It's Play Really, Isn't It? Dress, Creativity, Old Age

This paper 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 everyday, mundane, yet socially charged practices of older women. 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, which are often discussed with a focus on ‘creative individual’ or ‘creative genius’ rather than creative everyday practices.

We are particularly interested in the metanarratives that shape our understandings of dress phenomena. Twigg’s pioneering work (2013) has elaborately discussed life narratives of older women in terms of their dress – focussing on continuity and change through dress choices and preferences. Although the themes of choice and continuity are also important for our analysis, our overall focus is different. We are primarily interested in how metanarratives of creativity and old age interact to shape individual choices and practices – how our three informants both resist and conform to age-ordered and gendered demands and expectations. We are interested in the ways in which dress can be an agentic, creative practice for older women, how the conscious choice of clothing, the way it is then worn and constitutes an individuals’ style can be interpreted as a meaning-making and creative practice. Therefore, dress operates at two different levels in this account: it is explored as it constitutes an everyday practice and tool for the women we talked with, but it is also a frame and lens through which issues to do with old age and creativity can be discussed and analysed.