How to have style: style discourse in a makeover show and fashion consumption

This dissertation is composed of three essays about style discourse in fashion consumption. For the first chapter I developed a conceptual model to unravel the political process of meaning making between marketers and consumers. In particular, I draw on the concepts in the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe to develop the conceptual model to analyze the data of Chapter 2 and 3. The second chapter explores the mainstream discourse of having personal style with respect to fashion. For this second study, data have been collected from the TLC TV series What Not to Wear, an American reality television show that is based on a British Show of the same name. I chose episodes selected in What Not to Wear: Best of DVD with run time of 10 hours and 45 minutes. Transcripts of these episodes were produced and I analyzed how the notions of self, fashion, and style are intertwined in the discourse of the program. In this program the conflicts between the nominee and fashion consultants are prevalent components and there is some extent of negotiation between the two parties. Therefore, I also focus on this negotiation process and reveal how the hosts of the show win over the nominees. For the third chapter, I turn to the fans of the show What Not to Wear. Using postings on the web forum of the program I examined the ways fans integrate the cultural discourse of fashion on the program into their lives. Since there was an ample amount of data on the web forum, I sampled only the postings that were related to the episodes used in the second study. The focus of analysis is on the identification process of audience members: who do audience members identify with and how does such identification lead to specific ways of incorporating the fashion knowledge of the program? This study is expected to contribute to better understanding of how fashion reality shows have influence on consumption behaviors of audience members.

HOW TO HAVE STYLE: STYLE DISCOURSE IN A MAKEOVER SHOW AND FASHION CONSUMPTION by Hyun Jeong Min A dissertation submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy David Eccles School of Business The University of Utah August 2011 Copyright © Hyun Jeong Min 2011 All Rights Reserved The Uni v e r s i t y of Ut a h Gr ad ua t e Sc ho o l STATEMENT OF DISSERTATION APPROVAL The dissertation of Hyun Jeong Min has been approved by the following supervisory committee members: Debra Scammon , Chair June 9, 2011 Date Approved Teresa Pavia , Member June 13, 2011 Date Approved Arul Mishra , Member June 9, 2011 Date Approved Kristin Cloyes , Member Date Approved Jeff Murray , Member Date Approved and by William Hesterly , Associate Dean of the David Eccles School of Business and by Charles A. Wight, Dean of The Graduate School. ABSTRACT This dissertation is composed of three essays about style discourse in fashion consumption. For the first chapter I developed a conceptual model to unravel the political process of meaning making between marketers and consumers. In particular, I draw on the concepts in the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe to develop the conceptual model to analyze the data of Chapter 2 and 3. The second chapter explores the mainstream discourse of having personal style with respect to fashion. For this second study, data have been collected from the TLC TV series What Not to Wear, an American reality television show that is based on a British Show of the same name. I chose episodes selected in What Not to Wear: Best of DVD with run time of 10 hours and 45 minutes. Transcripts of these episodes were produced and I analyzed how the notions of self, fashion, and style are intertwined in the discourse of the program. In this program the conflicts between the nominee and fashion consultants are prevalent components and there is some extent of negotiation between the two parties. Therefore, I also focus on this negotiation process and reveal how the hosts of the show win over the nominees. For the third chapter, I turn to the fans of the show What Not to Wear. Using postings on the web forum of the program I examined the ways fans integrate the cultural discourse of fashion on the program into their lives. Since there was an ample amount of data on the web forum, I sampled only the postings that were related to the episodes used in the second study. The focus of analysis is on the identification process of audience members: who do audience members identify with and how does such identification lead to specific ways of incorporating the fashion knowledge of the program? This study is expected to contribute to iv better understanding of how fashion reality shows have influence on consumption behaviors of audience members. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................ iii LIST OF FIGURES............................................................................................................. vii LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................. viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.................................................................................................. ix Chapters 1 INTRODUCTION TO THREE STUDIES...................................................................... 1 References..................................................................................................................... 7 2 LACLAU AND MOUFFE‟S DISCOURSE THEORY FOR FASHION CONSUMPTION RESEARCH................................................................................................................... 9 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 9 Fashion as Ambiguous Semiotic Practice ...................................................................... 10 Overview of Discourse Analysis ................................................................................... 15 Discourse Theory of Laclau and Mouffe ....................................................................... 22 The Implications of Laclau and Mouffe‟s Discourse Theory for Consumer Research .... 36 References.................................................................................................................... 40 3 CONSTRUCTING FASHION AS ORDINARY PRACTICE: DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF WHAT NOT TO WEAR ........................................................................................... 47 Introduction .................................................................................................................. 47 Fashion and Style ......................................................................................................... 49 What Not to Wear ......................................................................................................... 53 Methodology ................................................................................................................ 57 Results ......................................................................................................................... 63 Discussion .................................................................................................................... 73 References.................................................................................................................... 81 4 MAKEOVER TV AND CONSUMER IDENTIFICATION: THE INFLUENCE OF WHAT NOT TO WEAR ON EVERYDAY FASHION CONSUMPTION PRACTICES . 84 Introduction .................................................................................................................. 84 Lifestyle Makeover Shows and Consumption Practices ................................................ 86 Discourse and Practice ................................................................................................. 89 vi Methodology ................................................................................................................ 90 Results ......................................................................................................................... 94 Discussion .................................................................................................................. 106 References.................................................................................................................. 109 LIST OF FIGURES 1: Flow of each episode .................................................................................................... 56 2: Antagonism over the meaning of fashion ...................................................................... 64 3: Antagonism over the meaning of the self ...................................................................... 68 4: Antagonism over the meaning of style .......................................................................... 72 5: The configuration of fashion, style and the self in What Not to Wear ............................ 74 LIST OF TABLES 1: The Characters in What Not to Wear ............................................................................ 54 2: Episode summary ........................................................................................................ 61 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to my advisor Debra L. Scammon for her guidance in implementation of the three studies presented in this dissertation and for all her mentoring and support throughout my PhD program. Without her I could not have successfully finished my degree. Very special thanks to Kristin G. Cloyes for her willingness to share her expertise and for giving me a great theoretical and methodological guidance. I would also like to thank Teresa Pavia, Arul Mishra and Jeff Murray for their thoughtful comments to move forward with this dissertation. My gratitude also goes to the entire marketing faculty at the David Eccles School of Business for their support in helping me improve upon this dissertation. Finally, I thank my husband Donghyup for his endless patience and support throughout this undertaking. CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION TO THREE STUDIES More and more consumers are having a deeper involvement of individual subjectivity in their consumption and this has led to the consequence that the essential and major function of products has decreased, while their role as embodiment of symbolic meaning has increased (Addis and Holbrook 2001). Research has shown not only that people do consume to cater to already existing needs but that the symbolic meanings embedded in goods and services play an important role in consumption decision making and people‟s identity construction in contemporary society (Belk 1988; Holbrook and Hirschman 1982). Among various commodities, fashion has been one of the most visible and accessible commodit ies for consumers to show who they are (Thompson and Haytko 1997; Murray 2002). Through fashion, people distinguish themselves from others and also satisfy the individual need for social adaptation and imitation. Reflecting the importance of fashion in consumers‟ identity construction, fashion has attracted the attention of many scholars. Many of them were interested in why the phenomenon of fashion was happening. For example, Veblen (1994) and Simmel (1957) claimed that emulation among classes was a motivating factor of fashion. Class emulation might have had some explanatory power in the pre-modern era. However, modernity opened up new possibilities for the creation of identity. It unfixed individuals from traditional communities, where everybody knew who she or he was. In addition, more and more people 2 came to have the purchasing power to acquire various commodities, and such commodities worked as raw material for the creation of new identit ies. As the nineteenth and twentieth centuries progressed, one‟s identity depended less and less on a fixed place in a stable social order. One‟s group affiliations could be „elected‟ and one‟s identity „invented‟ in the modern world (Entwistle 2000). Besides the emphasis on individual choices of group affiliations, today‟s fashion discourse encourages consumers to create their own style in fashion. Advice for how to have style is prominent in mass media. Having style is more than wearing up-to-date fashionable clothes. A fashion guru and a host of TLC‟s show What Not to Wear, Clinton Kelly (2008) says, "Fashion is what designers create and sell. You know, clothes, shoes, bags and other accessories. Style is your usage and interpretation of what is available to you" (p.4). Isaac Mizrahi (2008), a famous fashion designer, emphasizes, "There‟s no way to unearth your personal style without first knowing who you are" (p.10). What these statements about having style emphasize is that having style is not just about wearing up-to-date fashionable clothes but