FASHION PERCEPTIONS OF FASHION AND DRESS BY VISUALLY IMPAIRED WOMEN IN FINLAND MIKKO KUKKONEN - DIVA PORTAL
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F ashion Perceptions of fashion and dress by visually impaired women in Finland Mikko Kukkonen Department of Media Studies Fashion Studies Master’s thesis (30 ECTS) Spring semester 2021 Supervisor: Marie Ulväng
A BSTRACT Understanding fashion and dress is frequently dictated by the sense of sight and the social fact of visibility. This thesis aims to explore the phenomenon of non-visual fashion and dress with a particular focus on visually impaired people and their bodies as a site of knowledge production. While previous studies of the relationship between body and dress have examined how the sighted body is fashioned, the present small-scale and socio-sensorial study attempts to fathom how fashion and dress become perceivable in haptic, audial, and olfactory terms. This thesis engages thoughtfully with the visually impaired and their feelings related to the present-day field of fashion and dress, building on a Bourdieusan framework of habitus and embodiment applied to fashion studies. Employing qualitative interviews conducted among visually impaired women in Finland, this thesis gives voice to the people meagrely represented in the literature on fashion and dress. Furthermore, while acknowledging the empirically grounded non-visual dimension, this thesis adheres to previous contributions of revaluing the plurality of epistemologies and discourses vis-à-vis fashion, dress, and the body. KEY WORDS non-visual fashion and dress, material culture, everyday embodiment, visually impaired people, habitus, field of fashion, aesthetic knowledge, diversity
T ABLE OF C ONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................... 1
Research Aims and Questions ..................................................................... 4
Literature Review ....................................................................................... 6
Technology and Accessibility of Fashion ................................................... 7
Sociology and Diffusion of Fashion ........................................................... 8
Everyday Life and Embodiment of Fashion .............................................. 11
Materials and Methods .............................................................................. 13
Visually Impaired Participants ................................................................ 13
Interviewing and Listening ...................................................................... 16
Theoretical Framework ............................................................................. 19
Field of Fashion and its Properties .......................................................... 19
Embodied Habitus and Aesthetic Knowledge ............................................ 20
Situated Everyday Negotiations ............................................................... 22
PERCEPTUAL ANALYSIS ....................................................................................... 23
Feeling the Visual Field of Fashion ........................................................... 23
Embodying and Displaying Impaired Habitus ............................................ 31
Perceiving Fashion and Dress Sensorially .................................................. 40
Discussing and Challenging ...................................................................... 46
Is There Non-Visual Fashion Beyond the Sighted? ......................................... 46
Conceptualisation of ‘becoming perceivable’ ................................................ 55
CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................... 58
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS......................................................................................... 60
REFERENCES ........................................................................................................ 61
APPENDICES ......................................................................................................... 63
Appendix 1. Participant recruitment letter ................................................. 63
Appendix 2. Semi-structured interview schedule ....................................... 64Again, actual sensation corresponds to the exercise of knowledge;
with this difference, that the objects of sight and hearing
(and similarly those of the other senses),
which produce the actuality of sensation, are external.
This is because actual sensation is of particulars,
whereas knowledge is of universals;
these in a sense exist in the soul itself. *
ARISTOTLE
* Aristotle, On the Soul. Parva Naturalia. On Breath., trans. W.S. Hett, Loeb Classical Library 288
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 417b.I NTRODUCTION
According to Torkild Thanem and David Knights, a research project begins when something
starts to itch.1 Speaking of itching as a bodily sensation, a feeling of discomfort that—although
bothering us all at some point in our lives—always remains a personal feeling, and that
frequently proves to be tricky to put into words. The authors accurately refer to itching in
figurative terms, depicting a triggering interest towards a phenomenon that will not leave us
alone. Something that might ignite us to ask whether there exists an akin itch beyond the
“limited realm of ourselves,” something that could even awake our will to understand other
people and ourselves—that is, itching as a personal, embodied experience that provokes and
encourages research to be made in the first place.2 In May 2019, while reading David Summers’
ambitious attempt to cultivate universal and synchronic frameworks to comprehend art and its
history from a spatial perspective instead of visual and diachronic, my itch began to take form.
Already in the introduction, I was astonished by the author’s following words,
Art has long been prone to reduction to problems in the psychology of visual
perception, which is an obvious extension of the Western assumption that art
taken altogether is about visual perception.3
Itchy, is it not? Think of seeing art left in situ or facing art deliberately in museums and galleries;
think of appreciating art in the privacy of one’s home or encountering art in the public sphere.
The ways we witness, experience, or study art and its histories are embedded seemingly in our
ability to perceive these objects labelled as ‘art’ visually. Moreover, while we do not have direct
access to these objects, we can observe photographs and recorded footage of them—visual
evidence of their current or former existence. What is art, then, without visual perception?
Although his post-formalist take on art history, as the author calls it, has been criticised within
academia, Summers pointed out somewhat revealing thoughts about our seemingly natural way
to perceive cultural objects and architecture through the globular organs of sight, our eyes.
The astonishment I felt resulted from questioning the predominance of and the value placed
on visual perception in our society, sense of the sighted ruling in our mediated everyday life.
As it happens, the word perception is defined by many dictionaries as one’s ability to see and
hear or become aware of something through the senses. Intriguingly, seeing and hearing take
1 Torkild Thanem and David Knights, Embodied Research Methods (London: SAGE, 2019), 40.
2
Thanem and Knights, 41–42.
3 David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London: Phaidon, 2003),
15–16. Emphasis in original.
