‘It’s play, really, isn’t it?’ Dress, creativity, old age

This chapter brings together and depicts some broad and contested concepts: dress, creativity, old age. Through the medium of dress, we seek to understand how creativity may function in certain everyday, mundane yet socially charged practices of the elderly. We explore how narratives of creativity and narratives of old age are challenged and conformed to by three women for whom dress has always mattered and who sometimes find it matters even more in their later life. In discussing their individual cases, we seek to contribute to the theoretical debates about the meanings and practices of creativity in later life.