about expressing who we really are through concrete practices of combining fashion items. In order to have style, you have to have some extent of aesthetic knowledge such as rules about colors, patterns and proportions appropriate for your body and situation. In other words, the notions of the self and fashion are entangled with in the notion of style and therefore examining style discourse provides consumer researchers with a window through which to see the way that the fashion industry promotes its interests by conceptualizing style in particular ways. Another notable thing is that today‟s style discourse does not encourage women "to change everything about themselves from their lips to their bust sizes." Rather it says that having style is about "reinforcing everything about you that is already beautiful" (Mizrahi 2008, p.9). This is very different from what many feminists have argued, that is the fashion 3 industry is imposing an unrealistic thin body ideal on women. In fact, as Thompson and Haytko (1997) argue, in recent years, the popular press and a significant amount of scholarly work have implicated the fashion industry, through its models, advertising campaigns, and thin-oriented clothing designs, in a plethora of societal problems such as eating disorders, reduced self-esteem, body image distortions, and increased predilections for cosmetic surgery interventions (Bordo 1993; Joy and Venkatesh 1994). It is uncertain whether the new trend might have resulted from the fashion industry‟s acceptance of feminists‟ critique. Although the fashion industry does not impose a monolithic beauty ideal explicitly, the industry might not be innocent with regard to the social problems mentioned above. Nevertheless it seems to be obvious that today‟s fashion and style discourse is more complex, or at least the fashion industry‟s influence works in subtler way than what has been suggested in prior research on fashion. This gap, therefore, calls for the examination of the configuration of today‟s discourse of fashion and style. To examine how the fashion industry conceptualizes the notion of style in terms of fashion and self and what the effects of such configuration are for consumers‟ every day fashion consumption, I pay attention to the discourse of style. Today‟s style discourse draws a very clear line between fashion and style. According to Clinton Kelly (2008) a fashion guru and a host of TLC‟s show What Not to Wear, style refers to an individual‟s usage and interpretation of what is available to her or him while fashion is what designers create and sell. Therefore, in order for a consumer to have style, she has to know herself and make her inner self visible to others by engaging in semiotic practices of wearing clothes. I believe that these semiotic practices in the field of fashion are worth investigating and can contribute to better understanding everyday fashion consumption behaviors. This dissertation is composed of three studies about style discourse in fashion consumption. For the first study I develop a conceptual model arguing that fashion is a form 4 of discourse. I draw on a Foucauldian definition of discourse, which is much broader than just language in use, and includes many other elements of practice and institutional regulation (Hall 1997). In particular, I focus on the concepts in the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) to develop the conceptual model to analyze style discourse in fashion and consumers‟ everyday practices produced in the discourse. I also discuss the benefits of using Laclau and Mouffe‟s (1985) discourse theoretical concepts in consumer research. The second study explores the mainstream discourse of having personal style with respect to fashion through the analysis of episodes of a fashion makeover show, What Not to Wear. The program provides an appropriate empirical setting to look into how mainstream fashion discourse establishes relations among fashion, the self and style to promote the interests of the fashion industry for several reasons. First of all, the program reflects the current mantra of "create your own style" used in the fashion industry because the main purpose of the program is to teach the nominees and audience members how to create personal style by using fashion products available in the current market. Second, the program contains numerous confrontations between fashion experts and the nominees as ordinary consumers, and these confrontations provide consumer researchers with a window through which to observe the ongoing struggle in the process of constructing consumption meanings. The popularity of the program also provides a good empirical setting for researchers to examine the influence of the makeover show on everyday consumption practices. Mainstream fashion discourse has been quite a popular topic in academia, and many scholars have criticized the ideological influence of mainstream fashion discourse and practices on an unrealistically thin body as the ideal, low self esteem of obese people, and the prevalence of various eating disorders (Bordo 1993; Evans 1991; Hesse-Biber 1996; Wolf 1991). The problem is, although these criticisms are reasonable, in these discussions the way 5 that mainstream fashion industry works has been over-simplified, and therefore its influence on consumers has been described as dictatorial and all powerful. However, today‟s fashion style discourse does not encourage women to change everything about themselves to conform to an unrealistic beauty ideal. Rather, the discourse suggests that having style is about reinforcing everything about you that is already beautiful (Mizrahi 2008). The quotes from Mizrahi (2008) suggest that the mainstream style discourse is not dictating what to do or what not to do despite the criticism by many feminists that the fashion industry is imposing an unrealistically thin body ideal on women. In addition, the assumption that consumers are directly influenced by unrealistic fashion images does not seem to be well founded considering research findings that consumers appropriate various fashion discourses to generate personalized fashion narratives and to express resistance to dominant fashion norms in their social setting (Murray 2002; Thompson and Haytko 1997). The lack of consensus about the influence of the fashion industry suggests that it would be worthwhile to explore the ways in which mainstream fashion style discourse works and the ways in which constructs such as self, body, and fashion are intertwined in the mainstream style discourse. For the third study, I turn to the fans of the show What Not to Wear. I examine the ways they integrate the cultural discourse of fashion on the program into their lives using web forum data of the program. How are the fans of the show personalizing cultural meaning? How do they take the cultural discourse and do something with it? Does the show actually teach consumers the discourse of fashion? Do they change their consumption behaviors? In consumer research structural analysis of semiotics (McQuarrie et al. 2003; Mick 1986) has revealed the hidden meanings of media text, and research based on reader-response theory (Hirschman 1999; McQuarrie and Mick 1999; Stern 1992) has illustrated consumer‟s active role in interpreting media texts. Despite their contribution to media text related consumption behaviors, these studies did not extend their findings to consumers‟ everyday consumption 6 practices. This essay intends to overcome this limitation by focusing on the way consumers react to fashion knowledge being delivered through mass media and how they incorporate, negotiate, or reject such knowledge in their fashion consumption behaviors. Considering the increasing popularity of reality TV, in particular lifestyle TV, in the U.S. and other parts of world, examining the influence of these media texts on everyday consumption behavior seems to be an urgent matter. 7 References Addis, Michela and Holbrook, Morris B. (2001), "On the Conceptual Link between Mass Customization and Experiential Consumption: An Explosion of Subjectivity," Journal of Consumer Behaviour 1(1), 50-66 Belk, Russell. W. (1988), "Possessions and Extended Self," Journal of Consumer Research, 15(September), 139-168. Bordo, Susan (1993), Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press. Entwistle, Joanne (2000), The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Evans, Caroline (1991), "Fashion, Representation, Femininity," Feminist Review (38), 48-66. Hall, Stuart (1997), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage. Hesse-Biber, Sharlene Nagy (1996), Am I Thin enough Yet?: The Cult of Thinness and the Commercialization of Identity. New York: Oxford University Press. Hirschman, Elizabeth C. (1999), "Applying Reader-Response Theory to a Television Program," in Advances in Consumer Research Volume 26, Eric J. Arnould and Linda M. Scott eds., Provo, UT: Association for Consumer Research, 549-554. Joy, Annamma and Alladi Venkatesh (1994), ''Postmodernism,Feminism, and the Body: The Visible and the Invisible in Consumer Research,'' International Journal of Research in Marketing, 11(4), 333-357. Kelly, Clinton (2008), Freakin' Fabulous: How to Dress, Speak, Behave, Eat, Drink, Entertain, Decorate, and Generally Be Better than Everyone Else. New York: Simon Spotlight Entertainment. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe (1985), Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. McQuarrie, Edward F. and David Glen Mick (1999), "Visual Rhetoric in Advertising: Text- Interpretive, Experimental, and Reader-Response Analyses," The Journal of Consumer Research, 26 (1), 37-54. McQuarrie, Edward F., David Glen Mick, Linda M. Scott, and Rajeev Batra (2003), "The Contribution of Semiotic and Rhetorical Perspectives to the Explanation of Visual Persuasion in Advertising," in Persuasive Imagery: A Consumer Response Perspective, Linda M. Scott and Rajeev Batra, eds. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, 191-221. Mick, David Glen (1986), "Consumer Research and Semiotics: Exploring the Morphology of 8 Signs, Symbols, and Significance," Journal of Consumer Research, 13 (2), 196-213. Mizrahi, Isaac (2008), How to Have Style. New York: Gotham Books. Murray, Jeff B. (2002), "The Politics of Consumption: A Re-Inquiry on Thompson and Haytko's (1997) 'Speaking of Fashion'," Journal of Consumer Research, 29 (3), 427-40. Simmel, Georg (1957), "Fashion," American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 62 (6), 541-558. Stern, Barbara B. (1992), "Feminist Literary Theory and Advertising Research: A New "Reading" of the Text and the Consumer," Journal of Current Issues & Research in Advertising, 14 (1), 9-21. Thompson, Craig J. and Diana L. Haytko (1997), "Speaking of Fashion: Consumers' Uses of Fashion Discourses and the Appropriation of Countervailing Cultural Meanings," Journal of Consumer Research, 24 (1), 15-42. Veblen, Thorstein (1994), The Theory of Leisure Class. New York: Penguin Books. Wolf, Naomi (1991), The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used against Women. New York: W. Morrow. CHAPTER 2 LACLAU AND MOUFFE‟S DISCOURSE THEORY FOR FASHION CONSUMPTION RESEARCH Introduction Scholars of consumer culture theory have explored the political aspects of consumption meaning and practice (Arnould and Thompson 2005), and demonstrated how socio-political factors, such as gender (Thompson 2002; 1996; Thompson and Haytko 1997; Thompson and Hirschman 1995), age (Price et al. 2000), class (Holt 1998), race (Burton 2009), sexuality (Kates 2004; Kates 2002), globalization (Askegaard et al. 2005; Gentry et al. 1995; Kjeldgaard and Askegaard 2006; Penaloza 1994; Thompson and Arsel 2004; Wallendorf and Reilly 1983; Wamwara-Mbugua et al. 2008; Ü StüNer and Holt 2007) and ideology (Arnould 2007; Henry 2010; Hirschman 1993; Hirschman 1990; Hirschman 1988; Holt and Thompson 2004; Kozinets 2008; Thompson 2003; Thompson and Hirschman 1995; Zhao and Belk 2008) structure consumption meaning and practice in contemporary society. Despite the emphasis on the political aspect of constructing consumption practices and consumption meanings, the political signification process itself has not gotten much attention. How are particular signifieds articulated into a signifying sequence in the field of discursivity? Which signifiers work as a center in the signification process? What different understandings of reality are at stake? What are the consequences of these discursive configurations? These important questions need to be answered in order to better understand the politics of 10 consumption, but have not gotten much attention from researchers. One obstacle to such investigation may be the lack of a methodology to look into the construction process itself. Discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe may provide