1the first sensorial place in defining even though people have always used all of their senses—
conventionally divided in sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell—to get access to the world and
make it meaningful. One can still argue that physical processes of sight and the social fact of
visuality tend to rule, not only in perceiving art but also in our increasingly mediated everyday
life. As claimed by some historians, ocularcentrism associated with Renaissance, scientific
rationalism, and Enlightenment developments has steered seeing in the Western culture to a
hegemonic position.4 Similarly, in conversation, as linguists have shown, references to sight
outstrip references to the other senses that suggest visual dominance as a universal characteristic
of all languages.5 Albeit sartorial practices differ in cultural contexts, discourses of visuality are
predominant even in the world of fashion and dress. One could then argue that Summers’
scrutiny on the assumption about art being about visual perception is not that far from the ways
fashions are done, practised, and perceived not only among wearers but also by fashion scholars
who discuss, study and think fashion, fashioned bodies, and fashion systems through imageries,
discourses, and objects. Therefore, embodied and sensorial—haptic, audial, olfactory and even
gustatory—forms of fashion and dress and their direct link with the wearer’s body can remain
overlooked and unseen for the hegemonic seeing eye.
Outside the fields of medicine, (assisted) education and communication, studies on visually
limited or impaired people done within diverse disciplines of psychology, urban studies, and
computational intelligence have instead focused, to name but a few, on the perception of
colours,6 urban place and environment,7 and on finding solutions for intelligent clothing system
technologies.8 Relating the issue to fashion studies, recent sociological literature theories on
embodiment applied to the study of fashion indicate that dress should be understood as “a
situated practice […] result of complex social forces and individual negotiations” in everyday
life.9 However, the presence of visuality in the body of research bolstered by embodiment,
4 Mark M. Smith, Sensory History (Oxford: Berg, 2007).
5
Lila San Roque et al., ‘Vision Verbs Dominate in Conversation across Cultures, but the Ranking of Non-Visual
Verbs Varies’, Cognitive Linguistics 26, no. 1 (2015): 31–60.
6 Armin Saysani, Michael C. Corballis, and Paul M. Corballis, ‘Colour Envisioned: Concepts of Colour in the
Blind and Sighted’, Visual Cognition 26, no. 5 (2018): 382–92.
7 Laura Šakaja, ‘The Non-Visual Image of the City: How Blind and Visually Impaired White Cane Users
Conceptualize Urban Space’, Social & Cultural Geography 21, no. 6 (2020): 862–86; Agnieszka Wilkaniec et al.,
‘Non-Visual Perception of Landscape: Use of Hearing and Other Senses in the Perception of Selected
Spaces in the City of Poznań’, Teka Commission of Architecture, Urban Planning and Landscape Studies 9,
no. 2 (2013): 68–79.
8
Senem Kursun Bahadir et al., ‘Developing a Smart Clothing System for Blinds Based on Information Axiom’,
International Journal of Computational Intelligence Systems 6, no. 2 (2013): 279–92.
9 Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory, 2nd ed.
(Cambridge: Polity, 2015), 65.
2stemming eventually from the scholar’s positionality towards the topic, affects the examination
outcome. Thus, analytical research (other than object-based approaches) that both questions the
predominance of visuality and builds on empirical (field)work among visually impaired people
has remained notably unexplored in the field of fashion studies.
Optimistically not long ago, fashion design started to show interest in non-visuality when
four European design schools conducted the research project Beyond seeing that investigated
non-visual perspectives on fashion to find new ways of designing and creating fashion for
visually impaired people.10 Similarly, a small number of independent designers have started to
show interest in clothing design destined especially to visually impaired people.11 However, it
is remarkable that such designers are not represented in major fashion magazines. At the time
of writing the present study, if one takes the example of Vogue, a quick Google search on ‘visual
impairments’ and ‘fashion’ results with only a few articles published in recent years,
specifically in Teen Vogue,12 Vogue Singapore,13 and Vogue Business,14 to mention only three
examples here. Nevertheless, despite rising awareness of visual impairments and accessibility
to products, none of the magazine articles broaches fashionable dress from the point of view of
a visually impaired individual, consumer or reader.
One could ask how fashion and dress are perceived by visually impaired people—as I did
initially—assuming the supposedly sound hypothesis according to which non-visual perception
would somehow deviate from the sighted people’s perception; as if the use of haptic, audial,
olfactory and gustatory sensations instead of visual ones would automatically render the
perception of fashion and dress to something that differs from primarily visual perception. Ideas
of constant change and temporal fads related to fashion, individual aspects of style and the
importance of identity and outer appearances visible to others were raised by all of the visually
impaired women interviewed for this study when asked to define and describe fashion or
fashionable person. Therefore, after the empirical work was conducted, the research itch had to
10
Goethe Institut of Paris, ‘Beyond Seeing: Innovative Ways of Sensory Fashion Design’, Research and
Exhibition Project, 2019, www.goethe.de/beyondseeing.
11
To give some examples: Lithuanian textile and fashion designer Rugilė Gumuliauskaitė has rendered the
description of clothing more accessible and prints her collection books in relief; Argentinian brand Sonar whose
designer María Sol Ungar along with South-African designer Balini Naidoo incorporate braille language patterns
in their design; and the American non-profit company The Blind Brothers whose designers and most of their
workers are themselves visually impaired.
12 Lily Puckett, ‘These GIFs Will Show You What It’s Like to Be Visually Impaired’, Teen Vogue,
16 April 2016, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/visually-impaired-gifs.
13
Amelia Chia and Chandreyee Ray, ‘3 Visually Impaired Creatives in Singapore on Art, Inclusivity and Their
Personal Journeys with Disability’, Vogue Singapore, 22 February 2021, https://vogue.sg/3-visually-impaired-
creatives-in-singapore-on-art-inclusivity-and-their-personal-journeys-with-disability/.
14 Arabelle Sicardi, ‘Beauty Is Designing Packaging for the Visually Impaired’, Vogue Business, 24 July 2019,
https://www.voguebusiness.com/beauty/braille-beauty-packaging-loccitane.
