Clothing, age and the body: a critical review

Abstract

Clothes are central to the ways older bodies are experienced, presented and understood within culture, so that dress forms a significant, though neglected, element in the constitution and experience of old age. Drawing on a range of secondary literature, this article traces how clothing intersects with three key debates in social gerontology, concerning the body, identity and agency. It examines the part played by clothing in the expression of social difference, and explores the role of age-ordering in determining the dress choices of older people, and its enforcement through moral discourses that discipline their bodies. Dress is, however, also an arena for the expression of identity and exercise of agency, and the article discusses how far older people are able to use clothing to resist or redefine the dominant meanings of age. Lastly the paper addresses questions of the changing cultural location of older people, and the role of consumer culture in the production of Third Age identities.