a very useful tool for investigating the political process of creating consumption meaning and practice. Concepts like antagonism, hegemony, articulation and identification and discursive strategies, such as the logic of equivalence and logic of difference, provide consumer researchers with ways to analyze the political meaning construction process. In this essay, I will first discuss the ambiguous nature of the meaning of fashion. Fashion is an area of consumption inundated with a variety of consumption meanings, and therefore is a great field in which to explicate the politics of consumption meaning construction. I then present the basics of discourse theory and discourse analysis. Finally I move on to Laclau and Mouffe‟s discourse theory and explicate their concepts and theorization in detail. Fashion as Ambiguous Semiotic Practice Ambiguity of Fashion People communicate aspects of their persons, such as gender, social status, personal tastes, values, and individuality through their clothing, one of the most visible forms of consumption (Crane 2000; Davis 1992; Lipovetsky 1994; Lurie 1983; McCracken 1988; Wilson 2003). A body of literature on fashion has examined its communicative abilities and its role in modern or postmodern society (Giddens 1991; Sennett 1977; Simmel 1957; Wilson 2003). Prior work focuses on the nature of identity under postmodern conditions and the role of clothing in the presentation of self as a resource for constructing one‟s identity (Entwistle 2000). In semiotics, clothes are often considered to be signifiers, and in contemporary consumer culture, particular kinds or combinations of clothing are associated with certain 11 concepts or signifieds, such as elegance, formality, casualness or romance (Hall 1997). Consumer research has examined the communicative aspect of fashion consumption, showing that consumers use fashion to differentiate, express social affiliation and maintain or subvert gender boundaries (Murray 2002; Thompson 1997). Previous research on fashion clearly shows that clothing is an expressive medium and it communicates something about the person who wears it. One example of the approach to fashion as communication draws analogies between fashion and language (Entwistle 2000). In one extreme argument, Lurie (1983) suggests that our clothes can communicate facts about ourselves such as class status, age, family origin, personal opinion, taste and current mood. She even discusses clothing‟s rules of grammar and its „dialects‟ from diverse cultures. However, research also suggests that the meaning of clothing is very ambiguous and imprecise (Campbell 1995; Davis 1992; McCracken 1988). For instance, McCracken (1988) empirically examined the concept of clothing as language and concluded that the clothing-as-language metaphor can be useful in studying the cultural process of fashion. However, one should be cautious in equating the clothing with language because there are no fixed, rule-governed formulas for employing and juxtaposing fashion elements, and therefore clothing does not possess a combinatorial freedom like language (McCracken 1988). Davis (1992) also points out that meaningful differences among clothing signifiers are not nearly as sharply drawn and standardized as are the spoken sounds employed in a speech community. Besides the ambiguous nature of clothing, clothing styles have different meanings for different social groups and in different contexts (Crane 2000). While the signifiers constituting a style or a certain fashion trend can be considered to be the same for everyone in a material sense, what is signified can be very different for a community of clothes-wearers (Davis 1992). This aspect of clothing meaning is well exemplified in Hebdige‟s (1991) analysis of British youth subcultures. In his analysis, Hebdige (1991) examines how the 12 fashion elements adopted by the subcultures create meaning within the group. In the conspicuous consumption cultures of subculture groups, such as the skinheads and the punks, certain types of consumption are conspicuously rejected, and it is through this distinctive style that the subculture reveals its secret identity and communicates its forbidden meanings (Hebdige 1991). In other words, it is not the material differences that distinguish subcultures from the mainstream cultural formation but the different meanings attached to the same material commodities. For instance, the baggy pants worn by teen agers to express their individuality are considered to be offensive by many people and some towns have created ordinances - some with fines and jail time. Some argue that the criticisms of baggy pants are unfairly targeting African Americans. This debate on the baggy pants style clearly demonstrates the different meanings articulated to the same style of pants, according to the observers‟ ethnicities, ages, and social classes. The context-dependent characteristics of clothing also result in ambiguous consumption meanings (Davis 1992). Most individuals do not wear the same clothes on all occasions. They adapt their dress for the particular social context. Different situations impose different ways of dressing by imposing rules or codes of dress. Even when individuals choose to ignore such rules of dress, they are likely to be aware of the social pressure to conform (Entwistle 2000). This is why clothes that are very much appropriate in one situation might be inappropriate in another situation, and have different meanings. Another reason for the ambiguity of clothing is that what it says varies over time (Campbell 1995). Those who would attempt to ascribe precise meanings to clothing should be cautious, because the very same outfit that said one thing last year will very likely say something quite different today (Davis 1992). In the everyday practice of getting dressed, individuals cannot avoid the temporal constraints of fashion. Fashion is by definition temporal, and time in the fashion system is socially constructed through the circle of 13 collections, shows and seasons that serve to stop the flow of the present by means of projections into the future (Entwistle 2000). Fashion imagery reveals how our idea of beauty changes over time (Steele 1988). The clothes that were once thought to be beautiful go out of fashion and people do not think they are beautiful anymore. Therefore, as Steele (1988) puts it, every style is beautiful in its own time. People tend to dismiss the clothing of the recent past as amusing at best and ludicrous at worst (Steele 1988). Moreover, clothing has ambiguous meanings because it is unable to be read effectively. What it says is critically dependent on who is doing the decoding (Campbell 1995). It is well established that consumers convey specific meanings about their identity to others through their possessions and their consumption behaviors (Ahuvia 2005; Belk 1988; Holt 1998; Holt and Thompson 2004; Murray 2002; Price et al. 2000; Schouten 1991; Thompson 1996; Thompson and Haytko 1997; Velliquette et al. 2006). As Featherstone (1991) suggests, in contemporary society, consumption is usually employed to connote individuality, and one‟s body, clothes, speech, leisure pastimes, eating and drinking preferences, home, car, choice of holidays and so on are all considered to be indicators of personal taste and sense of style. However, as Campbell (1995) points out, the fact that actions are intelligible does not guarantee that they have an mutually-agreed-upon meaning. In addition, receiving and interpreting a message and intending to send one are separate activities. Although one individual may be able to perceive some identity message in the consumption activities of another, this does not imply that other observers discern similar meanings in that activity. Also, the discerned meanings do not necessarily correspond to those that the consumer intended to convey through their conduct (Campbell 1995). Therefore it is very likely that individuals will perceive different meanings from the clothing choices and appearance of another person, and that the interpreted meanings can be different from what the wearer originally intended to convey. 14 Politics of Fashion Meaning Fashion styles are always intertwined with social forces external to clothing itself, such as a wearer‟s body, gender, class, race, ethnicity, age, occupation, income etc., making the meanings of clothing more complicated and fluid. Clothing is always mediated by the individual body, because the body must be dressed in almost every social encounter (Calefato 2004; Entwistle 2000; Wilson 2003). In fashion, gender boundaries are constantly maintained and challenged through fashion production and consumption (Crane 2000; Entwistle 2000; Wilson 2003). Gender cannot be considered as a separate category from class, race, ethnicity, age, occupation and income level because the concept of gender is constituted differently by each category, and is also constituted differently according to the social context. Class also has a material bearing on clothing choices, and class is highly correlated to income level, which needs to be considered as an important factor in fashion consumption (Entwistle 2000). For instance, only a small number of women in the world have the income to purchase haute couture. Class also tends to structure fashion consumption decisions through taste, which is formed in interaction with the individual‟s class position and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984). Meanings projected onto fashion brands and particular styles of clothes by fashion advertising and marketing efforts also make already ambiguous and complex fashion meanings more convoluted. Since different factors intervene in different interpretation situations, meanings become more ambiguous in that it is hard to get people in general to interpret the same clothing symbols in the same way (Davis 1992). The fashion system provides the raw materials or resources from which consumers can make choices (Crane 1999; Entwistle 2000). But these are adapted within the context of the lived experience of their gender, class, race, age, occupation and so on, and therefore the meaning of the same clothes can never be finally fixed. As Hall (1997) puts it, taking the meaning must involve an active process of 15 interpretation. Meaning has to be actively interpreted by individual consumers. There is a constant slippage of meaning in all interpretation, something in excess of intended meaning. In this way other meanings overshadow intended meaning and other associations are evoked, giving our expressions a different twist (Hall 1997). In other words, the dynamic process of signification, the process in which signifiers are linked to signifieds by social agents to relations that more or less fix their meaning within a given social context (Cloyes 2006; Cloyes 2007). This activity promotes particular versions of meanings, while, at the same time, excluding other possible meanings (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002), making the meaning-making process a very political one. Discourse analysis acknowledges this political aspect of the signification process and concentrates on revealing the way contingent relations become fixed in one way although they could have been fixed in many other ways (Andersen 2003). For this reason discourse analysis can be an effective way to examine how certain meanings of style are promoted while other interpretations are discouraged in the context of fashion consumption. Overview of Discourse Analysis Language as Constitutive of Social Reality Discourse analysis is a set of methods and theories for studying language in use, which have developed from different theoretical traditions and diverse disciplinary locations (Finlayson 1999; Gill 2000; Taylor 2001; Wetherell et al. 2001). There is no single version of „discourse analysis,‟ but many different styles of analysis, for instance, from critical linguistics, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and discourse analysis associated with poststructuralism, all lay claim to the name. What unites these different styles and approaches is a rejection of the notion of language as a simple, neutral information-carrying vehicle reflecting the world and a conviction in the central importance of language in constructing 16 social reality as we experience it (Gill 2000; Taylor 2001). In other words, without language there can be no meaning and we cannot apprehend reality (O'Sullivan 2007). Language is constitutive of social life. These representations are never mere reflections of pre-existing reality, but rather contribute to constructing reality (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002; Wetherell 2001b). Words are about the world, but they also form the world through representation. As accounts become available and