3deviate from its initial ontological nature. Instead of emphasising how visually impaired people
perceive fashion, it proved to be more significant to stress and think how fashion and dress
become perceivable and tangible to visually impaired people; that is to people having
presumably limited access to the institutionalised field of fashion. For instance, think of
material objects visible in online and physical clothing stores, fashion and dress worn and
embodied by other people, but also reflections and self-image through mirrors, fashion
discourses and imageries on our phone screens and in catalogues, advertisement, blogs,
billboards, magazines, and television. Think of all this without the visual sensations provided
by sight. The way aesthetic knowledge of fashion is produced, distributed, and adopted in our
society relies comprehensively on visuality and visibility.
My interest in non-visuality is prompted by embodied experiences, intellectual curiosity,
and despondency caused after realising the evident gap in existing fashion literature on
non-visual fashion and the dearth of visually impaired people and their voices therein.
Therefore, before delving deeper into the study, it is crucial to identify terminological issues
and limitations. Firstly, due to my positioning as a sighted researcher with limited personal
experience of sensorial losses and possessing little knowledge about disabilities in general, any
expression that might cause implications of ableism is an error of mine alone. Secondly, naming
the topic initially as non-visual can inappropriately imply and reinforce visuality being a
somewhat superior and standardised Western way of doing, practising and perceiving through
which something that is not visual is understood and conceptualised as opposed. In this study,
connotations of this sort are not implied nor aimed. Instead, when the term non-visual fashion
and dress is used, it allows for deeper intellectual focus on all the other simultaneously existing,
embodied yet disregarded ways of practising and perceiving fashion and dress.
In other words, fashion and dress perceived not without sight but—and possibly to a greater
extent—beyond sight.
R ESEARCH A IMS AND Q UESTIONS
In the present study, the word perception is understood as an ability to become aware of
something, that is, fashion and dress, with the information being provided not primarily nor
necessarily by sight but other senses. More precisely, this study is a small-scale socio-sensorial
attempt to engage thoughtfully with visually impaired people (henceforth VIP), building on a
4Bourdieusan framework applied to fashion studies by Joanne Entwistle and Agnès Rocamora.15
With his concepts of habitus and field, the French sociologist offers a nuanced way to reflect
upon the embodied and situated nature of everyday negotiations, practices, and perceptions
between individuals, as VIP here, and social structures, as the field of fashion.16 Within this
visually-oriented field, the intrinsic and tacit knowledge of fashion is taken as given as it is
mediated through imageries, embodied upon ourselves and other people; thus, observed and
seen all around us in everyday life.
In a broader sense, in giving voice to the people meagrely represented and recognised
previously in the theoretical literature on fashion and dress, this study will first and foremost
recognise VIP and their bodies as legitimate sites of knowledge. Therefore, this study will opt
for shedding light on the phenomenon of non-visual fashion and dress by acknowledging and
presenting visually impaired women’s opinions about, feelings of, and encounters with the
present-day field of fashion. Furthermore, in stressing the dialectic relationship between the
individual and her structuring social space, this study will aim to elucidate dressed (and fashion)
habitus from the embodied perspective of visually impaired women. Lastly, this study will
provide insight into how fashion and dress become perceivable and tangible to VIP. The present
study, to achieve these aims, will be guided by the following research questions:
Q1 How do visually impaired women feel in relation to fashion and dress?
Q2 How do visual impairments affect dressed woman’s habitus?
Q3 How do fashion and dress become perceivable to visually impaired women?
This study will attempt to conceptualise the overlooked phenomenon of non‑visual fashion and
dress in answering these three questions. Consequently, a fourth and final research question
will be presented as follows:
Q4 How can the non-visual dimension of fashion and dress be perceived conceptually
in fashion studies?
As it will become evident, this study is neither a study of sensorial or material culture nor a
study based solemnly on consumption choices relating to fashion, even though these approaches
are inevitably linked to the problematisation in question. As a study conducted within the
15 In Finland, where the empirical work was conducted, two terms exist that are used for addressing VIP:
näkövammainen/synskadade and näkörajoitteinen/synhindrade the former being more widely used even though
implying and connotating vision-related damage or injury, the latter encompassing an idea of limited vision.
Some study participants used the word sokea (equivalent to ‘blind’) to describe or define their condition, which
will be quoted in the analytical part accordingly when using extracts from the interviews. However, this word
will not be used any further in the main text due to its possible pejorative connotations.
16 Entwistle, The Fashioned Body, 35–39, 243.
5interdisciplinary field of fashion studies, there is not necessarily a need for material object or
visual sources since becoming perceivable becomes the object of the study.17 However, as
shown by Giorgio Riello, the material object in fashion studies does exist, albeit not always in
its materiality, but in reference to more extensive, often theoretical, concepts through which it
becomes possible to consider and clarify current convolutions in contemporary cultures.18
Therefore, while investigating everyday sartorial practises, the material and embodied
manifestation of fashion in dress cannot remain unnoticed. After all, it was, and continues to
be, worn, cherished, and perceived by the visually impaired women involved in this study. For
this reason, as Riello observes, an approach examining the materiality of fashion has to explore
embodied “modalities and dynamics through which objects take on meaning.”19
An approach such as the one taken in this study—while not from a historical perspective,
as Riello proposes—will embark the researcher on an analytical journey with visually impaired
women and their everyday lives while combining fashion studies with the sensorial culture of
present-day fashion and dress.
L ITERATURE R EVIEW
The limited amount of precedent inquiry on VIP and non-visuality within fashion studies invites
the researcher to ask, firstly, to what extent fashion is explained and defined visually and
secondly, how to situate an investigation as the present one among such literature that does not
question visuality. However, from a solution-based perspective, one previous study of fashion
consumption has been conducted employing interviewing with VIP. Accordingly, in the first
section of this literature review, this preliminary study will be examined, and the need for a
closer investigation into the matter is proposed. The second section will critically discuss recent
and relevant literature on the sociology of fashion that explains how fashion as an abstract
concept becomes diffused and observed in society. After those contributions, in the third
section, approaches entailing embodiment and everyday life will be examined that intertwine
the adoption and consumption of fashion more firmly with situated aspects of dress.
