An Explication of Visual Enactment in Advanced Style: Fashioning a Challenge to the Ideology of Old Age

Abstract

In this essay, we use the outfits of Advanced Style and their challenge to the ideology of old age to theorize the rhetorical strategy of visual enactment. We propose that visual enactment involves four key elements—visibility, individuality, syncreticity, and futurity. Visibility makes an issue salient, individuality breaks apart an established category, syncreticity integrates disparate elements to create a new ideology, and futurity involves the anticipation of a new kind of future. Application of this theory to other discursive and nondiscursive artifacts will reveal the extent to which these features characterize enactment generally.

Keywords:

• Advanced Style
• Clothing
• Enactment
• Ideology
• Old Age
• Visual Rhetoric

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Yufang Zhang for her contributions to earlier versions of the essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We are following the lead of Calasanti and Slevin (2001) in using the word old in this essay to refer to those of advanced years; they suggest “there is nothing wrong with being old” (p. 47). Although some scholars suggest that the use of the term old reinforces the negative view of those beyond middle age, Calasanti and Slevin (2001) counter that the disavowal of the word old is a symptom of ageism itself: “We should rather learn to use the word ‘old’ in a positive or neutral way—much in the same way that we use terms for other age groups” (p. 47). They offer as an example the term young, to whom negative characteristics are often attributed; yet no one proposes that a different term be used to refer to this age group.

2. Those photographed sometimes are referred to by both names, sometimes by one name, and sometimes are not named at all. For the sake of consistency, we will use just an individual’s first name when it is available.