widely shared, they become social realities to be dealt with (Wetherell 2001b). This does not, however, mean that material reality itself does not exist beyond our consciousness. Indeed, physical things and actions exist, but they only take on meaning and become the objects of knowledge through language. And this is at the heart of the social constructionist idea, an epistemological basis of discourse analysis (Gill 2000; Hall 1997). Language as Action Another important premise that underpins all contemporary discourse research is that language is a medium oriented towards social action, although different traditions of discourse research understand social action in different ways (Potter 2001; Potter and Wetherell 1990; Wetherell 2001a). These are the most obvious in the linguistic philosophy of Wittgenstein (1968; 1961) and Austin‟s (1962) speech act theory. Scholars in these traditions stress that language is oriented towards action. For instance, utterances ask questions, make accusations and justify oversight (Potter and Wetherell 1990). Wittgenstein mainly criticized the treatments of language as an abstract system of concepts whose principal role was to refer to objects in the world. Wittgenstein‟s aim was to counterpoise this notion of language as a set of names for objects in the world with a picture that stresses its practicality and heterogeneity. For Wittgenstein, language is not one unified system, but a whole set of different parts with different roles like tools in a tool box (Potter 17 2001), in which "there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screw-driver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws-the functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects" (Wittgenstein 1968, para. 11). Wittgenstein problematized the overwhelming consideration of issues of reference and logical connections in linguistic philosophy, because this idea was not able to capture the complexity of language and caused a major source of confusion in philosophy. He believed the philosophical problems resulted from abstracting words like „belief‟, „certainty‟ and „knowledge‟ from their natural contexts of use. To solve this problem, he claimed that philosophers should start with a consideration of meaning that springs from inspecting the actual use of language (Potter 2001). Wittgenstein‟s view of language is condensed into the metaphor of a „language game.‟ He sees language as comprising multitudes of different games, each with their own aims and rules. Using language is therefore playing a role in these different games, such as giving orders and obeying them, describing the appearance of an object, reporting or speculating about an event, making up a story and guessing riddles (Potter 2001; Wittgenstein 1968). The metaphor of the language game supports the assumption, common to a variety of discourse analytic approaches, that people‟s practices are organized around the use of particular discourses or interpretative repertoires. It also cautions against an account of language as an abstract system and stresses the relationship between specific practices and language tied to occasions and settings (Potter 2001). In the same vein, John Austin (1962) developed the speech act theory, based on the belief that language is used to perform actions and focused on how meaning and action are related to language (Schiffrin 1994). As did Wittgenstein, Austin also problematized the treatment of language as an abstract reference system and emphasized the practical, active use of language (Potter 2001). Austin‟s speech act theory provided the discourse researcher with the insight to investigate issues such as how an utterance can perform more than one 18 speech act at a time and the relationship between context and illocutionary force (Schiffrin 1994). He demonstrated that all utterances are performative, meaning that to say something is to do something. By „issuing an utterance,‟ Austin claimed, a speaker can perform three acts simultaneously: a locutionary act, which is the act of saying something; an illocutionary act, which is an act performed in saying something; and a perlocutionary act, which is performed by or as a result of saying (Coulthard 1977). He also suggested six rules that utterances must satisfy in order to be performative, and called them felicity conditions. From a discourse analytic perspective, felicity conditions lock utterances into psychological and sociological concerns by showing that the utterances only work with the right beliefs, conventions, participants, circumstances, intentions, and so on (Potter 2001). If you "put language, action, interaction, values, beliefs, symbols, objects, tools, and places together in such a way that others recognize you as a particular type of identity in a particular type of activity," as Gee (1999) says, "then you have pulled off a discourse" (p.18). Discourse as Language and Practice Normally the term „discourse‟ is used as a linguistic concept, and is often defined in two ways. One refers to a particular unit of language, simply meaning passages of connected writing or speech (Hall 1997; Schiffrin 1994). Therefore, the narrowest description of discourse refers to a continuous stretch of language larger than the sentence (Crystal 1985). The other definition refers to language in use, taking account of actually occurring texts in a genuine communicative context. This focus on actual language use leads to concern for the meaning of the utterance rather than the sentence (Outhwaite and Bottomore 1993). By saying that utterance is the smaller unit, of which discourse is comprised, discourse refuses to be a collection of decontextualized units of language structure and becomes a collection of inherently contextualized units of language use (Schiffrin 1994). 19 However, in order to make theories of language more generally applicable to the social and political world, it is necessary to broaden the definition of discourse (Hardin 2001) and Foucault‟s theorization of constitutive power of language represents the broad definition of discourse. Foucault did not study language per se, but discourse as a system of representation (Hall 1997). By discourse Foucault meant a group of statements which structure the way a thing is thought and talked about in a particular historical moment. That is, discourses shapes how the world is understood and how things are done in it (Rose 2001). In this way, discourse becomes more than a collection of linguistic repertoires that people use. Discourse refers to the processes through which meaning is constructed in historically and locally specific contexts (Cloyes 2004). Discourses are always embedded in a myriad of social institutions, and often involve various props like books, magazines, laboratories, classrooms, technologies and other objects (Gee 1999). In other words, each discourse systematically organizes objects and practices as well as linguistic repertoires in a particular way, while repressing alternative forms of organization through dominance in power relations (Cloyes 2004; Howarth and Stavrakakis 2000; Outhwaite and Bottomore 1993). By establishing a system of relations between various concepts, objects, and practices, discourse becomes the issue of knowledge production through language. However, since all social practices involve meaning and meanings shape and influence the actions of social agents, it is possible to say that all practices have a discursive aspect. In this respect the concept of discourse ceases to remain purely a linguistic concept. It entails language and practice. Foucault claims that discourse constitutes the topic. It defines, produces the object of our knowledge, and governs the way that a topic is meaningfully talked about. It also influences how ideas are put into practice and used to regulate the actions of others. By promoting a particular way of talking and acting, at the same time it also rules out other ways of talking and conducting ourselves in relation to the topic (Hall 1997). The very possibility 20 of perception, thought and action, therefore, depends on the structuring of a certain meaningful field or discourse that pre-dates any factual immediacy (Laclau 1993). Language allows for multiple versions of accounts and creates an argumentative and rhetorical context (Billig 1991; Wetherell 2001b). In this respect, rhetoric has an important resonance for the discourse researcher. The rhetorical aspect of discourse suggests that discourse is designed to be persuasive. This is why there is always a struggle over how things are to be understood, so it makes sense to speak of the politics of representation and power issues. Individuals, groups, and institutions mobilize meanings (Wetherell 2001b) to accomplish their purposes. Particular interpretations of meanings may become dominant and serve the interests of a particular status quo by reconfirming and re-enacting existing social relationships and patterns of behavior. Since meanings are fluid and can be mobilized and re-worked, however, discourse also can renegotiate social relationships and introduce new meanings and new behavior. Hence, control over discourse is recognized as a vital source of power (Lemke 1995; Wetherell 2001b). Productive Power Discourse is powerful because it is productive. In discourse theory, power is not necessarily defined in negative terms, as it represses what it seeks to control. It traverses and produces things such as pleasure, forms of knowledge, and discourse. Foucault claims that power does not belong to particular agents such as particular individuals, the state, or groups with particular interests (Foucault 1980). Power is spread across different social practices (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002). It circulates and is never monopolized by one center. Therefore power needs to be thought of as a productive network which runs through the whole social body (Foucault 1980). Discourse disciplines individuals into certain ways of thinking and acting (Foucault 21 1979). The subject becomes the bearer of the knowledge that discourse produces (Hall 1997) and our sense of self is created through the operation of discourse (Rose 2001). However, it does not coerce people into rules for thought and behavior. Language positions people (Wetherell 2001b) in a certain point in the web of various relations. Within the produced discourse lie a variety of subject positions with which people can identify (Cloyes 2007; Cloyes 2004; Laclau 1994). In other words, subject positions provide people with a way of making sense of themselves, their motives, experiences and reactions (Wetherell 2001b). For instance, style discourse in a fashion makeover program produces, among other subject positions, fashion illiterates, significant others of fashion illiterates, fashion gurus, and favorable or critical audience members. Indeed, the interpretations of the program‟s contents and the ways of using the knowledge received from the program depend on the subject positions that people might choose while they are watching it, rather than one particular interpretation being imposed on the audience of the program. In the next section, I introduce the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe. The theory of Laclau and Mouffe shares epistemological premises of poststructuralism with other versions of discourse analysis. Their theory focuses on the political process of signification similar to critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 2001). However their theory does not separate the discursive aspect from material and behavioral aspects of social reality as Fairclough (2001) differentiates discursive elements with nondiscursive ones in his theory. This holistic approach to discourse is the most promising for consumer researchers to investigate the political process of creating consumption meanings and practices because consumption involves material and behavioral elements as well as linguistic ones. 22 Discourse Theory of Laclau and Mouffe In their book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe (1985) constituted their theory around a discourse-analytical reconstruction of the concept of hegemony (Andersen 2003), privileging the moment of political articulation (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). They suggested that sedimented social realities, such as theoretical categories and established social orders, are those which conceal the acts of their original institution. In their theory, therefore, they tried to reactivate the moment to make visible the original contingency of the synthesis (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). At the same time, they reconstructed Foucault‟s discourse analysis by removing the distinction of the linguistic (discursive)/extralinguistic (nondiscursive) oppositions in