Several terms with overlapping meanings appear in the works reviewed here: clothing, costume, dress, garment, apparel, and fashion. My choice to use dress is strategic, made in an effort to be inclusive and to avoid the ambiguities surrounding distinctions between cloth and clothing that arise when textiles shift from folded cloth to wrapped garments. In adopting the term dress, I follow Eicher & Roach-Higgins (1992) who viewit as an “assemblage of body modifications and/or supplements,” a definition that reckons both with the strategic effects entailed in the material properties of dress and their expressive abilities. Even then, I continue using the terms clothing/clothes and dress interchangeably but in the inclusive sense of dress just defined. I avoid the term costume used in dress scholarship for ite pants mens ensembles coordinated for masquerades, theatrical parts, dress from distinct historical periods, and native, indigenous clothing styles. The term rarely appears in the works reviewed here save from Latin America in reference to ethnic or regional dress. I speak of garments when referring to specific items of clothing and apparel when addressing issues concerning manufactured garments. Last but not least, I use fashion to frame this review because it is at the heart of widespread contemporary preoccupations with clothing and is central to the most exciting new scholarship on dress.

Whenexamining other people’s clothes as fashion, anthropologists have to come to terms with several long-standing scholarly concerns that have marginalized 1Important works on dress in cultural studies, popular culture, folklore, ethnology, psychology, and marketing fall beyond my scope. I have not considered works on dress and subcultural style, including gay and lesbian studies, a subject on which cultural and media studies are in the forefront. Most clothing research, including by anthropologists, focuses on young adults and adult populations, rarely examining the dress practices of children or the elderly. For reasons of space, I omit many interesting works on individual garments (e.g., Arthur 1999, 2000; Brydon 1998; Colchester 2003b; Foster & Johnson 2003; Kelly 2003). Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2004.33:369-392. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by Zhejiang University on 01/19/11. For personal use only. 372 HANSEN research on dress. One is the trivializing of consumers’, especiallyWesternwomen’s, interest in clothes, an antifashion tendency that devalues the significance of dress as a cultural and economic phenomenon. Today this tendency is less of an issue as many women and men study dress and as negotiations over gender boundaries through dress practice form part of the research agenda.

The second concern is the distinction between fashion in the West and the “traditional” clothing of much of the rest of the world drawn by scholars who explain fashion’s origin in terms of the development of the capitalist production system in the West. “Traditional” dress was never a cheap men suit cultural “heritage issue” in anthropology but was always a changing practice, remaking itself in interaction with other dress styles, with garments of Western commercial manufacture and the West’s fashion system. Globalization in the era of hypercommunication is creating a new “world in dress,” breaking down conventional fashion boundaries. Understanding fashion as a global phenomenon is further supported by shifts in the organization of garment production across the globe as well as by the vast economic significance of garment production in world trade.

The third concern arises from the lingering effects of trickle-down theories that have restrained our understanding of the sources and currents of dress inspirations. Bourdieu’s (1984) class-based explanatory model of differentiation may be criticized in this vein for accentuating distinctions between mass and high culture. Polhemus (1994) acknowledges influences on style adoption from the bottom up. Dress influences travel in all directions, across class lines, between urban and rural areas, and around the globe.Aproliferation of styles is simultaneously available, facilitating eclectic mixing if not idiosyncratic dress presentations (Polhemus 1996). Examining stylistic choice as a complex and heterogeneous process, contemporary anthropological work has moved beyond the idea of emulation to embrace notions of bricolage, hybridity, and creolization. Clarifying these dynamics and the power differentials that shape them is at the heart of today’s anthropological study of dress.

What is it about the dressed body that has prompted so much recent anthropological scholarship to approach it as a site of convergence for transnational, global, urban, and local forces? Because it both touches the body and faces outward toward others, dress has a dual quality, as Turner (1993 [1980]) noted when he coined the notion the social skin. This two-sided quality invites us to explore both the individual and collective identities that the dressed body outerwear men enables. The subjective and social experiences of dress are not always mutually supportive but may contradict one another or collide. The contingent dynamic between these two experiences of dress gives rise to considerable ambiguity, ambivalence, and, therefore, uncertainty and debate over dress. Dress readily becomes a flash point of conflicting values, fueling contests in historical encounters, in interactions across class, between genders and generations, and in recent global cultural and economic exchanges.

Some recent scholarship has revived a past era’s concerns with clothing as material culture but adds a new twist to highlight the efficacy of surfaces. Refocusing our attention on materiality as a surface that constitutes social relations and states of being, Miller (1994) and his colleagues explore how material properties affect what people do with cloth and clothing (K¨uchler & Miller 2005). Because clothes are so eminently malleable, we shape them to construct our appearance. There is an experiential dimension to the power of clothing, both in its wearing and viewing (O’Connor 2005). Our lived experience with clothes, how we feel about them, hinges on how others evaluate our crafted appearances, and this experience in turn is influenced by the situation and the structure of the wider context (Woodward 2005). In this view, clothing, body, and performance come together in dress as embodied practice.

While clothes are among our most personal possessions, they are also an important consumption good. Their worldwide production, export, and import circuits have altered the availability of apparel both on high streets in the West and in open-air urban markets in the third world. This accessibility not only facilitates individualism but also pushes the diversification of tastes in numerous directions, turning local consumers into arbiters of stylistic innovations that are contributing to the breakdown of fashion’s Western hegemony.