17
See Yuniya Kawamura, Fashion-Ology: An Introduction to Fashion Studies, 2nd ed. (New
York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 2.
18
Giorgio Riello, ‘The Object of Fashion: Methodological Approaches to the History of Fashion’, Journal of
Aesthetics & Culture 3, no. 1 (2011), https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v3i0.8865.
19 Riello.
6T ECHNOLOGY AND A CCES S IBILITY OF F AS HION
To the researcher’s knowledge, only one investigation exists to date that raises VIP and their
interaction with fashion and its excluding limitations as a topic of inquiry. In their
human-centred computing investigation, Michele A. Williams, Callie Neylan, and Amy Hurst
present two mixed-method small-scale studies.20 While using interviews and diaries with eight
visually impaired women, the first study mapped difficulties with shopping, clothing care and
management.21 As a result, the authors defined two areas of inaccessibility of fashion for VIP;
objective (colours, sizes) and subjective information (opinions). However, what the authors
mainly propose is technological solutions. Accordingly, with their second study, employing
online surveys with a focus group consisting of both sighted and visually impaired participants,
the authors aimed to gather information in order to map potential opportunities for future
technology development.22 Nevertheless, the study of Williams et al. acknowledges limitations
that the field of fashion impose on VIP, something which is relevant for the problematics of
non-visual perception in this study, too. Similarly, their findings suggest that VIP have a
specific desire to “fit in” and that shopping for VIP becomes a collaborative work within the
visually-oriented world of fashion.
Albeit Williams et al., in their study, comprehend clothing as a “critical aspect of modern
life” and fashion as a phenomenon dependent on vision, the authors do not further develop these
two; instead, the sense of fashion is reduced to a form of communication linked to wearer’s
identity.23 However, the present study echoes the authors’ starting point as regards the
problematics of vision and how this has an effect on detection and interpretation of “the visual
meaning of fashion” by VIP, something which highlight that ‘visual’ is only one of the many
other meanings of the complex phenomenon. 24 Similarly, while their preliminary study presents
a valuable overview of the largely neglected topic within fashion studies, the present study
delves deeper into the lives of VIP, which also helps to contribute with more theoretical
reasoning behind everyday negotiations and choices over fashion and dress.
20 Michele A. Williams, Callie Neylan, and Amy Hurst, ‘Preliminary Investigation of the Limitations Fashion
Presents to Those with Vision Impairments’, Fashion Practice 5, no. 1 (2013): 81–105. It should be emphasised
that the researcher discovered this study—representing a positive but unexpected exception to the otherwise
absent field of inquiry—post-empirically, nearing completion of the present analysis. Thus, Williams et al.’s
preliminary study did not influence the research questions and initial hypothesis, albeit it could have had.
21 Williams, Neylan, and Hurst, 85–92.
22 Williams, Neylan, and Hurst, 92–99.
23 Williams, Neylan, and Hurst, 82.
24 Williams, Neylan, and Hurst, 82.
7S OCIOLOGY AND D IFFUS ION OF F AS HIO N
The theoretical research in fashion questioning the predominance of visuality remains limited
as current theories of fashion tend to take the social fact of sight for granted. In their attempt to
define fashion as “an unplanned process of recurrent change against a backdrop of order in the
public realm,” Patrik Aspers and Frédéric Godart locate diffusion as one of the core aspects of
fashion.25 The authors emphasise the becoming nature of this social phenomenon conveyed
through usage and practice—both by brands when, for instance, advertising fashionable goods
and by people when adopting these or exhibiting and displaying their fashioned bodies. 26 In
stressing the public nature of fashion, Aspers and Godart argue for a need for space for fashion
to be diffused in society. According to them,
[f]or fashion to exist, the object, practice, or representation in question must be
observable by most or by all, for example on the Internet or in a mall. It must also
be financially accessible to actors. Various theories of diffusion and adaptation
can be used to explain how this occurs […] such as diffusion through
observations in public or via information that is communicated in networks.27
As it becomes clear, Aspers and Godart present the necessity of public observation for fashion
to exist in the first place. Furthermore, to explain how fashion becomes diffused and adopted
(one could also say perceived), the authors present social networks which are only briefly
mentioned and not further problematised. A series of questions open up about the role of
networks as a means of conveying information: what kind of information is conveyed, when,
how, and from who to whom? Following this line of thought, it is as though fashion would not
exist for a person who cannot publicly observe (in the sense of ‘watching’ or ‘noticing’) fashion
in dress or practice in visual terms. Nevertheless, as a novel direction for future research, Aspers
and Godart address the salience of studying comparatively not only fashions of the same idea
in different contexts but rather exploring fashions of different ideas within the same context in
order to understand better phenomenon’s various social processes, practices, and
representations.28 Thus, the present study on non-visual fashion, a disregarded topic both in
historical and contemporary perspectives, relates in some such way to what Aspers and Godart
wished to see further developed in the field of fashion studies.
25 Patrik Aspers and Frédéric Godart, ‘Sociology of Fashion: Order and Change’, Annual Review of Sociology
39, no. 1 (2013): 171–92.