conceptualizing social reality (Laclau and Mouffe 1987). To explain the theory of Laclau and Mouffe I will start with the concept of hegemony. Then I will proceed to explicate other theoretical concepts of overdetermination, articulation, discourse, subject position and identification, antagonism, and equivalence/difference. Hegemony and Privileging the Political The concept of hegemony was Gramsci‟s main contribution to political theory, and it was derived from his revision of orthodox Marxism (Bellamy 1994). The concept emphasizes forms of power which are dependent upon consent rather than coercion. Hence the hegemony of the dominant social group depends on winning the consent of the majority to existing social arrangements (Fairclough 2001). For Gramsci, political subjects are not classes but complex collective wills. The ideological elements articulated by a hegemonic class also do not have a necessary class to which they belong, and the collective will is a result of the politico-ideological articulation of dispersed and fragmented historical forces. To attain hegemony, dominant social groups need to achieve intellectual and moral leadership as well as political leadership. Whereas political leadership can be grounded on a conjunctural 23 coincidence of interests, moral and intellectual leadership requires that an ensemble of ideas and values be shared by a number of sectors, which traverse a number of class sectors. Intellectual and moral leadership constitutes a higher synthesis of collective will, and through ideology, this collective will becomes the organic cement unifying a historic bloc (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Laclau and Mouffe suggest that structural undecidability is the very condition for the existence of hegemony. If social objectivity determined whatever structural arrangement exists through its internal laws, there would be no room for politics as an autonomous activity. In order to have hegemony, therefore, it is required that the nature of elements does not predetermine them to enter into one particular type of arrangement rather than another (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). According to Derrida (1977), this undecidability calls for an ethico-political decision, and this contingent intervention is conceived of as a hegemonic intervention by Laclau and Mouffe (Torfing 1999). For this reason, the concept of hegemony emerges in a context dominated by the experience of fragmentation and by the indeterminacy of the articulations between different struggles and subject positions (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Along with structural undecidability, the presence of empty signifiers is another condition of hegemony. Strictly speaking, an empty signifier is a signifier without a signified. This does not mean that the same signifier can be attached to different signifieds in different contexts, or that the signifier is ambiguous (Laclau 1996). An empty signifier is that which signifies the indifferent and the cancellation of difference (Andersen 2003). An empty signifier emerges as all differences collapse into equivalential chains (Laclau 1996). Therefore all differences must be equally different in relation to it, while also being different from each other (Andersen 2003). The focal point of hegemonic struggle is an empty signifier, which is a central link in converging and competing signifying chains used to construct social 24 antagonisms and representations. Through the working of hegemony, social antagonisms and representations appear natural and necessary, rather than contingent (Cloyes 2004). Overdetermination and Articulation Privileging the moment of political articulation through the concept of hegemony, Laclau and Mouffe question what a relation between entities must be like in order for a hegemonic relation to become possible. For them, this relationship occurs when a particular social force assumes the representation of a totality or hegemonic universality that is radically incommensurable with it. The fact that a relation of hegemonic representation is possible indicates that the society as a closed totality is impossible. The society as totality does not exist; hence the social is a discursive space (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). However, we continuously produce society and act as if it exists as a totality (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002). For instance, in the fashion makeover reality program "What Not To Wear," fashion gurus use words like „fashion,‟ „style,‟ and „self‟ in their accounts of their subjects‟ transformation, and they try to ascribe their own interpretation of the term and teach the nominees what fashion and style are. However what we actually observe in the program is ongoing struggles, contestations, and negotiation of meanings between fashion gurus and nominees for transformation. Such struggles and contestations clearly indicate that these ascribed meanings are only temporary and partial fixations of meaning in a fundamentally undecidable terrain (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002). To better understand the struggles over meaning, we need to focus on the notion of overdetermination, which refers to the overflowing of the signifier by the signified. Originally the term overdetermination came from Freud, and it refers to a type of fusion, entailing a symbolic dimension and a plurality of meanings. Therefore the concept of overdetermination is constituted in the field of the symbolic and has no meaning outside of 25 the symbolic realm. As a result, when Althusser (1972) stated that everything existing in the social is overdetermined, what he meant was that the social constitutes itself as a symbolic order. The symbolically overdetermined character of social relations therefore implies that they lack an ultimate literality which would reduce them to necessary moments of an inherent law. For this reason, society and social agents lack any objective essence and their regularities are the relative and precarious forms of fixation that accompany the establishment of a certain order (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). The overdetermined character of social relations opens up the possibility of elaborating the concept of articulation. In this respect, the growing complexity and fragmentation of advanced industrial societies can be explained. It does not result from its inherent complexity, as compared to earlier societies. Instead, this complexity and fragmentation are constituted around a fundamental asymmetry between a growing proliferation of difference or a surplus of meaning of the social, and the difficulties encountered by any discourse attempting to fix those differences as moments of a stable articulatory structure (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). The notion of overdetermination criticizes every type of fixity through an affirmation of the incomplete, open and politically negotiable character of every identity. Every identity is overdetermined inasmuch as all literality appears as constitutively subverted and exceeded. The presence of some objects in the others prevents any of their identities from being fixed. Objects do not appear articulated like pieces in a clockwork mechanism because the presence of some in the others hinders the suturing of any of their identities (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). The subject is positioned by several conflicting social relations, among which a conflict arises (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002). For this reason the working class had difficulty in constituting itself as a historical subject, due to the dispersion and fragmentation of its positionalities (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Taking up different, and sometimes conflicting, subject positions 26 can have decisive influence on consumption decisions. For instance, an individual is ascribed with multiple subject positions, such as a feminist, an office worker, a mother, or a customer of fashion goods, and those positions point in different directions when it comes to making decisions about fashion consumption (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002). In summary, we are in the field of overdetermination of some entities by others, and this is the specific logic of articulation (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Articulation and Discourse Laclau and Mouffe (1985) call articulation "any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice (p.105)." They call the structured totality resulting from the articulatory practice „discourse.‟ The differential positions, insofar as they appear articulated within a discourse, are called moments. On the other hand, element refers to any difference that is not articulated into a discourse (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). However this differential ensemble of signifying sequences fails to invoke a complete closure because there is no fixed center in the discourse. The absence of a fixed center extends the process of signification within the structure infinitely. Hence there will always be something that escapes the seemingly infinite process of signification within the discourse. The multiplicity of mutually substituting centers only achieves a precarious order and manages to produce a partially fixed meaning. This partial fixation of meaning produces a surplus of meaning, which escapes the differential logic of discourse (Torfing 1999). Inherent in every discursive situation, this surplus is the necessary terrain for the constitution of every social practice and is called the field of discursivity. The field of discursivity determines the necessarily discursive character of any object and the impossibility for any given discourse to implement a final suture at the same time (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). The field of surplus is termed the field of discursivity because what is not 27 fixed as a differential identity within a concrete discourse is not nondiscursive, but is discursively constructed within a terrain of unfixity (Torfing 1999). For this reason, anti-fashion styles and an attitude of indifference to current fashion are not external to the mainstream fashion discourse, because they exist as elements within it although they did not become moments of contemporary mainstream fashion discourse at the moment. They exist in the field of discursivity and might be able to become a moment of discourse. Very often the antifashion styles from outside of mainstream culture have been appropriated by the mainstream fashion industry (Crane 1999), and this fact also clearly indicates that the signifying relations among moments and elements are very fluid. A discursive totality never exists in the form of a simply given and delimited positivity, and thus the relational logic will be incomplete and pierced by contingency. The transition from elements to moments is never entirely fulfilled, and hence a no-man‟s land emerges, making the articulatory practice possible. In this case both the identities and the relat ions lose their necessary character and there is no identity which can be fully constituted. This incomplete character of every totality leads us to abandon the premise of society as a sutured and self-defined totality. That is, society is not a valid object of discourse because there is no single underlying principle constituting the whole field of differences as a society. The social is constituted in the terrain where neither a total interiority nor a total exteriority is possible. For the same reason that the social cannot be reduced to the interiority of a fixed system of differences, pure exteriority is also impossible (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). According to Laclau and Mouffe, every discourse is constituted as an attempt to dominate the field of discursivity, to arrest the flow of differences, and to construct a center. These privileged discursive points of this partial fixation are called nodal points. However this center does not have any natural site or fixed locus, but instead has a function (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Around a nodal point, other signs are ordered and these other signs 28 acquire their meaning from their relationship to the nodal point (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002). Since all identity is relational and all discourse is subverted by a field of discursivity that overflows it, the transition from elements to moment can never be complete. These elements have the status of floating signifiers, incapable of being wholly articulated to a discursive chain, and this floating character finally penetrates any social identity. Considering the noncomplete character of all discursive fixation and the relational character of every identity, the ambiguous character of the signifier is caused by a proliferation of signifieds, rather than a paucity of them. That is, it is polysemy that disarticulates a discursive structure and that establishes the overdetermined, symbolic dimension of every social identity. Every nodal point is constituted within an intertextuality that overflows it. Therefore the practice of articulation consists in the construction of nodal points, which partially fix the meaning of a signifying chain. This partial character emanates from the openness of the social, which is a result of the constant overflowing of every discourse by the infinitude of the field of discursivity (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Another interesting theoretical contribution made by Laclau and Mouffe is that they resist any distinction between objectified realities (the nondiscursive) and discourse based on the fact that one effect of discursive activity is to produce objectivity (Laclau 1996). Their analysis affirms that every object is constituted as an object of discourse and that any distinction between what are usually called the linguistic and behavioral aspects of a social practice is an incorrect one (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). So called nondiscursive complexes such as institutions, techniques, productive organization, and so on turn out to be more or less complex forms of differential positions among objects, which do not arise from some objective necessity like God, Nature, or Reason. Seemingly nondiscursive complexes can therefore only be conceived as discursive articulations (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Torfing 1999). 