant, Mr Bentley Williams, for the permission to use his picture in Figure 3. Special thanks to the photographer, Mr Wee Khim, for his permission to use the picture in Figure 4. Figure 5(a) and 5(b) were reproduced from the website www.rebelscum.com with the permission of the owners, Mr Philip Wise and Mr Dan Curto. This work was supported by the Singapore National Research Foundation Interactive Digital Media R&D Program, under Research Grant NRF2007IDM-IDM002-066.