26 Aspers and Godart, 183, 185.
27 Aspers and Godart, 186–87. Emphasis added.
28 Aspers and Godart, 187.
8Diane Crane and Laura Bovone sees fashion as a part of a broader social and cultural
phenomenon that creates and attributes symbolic value to clothing.29 The ways this value is
attributed can take many forms, something which represents for the authors particular and
possible sociological ways to study fashion as material culture. Three of their proposed
approaches are relevant to mention in this study. Firstly, according to the authors, in the process
of cultural production, the symbolic value of fashion is conveyed to material culture “through
the collective activities of personnel with a wide range of skills,” that is, through the creative
professionals and workers involved in the fashion industry.30 However, this approach is partly
unexplored in the individual level of commercial fashion, although the authors mention briefly
small-scale retailers. Similarly, as shown elsewhere, people outside the fashion industry, such
as celebrities, transmit symbolic and material knowledge of current fashions.31
As mentioned, the authors present another way to analyse how the transmission of
symbolic value is conveyed to material objects, namely the process of communication.32
Stressing especially advertisements Crane and Bovone report that images have become more
and more prominent with regard to clothing in present-day fashion as “[e]ditorial pages in
fashion magazines, advertisements, catalogues, and programs on television and cable
disseminate images of clothing more widely than the products they depict.”33 However, while
stating this, the authors situate the process of value transmission, namely, knowledge of fashion,
mainly within the limits of visual perception. Therefore, in communication, the message
(image) that the brand sent reached its target audience unhinderedly. Consequently, the weight
Crane and Bovone put on mediated fashion imageries as communication leaves little room for
discussion about other possible ways through which fashion and ‘fashionability’ are diffused
and thus become perceivable, for instance, in material and aural culture.
The third approach to be mentioned here is the attribution of symbolic values to material
culture by consumers.34 However, the authors’ view on this matter remains highly reduced as it
entails only three kinds of consumer comportment, namely, according to social classes,
29 Diana Crane and Laura Bovone, ‘Approaches to Material Culture: The Sociology of Fashion and Clothing’,
Poetics 34, no. 6 (2006): 319–33.
30 Crane and Bovone, 321.
31 In initiating and epitomising fashions, celebrities and influencers can even produce new symbolic value which
trickles down to their followers on a global scale to whom being ‘fashionable’ translates by these public figures’
lifestyles and sartorial choices. For an in-depth discussion on the dissemination and consumption of
‘celebrity fashion’, see Pamela Church Gibson, ‘Celebrity’, in The End of Fashion: Clothing and Dress in the
Age of Globalization, ed. Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 67–78.
32 Crane and Bovone, ‘Approaches to Material Culture’, 322.
33 Crane and Bovone, 322.
34 Crane and Bovone, 323.
9lifestyles, and youth subcultures. What is more, all but one of the approaches discussed by
Crane and Bovone tend to follow in line with large-scale sociological analysis on fashion,
highlighting the institutionalised aspects of production. Thus, their proposed framework seems
to neglect how individuals adopt and grasp the symbolic value of fashion first produced
culturally, then diffused socially, and ultimately materialised and made perceivable visually in
dress, practice, or another form of representation. However, in acknowledging the need for
more analytical studies featuring aspects of meaning, production, communication, and
consumption, the authors point out relevant future developments, albeit stressing national and
global dimension and the centrality of the object as a cultural good.35
Yuniya Kawamura offers one suitable framework to fathom fashion as a social construct,
namely, fashion-ology, a particular sociological approach fostered by her.36 Kawamura argues
that investigating the macro and the micro levels of the field of fashion provides a closer look
for institutions and individuals involved in the diffusion of fashion.37 In her study, Kawamura
summarises numerous existing models and strategies that regulate production, diffusion, and
adoption of fashion in society, such as influential leaders, gatekeepers, and fashion propaganda
through advertising.38 Relevant for the topic of this study is the inquiry Kawamura makes on
the micro-level of personal diffusion: how the individuals come to know those specific items
of clothing are “the fashionable items of the time?”39 Although defending her view of fashion
as an abstract concept and system separated from dress, Kawamura states that a transformation
takes place when the idea of fashion becomes adopted and consumed in society, and this, by
converting into “something more concrete” and—needless to say,—“visible […] clothing
fashion.”40 As argued, Kawamura acknowledges the societal collectiveness of fashion and sees
the pervasive mediated imagery as increasingly essential in mass-consumed fashion. However,
by coining the term “social visibility of fashion” as a key to collective behaviour in fashion,
Kawamura pins down several aspects regulating diffusion and adoption of current styles,
colours, cuts, and models, namely “societal clothing norms.” 41 Individuals first observe and
identify these norms collectively and then adopt them personally by evaluating and taking into
account these observations about fashion and dress, which are, above all, perceived visually.
35 Crane and Bovone, 330.
36 Kawamura, Fashion-Ology.
37 Kawamura, 75.
38 Kawamura, 72–85.
39 Kawamura, 75.
40 Kawamura, 87. Emphasis added.
41 Kawamura, 95–96.
10E VERYDAY L IFE AND E MBODIMENT OF F AS HION
To fathom fashion not merely as a visual phenomenon but also as a bodily experience has been
a topic of growing interest in the field of fashion studies. An embedded turn in the literature,
influenced by Entwistle with her sociological inquiry, filled the lacuna in previous writings on
the phenomenon primarily focused on disembodied aspects of fashion.42 In highlighting the
persisting division in literature, addressing either fashion (seen as an idea) or dress (seen as a
practice), Entwistle proposes instead—and what is relevant for this study—that fashion and
dress should be investigated as situated bodily practices analysing how they are lived,
experienced, and embodied in everyday life by their wearers and their living and phenomenal
bodies.43 According to Entwistle, the negotiations taking place between fashion and dress
outside the fashion system ought to be further assessed because
within these parameters are many practices of dressing that are dependent upon
a variety of other social structures. A consideration of dress from this perspective
involves investigating experiences and practical understandings of fashion as
well as the factors which mediate it. 44
In mentioning these mechanisms, Entwistle touches upon the echelon somewhat neglected in
previous research. However, this everyday echelon which, one could say, represents the lion’s
share of the negotiations about the materialisation of fashion in dress, could be argued to include
people beyond cultural intermediaries—a Bourdieusan concept Entwistle refers in her inquiry
and which she has developed further elsewhere.45 It should be noted that dressed bodies are
present, too, when fashion becomes diffused and adopted in society, not only when related to
class, gender, identity, and sexuality which Entwistle has otherwise cogently assessed.