29 However, it should be noted that the fact that every object is constituted as an object of discourse does not necessarily have a connection to the philosophical debate about whether there is a world external to thought. An earthquake or the falling of a brick is an event that certainly exists independent of one‟s will. But depending on the structuring of a discursive field, the same events can be interpreted as natural phenomena or expressions of the wrath of God. What is denied is not that such objects exist externally to our consciousness, but that they could constitute themselves as objects of knowledge outside any discursive condition of emergence (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Rejecting the distinction between the discursive (linguistic) and the nondiscursive (extralinguistic), Laclau and Mouffe insist on the interweaving of the semantic aspects of language with the pragmatic aspects of actions, movements and objects (Torfing 1999). Drawing on the theory of speech acts by Wittgenstein, Laclau and Mouffe stress the material character of every discursive structure. The theory of speech acts emphasizes the performative character of language, and the concept of the language game by Wittgenstein includes both language and the actions within an indissoluble totality, as he declares "I shall also call the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven, the language game" (Wittgenstein 1968, para.7). It is evident that the very material properties of objects are part of Wittgenstein‟s language game, which is an example of what Laclau and Mouffe call discourse (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Since discourse is co-extensive with the social, it cannot be reduced to its semantic or its pragmatic aspects (Torfing 1999). Semantic meaning is compounded from cases of a word‟s use, so meaning is very much the product of pragmatics. The use of a term is an act, which also forms part of pragmatics. On the other hand the meaning is also constituted in the context of actual use, and in that sense its semantics are entirely dependent upon its pragmatics. Therefore every discursive object or identity is constituted in the context of an 30 action and every nonlinguistic action also has a meaning. What we find within so called nonlinguistic action is the same entanglement of pragmatics and semantics that we find in the use of language (Laclau and Mouffe 1987). All actions have meaning, and producing and disseminating meaning is acting (Torfing 1999). As a result, the distinction between linguistic and nonlinguistic elements does not overlap with the distinction between meaningful and not meaningful. The distinction between linguistic and nonlinguistic is a secondary one that takes place within meaningful totalities. This totality, which includes the linguistic and the nonlinguistic, is what Laclau and Mouffe call discourse (Laclau and Mouffe 1987). The consequence of a break with the linguistic (discursive)/nonlinguistic (extra-discursive) dichotomy is to abandon the thought/reality opposition, and therefore a major enlargement of the field of categories that can account for social relations (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Subject Positions and Identification In discourse theoretical terms, the subjects become subject positions (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002). When Laclau and Mouffe use the category of subject, they use it in the sense of subject positions within a discursive structure (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). This notion of a subject position represents a particular strength of the poststructuralist research paradigm, on which the theory of Laclau and Mouffe is grounded, because it recognizes both the constitutive force of discourse and of discursive practices and at the same time the fact that an individual is capable of exercising choice in relation to those practices (Davies and Harré 2001). As Althusser (1972) claims, the way that people experience themselves and the world around them is in part a consequence of particular discursive regimes. Through the process of interpellation, people are hailed by a particular discourse as particular kinds of individuals or subjects. The concept of the subject position is powerful because it connects the notion of 31 discourses to the social construction of particular selves (Edley 2001). By taking up a particular position as one‟s own, a person inevitably sees the world from the vantage point associated with position, and in terms of the particular images, metaphors, story lines and concepts that are made available and relevant within the particular discursive practice in which they are positioned (Davies and Harré 2001). For instance, if a child calls out „Mom!‟ and an adult responds, then the adult has become interpellated with a particular identity of a mother, to which particular behavioral expectations are attached (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002). However, the interpellation does not necessarily mean that individuals do not have any choice. The possibility of choice is inevitably involved in the process because there are many and contradictory discursive practices in which each individual can engage (Davies and Harré 2001). Since every subject position is a discursive position, they also take the open character of every discourse. As a result the various positions cannot be totally fixed in a closed system of differences. The affirmation of the discursive character of every subject position is linked to the rejection of the notion of subject as an originative totality. Since every subject position is a discursive position, the category of subject is penetrated by the same ambiguous, incomplete and polysemical character which overdetermination assigns to every discursive identity. For this reason, the moment of closure of a discursive totality cannot be established at the level of a „meaning-giving subject.‟ Because of this very absence of a final suture, none of the subject positions manages to stabilize itself as a separate subject position. There is a game of overdetermination among them that reintroduces the horizon of an impossible totality, and it is this game that makes hegemonic articulation possible (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). If individuals were to always have readily defined locations in the social structure, the problem of their identity would not arise, or, at most, would be a matter of people discovering 32 or recognizing their identity, rather than of constructing it. In this case the problems of social dislocation could be understood in terms of the contradictory locations of the social agents. However, the basic question of the social is posed at this identity level. All social conflict would have to be considered not only in terms of the contradictory claims, but also from the viewpoint of the destructuration of the social identities that the conflict would create. If a conflict-free situation were incompatible with any form of society, any social identity would necessarily entail construction as one of its dimensions (Laclau 1994). Laclau calls this the process of constructing identity identification. The identification, which has originated from psychoanalysis, asserts a lack of any essential foundation for any identity. Thus one needs to identify with something because there is an originary and insurmountable lack of fixed identity (Laclau 1994). Confronted with the undecidability of the social and the absence of any essence for identity, a person makes a decision to act regarding her or his self, and this move constructs a particular representation of self-identity (Cloyes 2004). That is, the subject is not merely hailed in a purely passive manner, but reflexively recognizes and invests in the position (Benwell and Stokoe 2006; Hall 2000). However, considering incompleteness and indeterminacy of every discursive relation, whatever identity the social agents have can only arise from precarious and transient forms of identification (Laclau 1994). Antagonism and Objectivity People confront the social world primarily as a sedimented ensemble of social practices, accepting them without questioning their contingency (Laclau 1994). Sometimes the degree of sedimentation is so high that the element of conflict and antagonism tends to fade (Torfing 1999) and then the sedimented ensemble seems natural and relatively uncontested. The concept of objectivity refers to this phenomenon (Jørgensen and Phillips 33 2002). However, the social world is not entirely defined in terms of the repetition of sedimented practices, because the social always overflows the institutionalized frameworks of „society.‟ In addition, social antagonism, which has a form of discursive presence as the experience of the limit of all objectivity, shows the inherent contingency of those frameworks (Laclau 1994; Laclau and Mouffe 1985). In a situation of social antagonism, the presence of an „Other‟ within the social field prevents one from being totally oneself (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Antagonism can be found where discourses collide, and this antagonism can be dissolved through hegemonic interventions, which are contingent interventions taking place in an undecidable terrain by ethico-political decisions (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002; Laclau 1996; Torfing 1999). Hegemonic articulation ultimately involves the negation of identity because some element of force and repression is involved in the process. What is negated in the process is not only alternative meanings and actions but also those who identify themselves with these meanings and actions. The negation of identity tends to give rise to social antagonism (Torfing 1999). In a social antagonistic situation, different identities mutually exclude each other (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002). In this situation, hegemonic force, which is responsible for the negation of individual or collective identity, tends to construct the excluded identity as a threatening obstacle to the fulfillment of chosen meanings and actions (Torfing 1999). In this way the contingency of sedimented reality and the identities it constitutes become visible (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002). Before discussing the specificity of social antagonism, we need to understand real opposition and dialectic contradiction, although neither real opposition nor dialectical contradiction can account for the specific relation of social antagonism. Real opposition responds to the formula „A-B‟ in which each of its terms has its own positivity, independent of its relation with the other. Obviously an antagonism cannot be a real opposition. There is 34 nothing antagonistic in a crash between two vehicles. It is only a material fact obeying positive physical laws. Dialectical contradiction, on the other hand, responds to the formula „A-not A,‟ in which the relation of each term with the other exhausts the reality of both. People participate in a variety of mutually