Negotiating vulnerability and attractiveness through dress

The ageing female body is particularly exposed to the social gaze. While it should remain fit and durable as well as attractive and desirable, there is the danger of ridicule through supposedly too youthful or too outlandish performance. Women’s clothing practices can conform to social expectations, can circumvent them, can actively protest against them, and possibly change social demands. In every part of the process, i.e., the experience of bodily changes, the experience of social expectations, consumer choices, the practices of clothing and reactions to clothing choices, the body and getting dressed becomes a site of new feelings of vulnerability.

This article asks how these vulnerabilities are presented in the clothing practices of older women, are expressed in the materiality of clothes and in the practices of getting dressed.

Data from a study that followed a situational analysis methodology and used semi-structured interviews and photo elicitation, were re-examined through the lens of vulnerability.

Different aspects to vulnerability are presented in this article. Interviewees had to come to terms with bodily changes and made arrangement to the way they dressed that in turn could collide with subjective and social expectations of normative femininity. In this process of acquiescing, new vulnerabilities were produced; however, interviewees developed clothing strategies that provided them with experiences of their own attractiveness. They also had to adapt to changing circumstances to present themselves as fashionable and attractive due to age.

Practitioners can address feelings of vulnerabilities when talking about gendered clothing practices, for example through biographical work.