For Entwistle, the sense of fashion and dress is, after all, about bodies in the plural.
However, when focusing on these bodies, Entwistle takes their able-bodiedness and their ability
to see for granted. Moreover, she explores studies grounded in empirical approaches only within
anthropology and social psychology that tend to focus mainly on non-Western and traditional
communities, thus failing to implement empirical material, bodies or bodily practices in her
study of fashion and dress.46 Interestingly, Entwistle does not consider further contributions of
object-based approaches nor studies of material culture that embrace powerful substantial and
sensorial agent of objects claiming that materiality gives meaning to clothing in the first place.
42 Entwistle, The Fashioned Body.
43 Entwistle, 3–4, 55.
44 Entwistle, 65. See also x-xiii.
45 Joanne Entwistle, ‘The Cultural Economy of Fashion Buying’, Current Sociology 54, no. 5 (2006): 704–24.
46 Entwistle, The Fashioned Body, 75–76.
11However, although her scrutiny remains centred on the intersection of production and
consumption and within the internal processes of creative and aesthetic industries and bodies
therein, Entwistle recognises the need for closer analysis on everyday interactions between
consumers and fashion as the individuals are “looking, handling, examining, trying on” clothing
and accessories in their everyday life.47
In a more recent historical analysis, Cheryl Buckley and Hazel Clark delve into women’s
everyday sartorial practices from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century.48 Whereas
Entwistle attempts to bring fashion and dress together, Buckley and Clark merge fashion closer
with everyday urban life. The authors accentuate mediated imageries around fashion that by the
millennium had made fashion more “newsworthy than ever” due to its dissemination, that is,
its diffusion. Therefore fashion, as they observe, became a show, “a more visible and consistent
part of lives, […] means by which more people could ‘show off’ in public than ever before.”49
As the authors argue, the show was (and remains) diffused increasingly online via social media,
television, and exhibitions—through the penetrating screens. Consequently, in stressing the
mundane, Buckley and Clark seem to associate expanding visuality of fashion with
everydayness, thus reinforcing discourses on sight already present in the literature, which does
not consider people who practise fashion and dress in other ways. Similarly, albeit employing
material objects, the other sources that the authors use are visual such as photographs, and thus,
while stressing everyday life, the aural culture remains cornered. 50 However, what is relevant
for this study is the argument Buckley and Clark make on the absence of more incisive and thus
far “hidden” explorations of the less apparent aspects of everyday life, including production,
consumption and use of fashion by ordinary people.51
To conclude this literature review, albeit VIP and their relation to fashion have been
preliminarily investigated, the questions that the present study evokes have not yet been
discussed in depth in fashion studies. Therefore, by filling this lack of understanding, this study
will opt to bring fashion, dress, and everyday negotiations together; negotiations that take place
between the visual and structural field of fashion and a particular kind of people, namely,
visually impaired women who will be introduced in the following section.
47 Entwistle, 217–40.
48 Cheryl Buckley and Hazel Clark, Fashion and Everyday Life: London and New York (London: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2018).
49 Buckley and Clark, 235–72.
50 Buckley and Clark, 17–19.
51 Buckley and Clark, 1.
12M ATERIALS AND M ETHODS
In order to gain access to understanding, which is neither visible nor accessible to the sighted
researcher, the methodological emphasis has to be put on the visually impaired body’s capacity
to perceive and produce knowledge of non-visual fashion and dress in social interaction.
Accordingly, in this section, the two interrelated sides of interviewing, providing a means to
uncover sources and being an insightful research method, will be discussed regarding the
collection, transcription, translation, and thematic categorisation of the empirical material.
V IS UALLY I MPAIRED P ARTIC IPANTS
The Finnish Federation of the Visually Impaired (Näkövammaisten liitto), the umbrella
organisation on a national level in Finland, was contacted in January 2021 to send the
recruitment letter (see Appendix 1). One regional association of VIP operating in Finland was
contacted in parallel through family connections. Both parties responded with interest and
fascination. The Federation published the recruitment letter on a Facebook group for visually
impaired young and a discussion forum dedicated to fashion and beauty; the regional
association shared the letter externally for their members. Twelve women responded to the letter
by email, from which ten volunteers aged between 29–69 were willing to be interviewed in
February 2021. The interviews were conducted in Finland with mixed methods, including three
face-to-face interviews, four phone interviews, and three computer-assisted online interviews
using two videotelephony services Zoom and Microsoft Teams. The computer and
phone-assisted interviews created distance between the interviewees and the researcher as the
visually impaired were dependent solemnly on the audial perception compared to face-to-face
interaction. In this case, they could also have relied on haptic sensations, feelings in both
emotional and sensorial meanings, and olfactory clues. Likewise, another disadvantage of more
disembodied interviewing is that the faces and facial expressions, gestures, non-verbal
language, and clothes worn by most interviewees were not visible to the researcher. However,
given the topic of this study, the sighted researcher’s reliance mainly on non‑visuality and thus
spoken, aural discourse can be justified both in general terms appropriate and methodologically
suitable and a conceivable option to be further considered when doing interviews.
The average length was 28 minutes with variation from 19 to 51 minutes, albeit clear
boundaries of starting and ending an interview imposed by recording practices are challenging
to define precisely due to social interaction’s improvised and conversational nature. The
interviews were recorded and stored in audio file format and transcribed initially
computer-assisted, and afterwards, proofread and corrected free of regional characteristics and
13variations manually.52 It should be noted that the transcription of the final interview
(Participant 10) was written from the interpreter’s translated speech, not directly from the
participant’s own communication in sign language. All participants consented to share and
report their gender, age, and sensory impairments in the study; however, their names are
withheld by mutual agreement. Any other names and places and specific information about
impairments and their diagnosis mentioned in the transcriptions were erased to keep the
participants’ identity confidential. The participants’ demographic information, their coded
names used in the analysis, and the interview methods are presented below.