contradictory belief systems, but antagonism does not necessarily emerge from these contradictions. Therefore contradictions do not necessarily imply an antagonistic relationship (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Despite their differences, what these two relations share is that they are objective relations, between real objects in the real opposition and between conceptual objects in the contradiction. In both cases we are concerned with full identities. In contradiction, it is because A is fully A that being-not-A is a contradiction. In the case of real opposition, it is because A is also fully A that its relation with B produces an objectively determinable effect. In the case of antagonism, however, we are confronted with the presence of the „Other‟ that prevents me from being totally myself, and therefore the relation does not arise from full totalities. The presence of the Other is not a logical impossibility, so it is not a contradiction. Antagonisms are not objective relations, but relations that show off the limits of all objectivity, which are revealed as partial and precarious objectification (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Equivalence and Difference The first condition for subverting the social or preventing closure is that the specificity of each position should be dissolved, and at this point the relation of equivalence is relevant (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). For instance, when makeover nominees meet with fashion gurus in the fashion makeover reality show, What Not to Wear, nominees express their fashion style through contents such as various clothes, hair-dos, and different make-up styles. However, the fashion gurus consider the different styles to be equivalently unstylish 35 and their wearers equally fashion illiterate. Since each of these contents is equivalent to the fashion gurus, in terms of the nominees being unstylish, the objects lose the condition of differential moments, and acquire the floating character of elements. The differences cancel one another out insofar as they are used to express something identical underlying them all, which is being unstylish. If all the differential features of an object have become equivalent, it is impossible to express anything positive concerning that object, and this implies that through the equivalence something is expressed which the object is not (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). A relation of equivalence absorbs all the positive determinations of the nominees in opposition to the fashion gurus‟ conception of style. Thus a system of positive differential positions is not created between the two because it dissolves all positivity: the nominees are discursively constructed as antifashion. To be equivalent, two terms must be different. Otherwise there would be a simple identity. On the other hand, the equivalence exists only through the act of subverting the differential character of those terms. Hence the ambiguity penetrates every relation of equivalence and the relation between difference and equivalence is undecidable (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). The discursive identities are inscribed both in differential signifying chains and equivalent signifying chains, and thus the tension between differential and equivalential aspects of discursive identities is unresolvable. This undecidability between difference and equivalence indicates that all social identities are intersecting points between the logic of equivalence and logic of difference (Torfing 1999). Although Laclau and Mouffe are primarily interested in more abstract discourses, the idea that these discourses are created, maintained and changed in diverse everyday practices is implied in their theory (Jorgensen and Philips 2002). Especially their concepts including nodal points and articulation have potential to be used effectively in detailed empirical analysis to answer questions such as how each discourse constitutes knowledge and reality, 36 identities and social relations. Laclau and Mouffe‟s theory can be used as a useful framework to examine the political process of creating meanings in the phenomena of fashion because their concepts, such as overdetermination and articulation, are oriented toward mapping out how different concepts and ideas are intermingled in a certain discourse and have certain effects on social reality. In particular, the concepts of nodal points and logic of equivalence and difference have much to offer for consumer researchers to reveal the contingent relations among various concepts and practices. The Implications of Laclau and Mouffe‟s Discourse Theory for Consumer Research Guiding the Analysis by Focusing on the Signification Process The overall goal of discourse analysis is to explain what is being done in the discourse and how it is accomplished. That is, the role of discourse researchers is to reveal how discourse is structured to perform a variety of functions and achieve various effects (Potter and Wetherell 1987). In the respect that it provides researchers with a way to unpack the construction of social reality, discourse analysis complements traditional qualitative methods. Traditional qualitative methods provide insight into the meaning of social reality and often reify categories from the data (Phillips and Hardy 2002). For instance phenomenology is most interested in examining the lived experience of consumers and the research usually results in descriptions of the essential structure of consumer experience. Ethnography is concerned about how certain consumption behaviors are understood and managed in different social contexts and therefore the research product usually includes a typology of interpretations, relations, and variations within certain consumption practices (Thorne 2000). On the contrary, discourse analysis is interested in revealing how social realities and identities are built and what the consequences of such configurations are. It provides the tools 37 to investigate the dynamics of social construction that produce these categories (Phillips and Hardy 2002). In discourse analysis, therefore, decisions about the truth and falsity of descriptions are typically suspended. Researchers using discourse analysis are much more interested in examining the process of construction itself. They strive to answer questions such as how „truths‟ emerge, how social realities and identities are built and what their consequences are. Working out what „really happened‟ is of less interest (Wetherell 2001b). For this reason, analysis must attend to the local geography of contexts and practices, and to the mechanisms through which the discourses are effectively realized (Potter and Wetherell 1990). In spite of its usefulness for investigating the process of the construction of social reality, similar to other qualitative methods, there is no standardized recipe for successful discourse analysis (Phillips and Hardy 2002). Moreover, to be too systematic and mechanical undermines the very basis of discourse analysis, inducing the reification of concepts and objects, which discourse analysis seeks to avoid (Burman and Parker 1993). When the analysis heads towards the reification of concepts and objects, it risks being a thematic analysis, the interest of which is to identify overarching themes in order to summarize data. On the other hand, the purpose of discourse analysis is to reveal the contingent configuration of various concepts and practices in cultural discourses. Therefore the nature of the analysis should be relatively open-ended and iterative (Taylor 2001). Despite its open-endedness, having analytical concepts to guide the analysis will help researchers to navigate through the data, because analytical concepts suggest what to look for and how to interpret what we see (Wood and Kroger 2000). In this respect, the theory and concepts of Laclau and Mouffe help researchers focus on the process of production of meaning and practice within and through discourse, avoiding the risk of doing thematic analysis. 38 In fact, Laclau and Mouffe did not provide any detailed analysis of empirical materials themselves, and were more interested in discourses as abstract phenomena (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002). However this does not mean their concepts cannot be used in empirical analyses. Their theoretical concepts of nodal points, antagonism and hegemony, logic of equivalence and difference, and subject positions and identification can be very useful and promising for analyzing the construction process of fashion meaning and practice. The concept of nodal points, which refer to key signifiers in the discursive organization of meaning, can be identified in specific empirical material, and the researcher can proceed to identify how nodal points organize the discursive and symbolic fields by producing privileged points of signification. Antagonism and hegemony can also guide the researcher to detect how antagonistic relations are configured in the field of fashion discourse and how such tensions are resolved through hegemonic intervention. Through the logic of equivalence and difference, researchers can examine how different elements are articulated into signifying chains in the field of discursivity. Subject positions and identification also provide a useful tool for the researcher to investigate how a consumer‟s adoption of certain subject positions in the discourse leads to the production of certain consumption meanings and practice in their everyday lives (Cloyes 2004; Jørgensen and Phillips 2002; Torfing 1999). Consumption as Discourse One of the potential applications of Laclau and Mouffe‟s discourse theory to consumer research comes from their abandonment of the distinction between linguistic and nonlinguistic elements in constructing signifying chains (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; 1987). According to Laclau and Mouffe, nonlinguistic practices and objects are also part of discourses (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002). This aspect of their theory has immense significance for consumer researchers because consumption involves material objects 39 (products) and actual consumption behaviors, apart from linguistic elements. In their everyday life consumers engage in the signification process by using particular products in particular situations. For instance, if a researcher examines the discourse around baggy pants, she will find out that what people say about the pants is tightly intertwined with the object itself (pants) and wearers‟ behaviors, such as the style in which they wear the pants and where they go in those pants. For the sake of analysis, a researcher can single out linguistic elements from the totality of the signification process. With only linguistic elements, however, the whole process of signification in the discourse of baggy pants cannot be shown in full, because linguistic elements are interwoven with consumption objects and consumers‟ behaviors to produce meaning. As Lalcau and Mouffe stressed in their theory, if the totality of consumption practice includes both linguistic and nonlinguistic elements, it cannot itself be either linguistic or extralinguistic (Laclau and Mouffe 1987). 