Pleasure and Personhood: Women, Ageing and Dress

This presentation discusses the dress of older women as it is a multi-faceted creative practice, combining visual, haptic, cognitive and emotional elements. We show how these interrelated factors can contribute to the pleasure that dress is able to elicit, and how dress can operate as a tool when elderly women construct, make sense of, and communicate their personhood in later life which is often associated with gendered ‘invisibility’. Drawing on data from a small-scale empirical study that focused on 3 fashion conscious women in their 70s and 80s we discuss forms of everyday creativity, often overlooked by hegemonic narratives of creativity in late life. We emphasise how dress is both a means of conformity to gendered expectations of ageing as well as a way of resisting these: thinking differently, doing differently, making differently.