Table 1. Participants and interview methods
Coded name Age Visual (and other) impairments Interview
method
congenital vision loss, detects light and shapes
Participant 1 29 Zoom
of objects in a certain light
congenital hearing impairment and degenerative
vision due to a rare genetic disorder, hearing
Participant 2 70 Phone call
cured with ear implants, vision loss on one eye,
blurred vision on the other, trouble with colours
10° tunnel vision due to a genetic disorder,
Participant 3 53 In person
trouble with shades of colours
near sightedness and sensitivity to light due to a
Participant 4 65 In person
genetic mutation, blurred vision
complete vision loss seven years ago due to a
Participant 5 63 Phone call
degenerative and rare genetic disorder
partial vision loss 11 years ago due to an
Participant 6 52 accident, very narrow 1-3° tunnel vision only on Phone call
one eye
complete vision loss at the age of 15 due to a
Participant 7 69 In person
congenital condition
complete vision loss 20 years ago, detects
Participant 8 60 Zoom
flashes of light and movement
complete vision loss at the age of one, detects
Participant 9 46 Phone call
bright colours
congenital hearing loss, partial vision loss
Microsoft
Participant 10 43 twenty years ago due to a rare syndrome,
Teams
variable vision: from loss to moderate vision
52
The Two Zoom interviews (of which only the first one was conducted with video) were recorded with the
application’s recording function; three interviews in person, four on the phone, and one on Microsoft Teams were
recorded with the iOS Voice Memos application on MacBook Pro or iPhone SE. The initial transcribing was
conducted with a computer vocal recognition function in Microsoft Word. The completed transcriptions in
Finnish are available by request from the researcher.
14As stated in the recruitment letter, the main criteria required participants to have decreased
ability to see due to congenital impairment or other cause or accident. This resulted in
significant heterogeneity within the participants, so each interviewee had a unique condition
regarding vision and sight, either its span or partial or complete loss. Because the participants
told the causes and diagnoses of their impairments openly and shared feelings and personal
experiences living with them, both positive and negative, the accounts are true for them, and
therefore their responses can be undoubtedly trusted. However, it should be mentioned that
several participants felt that the recruitment letter did not provide sufficient information about
the present research. Therefore, in this study, inaccurate informing and identifying appropriate
participants due to the researcher’s inexperience with survey methods and unfamiliarity with
visual impairments can be seen as a potential drawback. A small sample can be justified with
difficulty in obtaining participants on a purely voluntary basis. Ten female participants are far
from representing VIP, so caution must be applied when analysing and framing the responses.
Nevertheless, and albeit the potential misidentifying of participants, the heterogeneity of the
ten women regarding age and sensory impairments addresses and represents the distinct nature
of various lived and embodied realities that are true and unique to people living with
impairments. Thus, by its very nature, the present study adheres to the criterion of fairness by
encouraging to include all voices worthy of being heard such that they have equal status
throughout the research project.53
Furthermore, it should be noted that the group of participants consisted entirely of women,
which echoes and might erroneously reinforce the seemingly conceived gendered nature of
fashion and dress.54 The absence of visually impaired men, younger adults, and youths remains
noticeable in this study, but this does not imply that these groups of people would not be
interested in fashion or dress. The word choices of the initial inquiry and channels and networks
where the message was sent and shared have limited or hindered access to the information.
Therefore, with respect to transparency and openness and the keen curiosity witnessed among
the participants, the study’s main conclusions in the form of an abstract will be presented in
Finnish and shared accordingly among the participants.55
53 Kerry E. Howell, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Methodology (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2016), 190.
54
On the feminisation of fashion and dress, see, for example, Kawamura, Fashion-Ology, 9–12.
55 A short oral presentation of the study will possibly be held at an event organised by one regional association
of VIP operating in Finland.
15I NTERVIEWING AND L IS TENING
As a sighted researcher, one cannot remain unaffected by assumptions about and pre-knowledge
of the phenomenon of non-visual fashion and dress formed and dictated firstly by visuality in
general and secondly by sighted scholars’ writings on (visual) fashion and dress. As
Kerry E. Howell states, this pre-knowledge and possible hypotheses can overshadow what is
discovered during research—and as occurred doing the present study, it can simplify a priori
reasoning at early stages.56 The semi-structured interview method was chosen as most
appropriate because it offers freedom and enables more open and natural discussion with the
possibility of minor alterations, clarifications, adding and deleting of questions.57 This is why a
complete set of questions asked from the participants during the interviews is not possible to
provide. The template of questions worked mainly as a base structure for interviews and aid for
the less-experienced researcher to keep the conversation progressing (see Appendix 2).
However, it is essential to underline that the initial hypothesis influenced the first draft of
questions according to which the visually impaired perception of fashion would somehow differ
from the sighted’s one. Similarly, some topics and questions during the interviews, introduced
by the researcher, stemmed from the participants’ early email correspondence. Reading
responses to the recruitment letter informed, for instance, that even the most ordinary and
familiar things that one takes for granted, say, choosing an outfit or going to a clothing store,
can become complicated when living with sensory impairments. While the interviews
proceeded, previous interactions influenced the next ones as some important topics for one
participant were introduced, discussed, and commented on further in the following interviews.
Due to this cumulative effect, qualitative interviewing joins material collection and preliminary
analysis, two distinctive research aspects. To further haze these components, the researcher as
an interviewer, to begin with, cannot fully remain unbiased and take a theory-neutral stance.58
The confirmability criterion further considered, one layer of the subjectivity of what can
be said in a constructed situation such as interviews has to be considered.59 As
Laura L. Ellingson observes interviewing and bodies therein, prevailing sociohistorical
56 Howell, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Methodology, 200.
57 Howell, 199–200; Yuniya Kawamura, Doing Research in Fashion and Dress: An Introduction to Qualitative
Methods (Oxford: Berg, 2011), 72–73.
