Classy looks and classificatory gazes: The fashioning of class in reality television
- Submitting institution
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Royal College of Art(The)
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- Pickering1
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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10.1386/ffc.3.3.195_1
- Title of journal
- Film, Fashion & Consumption
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 195
- Volume
- 3
- Issue
- 3
- ISSN
- 2044-2823
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
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https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/ffc/2014/00000003/00000003/art00003
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
-
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Classy Looks and Classificatory Gazes: the fashioning of class in reality television (2015) is a peer-reviewed article in a journal edited by one of the foremost scholars in the field: Pamela Church Gibson. Film, Fashion and Consumption aims to promote research “within and between the fields of film, fashion, design, history and art history” and fosters innovation via this unique, interdisciplinary context. As such, it is a fulcrum for this article, which apposes moving image, embodied class, gender, cosmetics and fashion. Little had been published on fashion and class since Diana Crane’s– rich in historical context - Fashion and it’s Social Agendas in 2000. Classy Looks… examines contemporary examples to bring current attitudes to self-presentation and stratification under scrutiny. The article was developed from a presentation at a European Popular Culture Association Conference, which, like the journal, attracts an international research community. It is part of an on-going body of research into socioeconomic status and embodiment.
The research posits a bourgeois gaze to elucidate what emerges from the collision between cultural hegemony and the male gaze in the examples analysed, and so demonstrates precisely how gender is policed through the lens of class. It is shown that whilst the ideologies of patriarchy and advanced capitalism might already be successfully internalized by those represented, the preferred taste culture is not. Hence, how middle class taste is universalised as good taste, and working class identity is leached of value, is exposed.
Within a context of concealment and denial of working class identities, the article strongly argued for stratification as an area of continuing academic importance. Since publication, the shifting political climate in Europe and the USA has led to a re-ignition of interest in the legacy of class in post-industrial contexts, thus the article was prescient, and research necessary, in this regard.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