58 Kawamura, Doing Research in Fashion and Dress, 25–26. It is worth bearing in mind that readings on the
phenomenology of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his influence before material collection,
especially his view on embodied perception as the base of all knowledge, have encouraged the research project.
Therefore, the present study cannot remain unaffected by some Merleau-Pontian stimulus. See, for instance,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (Milton Park, Abingdon,
Oxon: Routledge, 2012).
59 Howell, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Methodology, 190.
16contexts imply “constraints of language resources including absence of language for some
experiences, feelings, and understandings.”60 The absence of describing feelings and
perceptions is particularly relevant in this study as the participants discussed above represent
various impairments and unique conditions regarding the senses of sight and hearing. Therefore,
the interviews were conducted in Finland and in Finnish, the native tongue shared by the
researcher and the participants. Using mother tongues can render the social interaction more
agreeable as they offer and empower more abundant language resources and more specific and
nuanced ways to interact and express oneself. 61 Therefore, it should also be noted that doing
research and reporting it in English while investigating through questions and answers in
Finnish involves ambiguity. What is more, as Howell says, interpretation of the answers always
involves some level of subjectivity when doing interviews.62
Working with aural interview material with minimal embodiment required, first and
foremost, an analysis of enunciation, that is, analysis of spoken utterances, but also of the
affective responses that proved to be challenging to put in words. That much said, transcribing
interview material is not easy, nor is it a neutral act, as Ellingson highlights, but “an act of
translation between two vastly different media”—namely, a translation and a transformation
from aural discourse to a visible form of text in a digital document.63 Transcribing becomes an
integral part of the research during which topics that were missed or unheeded in the social
interactions could be reheard and repeated; thus, these topics could also be re-evaluated,
analysed, and taken into attention in the following interviews.
After the interview transcripts were completed, they were merged into one PDF file, which
became the working document, a visual source of aurality for the researcher. Given the small
sample size of this study, the widely used thematic content analysis method, as demonstrated
by Jon Swain, was chosen as a suitable approach to scrutinise closer the emerging themes from
60 Laura L. Ellingson, ‘Interview as Embodied Communication’, in The SAGE Handbook of Interview Research:
The Complexity of the Craft, ed. Jaber F. Gubrium et al. (California: SAGE, 2012), 531.
61 As one would expect, this is based on the assumption that native tongues are the best media of expression,
especially for people who have learnt other languages by studying. Intriguingly, these kinds of problematisations
are seldom raised in the literature devoted to interviewing even though language, verbal, non-verbal, or sign
language, is the centre of interaction and meaning-making when seeking to understand other people’s
worldviews, beliefs, and perceptions.
62 Howell, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Methodology, 197.
63 Ellingson, ‘Interview as Embodied Communication’, 529. The aural discourse needs to be, as survey methods
require, transcribed into a textual and hence visual form of discourse. It goes without saying that while being in
textual form, the transcripts should not be treated with the analytical conventions of written text. But, given the
thematic of this study, one could question why there is a need to use textual transcripts, a sort of visual evidence
of the collected empirical material. Is it yet another method reminiscent of the linguistic paradigm in the
humanities and social sciences at large? A discussion that, however, exceeds the limits of this study. For sound
insights into the optical impediment affecting our way to perceive sounds through their visual and material
sources, see Christian Metz, ‘Aural Objects’, trans. Georgia Gurrieri, Yale French Studies, no. 60 (1980): 24–32.
17the developing material.64 Using Swain’s proposed hybrid model, new codes encompassing
prominent and more applicable themes were introduced when the transcripts were analysed in
detail. Briefly put, and following in line with Swain’s case, in this research process, the a priori
coding deduced from the initial research aims and questions combined with the earliest email
correspondence with the participants formed preliminary analysis. However, once applied to
the completed material, this pre-empiric coding was challenged and eventually helped the
researcher find new and meaningful patterns and create more specific codes and themes
a posteriori.65 The five thematic codes used in the analysis were as follows:
C1 feelings and opinions in relation to (the field of) fashion,
C2 dependence (of aid, assistant, etc.) due to visual impairment,
C3 sources of information about fashion and dress,
C4 non-visual (haptic, audial, olfactory) perceptions,
C5 perceptions from the outside world.
Coding was followed by systematic notetaking from each transcript, first by hand, and then
editing them to a new digital document. At this phase, the concise notes formed an overview of
the empirical material and pertinent analytical remarks therein, which were later translated into
English and shared with the supervisor.66 After that, the analytical process progressed firstly by
comparing the structured notes with the ones taken during and after interviews, and then by a
close reading of transcripts and literature and finally making the process visible by typing out.
However, going back to the audio files turned out to be an important and stimulating
decision of the process. Thus, at the same time as the analysis was being written, close reading
was intertwined with the method of close hearing to bring back the embodied dimension of
social interaction, personal nuances, and feelings conveyed by the aurality. To further justify,
as a researcher of fashion and dress, closing one’s eyes and listening might be one focal way to
meet the methodological criteria, as proposed by Riello, in order to discuss both modalities and
personal, embodied dynamics through which objects, such as dress, take on meaning.67
64 Jon Swain, ‘A Hybrid Approach to Thematic Analysis in Qualitative Research: Using a Practical Example’, in
SAGE Research Methods Cases (London: SAGE, 2018), https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526435477.
65 Cf. Swain. It should be noted that the method proposed does not differentiate between a code and a theme
when analysing interview material.
66 As mentioned above, Ellingson describes transcribing as an act of translation. Her word choice translation is
noteworthy since when working with several languages, another level of subjectivity occurs, namely translation,
in this study from Finnish into English. The translation is an integral yet rarely discussed part of methodology in
the humanities and social sciences. While not being a trained and licensed translator (in fact, few researchers
are), potential biases, errors or altered significations, while never aimed for, have to be considered.
67 Cf. Riello, ‘The Object of Fashion’.
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