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CHAPTER 3 CONSTRUCTING FASHION AS ORDINARY PRACTICE: DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF WHAT NOT TO WEAR Introduction Fashion has generally been conceptualized as a form of hegemonic oppression, obliging women to conform to the beauty ideal of the society (Wolf 1991). As Crane (1999) suggests, however, recent changes in the nature of fashion make it possible for a variety of styles to coexist, rather than enforcing the concept of one style dominating in a season. Moreover, Crane (1999) notes changes in the ways women perceive fashion. These changes raise questions concerning the above conceptualization as having a direct and automatic impact on consumers. Although the power of fashion to structure has been preserved, the power of fashion on consumers and the mechanisms by which that is achieved have experienced some changes. Since the 1970s, clothes have been selected on the basis of personal tastes rather than conformity to rules set by fashion authorities. The emphasis on individual interpretation of style continues to change the way fashion innovations are developed and presented to the consumers (Crane 1999). In fact, many scholars, industry analysts, and journalists strongly deny the dictating influence of the fashion industry on consumers‟ acceptance of changing trends (Sproles 1981). Moreover, the increasing level of competition has made it more difficult to implement the top-down model of the past. Elite designers display many ideas in 48 their biannual fashion shows, from which fashion editors and department store buyers choose items that will be promoted as new trends. To be successful in this environment fashionable clothes have to be synchronized with media cultures as expressed in television, film, and popular music (Crane 1999). For this reason, mass media has long been identified as an important part of an economic system that sustains the rapid production and consumption of fashion (Crane 1999; König 2004; McRobbie 1998). In particular, fashion journalism plays a crucial role in the dissemination of fashion innovations in contemporary society. The diffusion of fashion innovations, whether the process is downward or upward, has been accelerated by media exposure, which leads to rapid awareness of new styles at all levels of the fashion system (Crane 1999).The influence of TV shows, such as Sex and the City, on fashion consumption illustrates the impact that media contents can have on the process of fashion consumption (König 2004; Niblock 2004). Thanks to Sex and the City, Manolo Blahnik became a household name although not all can afford to buy these expensive shoes. Reflecting consumers‟ increasing interests in fashion and its importance in individuals‟ identity construction in contemporary society, television is overflowing with reality shows on fashion such as America's Next Top Model, Project Runway, and What Not to Wear. In particular, What Not to Wear is a fashion makeover show that teaches ordinary consumers how to dress in such a way as to enhance one‟s own style. As opposed to feminist criticism of fashion (Bordo 1993; Hesse-Biber 1996; Wolf 1991), the program does not encourage women to change everything about themselves to conform to an unrealistic, oppressing beauty ideal. Instead, the hosts of the show and other style experts claim that having style means reinforcing everything about a person that is already beautiful (Kelly 2008; Mizrahi 2008). It is also hard to deny the influence of the fashion industry and fashion media discourse on fashion consumption despite the supporting evidence for consumer agency in fashion 49 consumption studies (Murray 2002; Thompson and Haytko 1997). Still, the fashion industry takes charge of producing available fashion items, and the fashion media play a crucial role in disseminating new fashion trends and knowledge. This indicates the change in the ways that the fashion industry and media work to influence fashion consumption, and the limitations that a dictating model of the fashion industry has in explaining how contemporary mainstream fashion discourses work. Therefore, it would seem worthwhile to explore the ways in which fashion, the self and style are intertwined in mainstream style discourse, as well as this configuration‟s effects of on fashion consumption. For this essay‟s investigation of the ways that mainstream fashion discourses exercise their influence, I turn to a fashion make-over show, What Not to Wear. I investigate the following questions: 1) How do fashion experts and nominees conceptualize fashion, style, and the self in the program?; 2) How are these different meanings contested in the program?; and 3) What are the effects of the configuration suggested in the program? Considering the increasing popularity and importance of reality shows in contemporary popular culture, answering these questions will help consumer researchers to better understand the influence of popular culture on fashion consumption. Fashion and Style In the contemporary fashion world, fashion and style have quite different meanings although they are often used interchangeably in everyday language usage. In particular, in their use of language contemporary fashion experts draw a very clear line between fashion and style. Fashion usually indicates what designers create and sell such as clothes, shoes, bags and other accessories. On the other hand, style refers to one‟s usage and interpretation of what is available for her or him (Kelly 2008; Mizrahi 2008). Therefore it is possible to have lots of clothes without having style (Marano 2008). 50 Fashion The concept of fashion is usually defined in „change‟ of styles in clothes (Wilson 2003). Sproles (1979) defines fashion as temporary cyclical phenomena adopted by consumers for a particular time and situation. Fashion as change can be found in any field from clothes to academic research. However, the term fashion is commonly used in reference to clothes. In modern societies no clothes are outside of fashion. Fashion sets the terms of all clothes related behavior. Uniforms have been designed by Paris dressmakers and even nuns have shortened their skirts as fashion has changed (Wilson 2003). A number of authors have argued that the fashion system provides consumers with the raw material for everyday dress, and this raw material includes discourses and aesthetic ideas around clothes as well as the garments themselves (Wilson 2003). The discourse of fashion serves to present certain clothes as meaningful, beautiful or desirable while endowing certain clothes with the meaning of ugly, bad, or undesirable (Entwistle 2000). Style While the term fashion emphasizes change, style is more related to aesthetic practices of individuals. Indeed, the term style is a central notion in the arts (Meskin 2001). Style is any distinctive, recognizable way in which an act is performed or an artifact made. The wide range of application implied in this definition is reflected in the variety of usages of the term in contemporary English. It may indicate the classification of the ways of doing or making according to the groups or countries or periods and it may denote one individual‟s manner of doing something (Gombrich 1968). Phrases like Baroque or Renaissance style are examples of the former usage, and the style of Beethoven or Cicero refers to the latter usage. By virtue of style, therefore, the particularity of individual work is subject to a general law of form that also applies to other works (Simmel 1991). For this reason consumers cannot 51 have their own style in fashion ignoring current fashion trends because creativity in their own interpretation of fashion is only allowed within the boundaries of fashion discourses and aesthetic norms of the period. People, however, do speak of Michelangelo‟s style, or Beethoven‟s style. In fashion similar things happen. Groundbreaking works of certain fashion geniuses such as Karl Lagerfeld, Alexander McQueen and John Galiano set the terms for other fashion designers. Celebrities, often called fashionistas, create ensembles which ordinary consumers emulate creating their own look. These special figures literally created their own style from their very individual genius. The style of an individual master may be adopted by others so that it ends up being the shared property of many artists (Simmel 1991). Some might claim that people sometimes refuse to go with the fashion and assert their independence, but this independence is relative. Even a refusal to participate in mainstream fashion is a way of taking up a position toward it (Gombrich 1968). This is why studying seemingly highly individualized ways of creating one‟s own style opens the window to look into the discursive formation of meanings and practices in fashion consumption. In common usage of language, people often use the term „style‟ with evaluative connotation. While „s/he has style‟ is commonly used to express positive evaluation, „he has no style‟ is commonly understood to be criticism (Meskin 2001). In fact the names for styles used in art history emerged from normative contexts. Sticking to certain stylistic norms is considered desirable while deviation from such norms is sometimes condemned. The adoption of certain style conventions is clearly learned and absorbed by those who carry on the tradition (Gombrich, 1968). These evaluative and learned aspects of style also imply that the social elements play an important role in creating one‟s own style. However we also criticize people for showing off style without substance. Therefore the mere exhibition of style is not sufficient for overall positive value (Meskin 2001). The criticism of style without 52 substance actually resonates with the mantra of contemporary style discourse, which is "there‟s no way to unearth your personal style without first knowing who you are" (Mizrahi 2008), p.10). In other words, style discourse takes a certain standpoint in relation to fashion and self, and this intertwined relationship among fashion, self and aesthetic interpretation of fashion through creating style seems to be fruitful ground to uncover how mainstream fashion discourse defines the self in relation to fashion and how this definition leads to the hegemony of the fashion industry. Another pivotal element of style is that there can be no question of style if the speaker or writer does not have the possibility of choosing between alternative ways of doing things (Gombrich 1968). Therefore synonymy lies at the root of the whole problem of style (Ullmann 1964). In order for a consumer to wear an evening dress with style, she has to have choice options to express her individuality. In fact both designers and clothing firms offer a wide range of choices from which the consumer can put together a look that is compatible with his or her identity (Crane 1999). There is an internal paradox of style mixing generality with individuality. Having choices is not necessarily indicative of consumers having certain autonomy in fashion. Consumers‟ practices of juxtaposing various discourses should not be directly understood as representation of consumer agency. In addition, by selecting among possible options and putting those things together to create a certain look signifying specific meanings, consumers engage in concrete practices of wearing clothes, and thus researchers can look into the concrete semiotic practices of wearing clothes and creating meanings. In summary the term „style‟ is used to describe alternative ways of doing things, while the term „fashion‟ can be reserved for the fluctuating preferences which carry social prestige in a given period of time. Despite the difference in meanings, the two terms can overlap in their application if a fashionable preference can become so general and lasting that it affects the style of a whole society (Gombrich 1968). These working definitions for fashion and style 53 will be used for this essay. In the following section, I will overview the paradoxes of individuality versus generality in fashion consumption. What Not to Wear What Not to Wear is an American reality television show that is based on a British Show of the same name, which was launched by the BBC in 2001. It started airing on January 18th, 2003 and over 10 seasons about 270 episodes have been shown thus far. Most of the episodes feature participants who have been nominated by their significant others such as family members, friends and colleagues. Whenever someone is selected, the nominee is secretly videotaped for two weeks. Afterward, the hosts of the show, the nominee, and nominators meet and watch the secret footage together and criticize the nominee‟s choice of clothing. Five thousand dollars is then offered to the nominee for purchase of a new wardrobe. However, conditions are imposed. The nominee must turn over her or his entire existing wardrobe to the hosts. The nominee must also shop by the rules which are tailored for the nominee and established by the hosts. If the nominee accepts, she or he is brought to New York City for a week of evaluation, shopping, and hair and makeup styling. In this show, nominees often resist changing their fashion consumption behaviors because they do not care about fashion or want to remain unique in the crowd. As the episode progress, however, nominees become more attuned to the fashion norms suggested by the fashion expert in the program, although there are some variations in the terms of the negotiation between the fashion experts and the nominees. People in the Program Various characters appear in What Not to Wear, including the makeover nominee, the nominee‟s family and friends, fashion experts, a hair stylist, a makeup artist and a narrator. 54 Their roles in the program are summarized in Table 1. In every episode, a new person is nominated for a fashion makeover head to toe. The person is secretly nominated by her or his family and friends. The reasons for nomination are varied, from outdated fashion to clothes being appropriate for their gender, age, social roles, jobs, and so on. Nominees‟ characteristics are varied in terms of gender, age, profession, marital status, body shape, and geographical location so that regular viewers will, over the course of time, find someone with whom they can identify. Besides nomination, a nominee‟s family and friends help film the secret footage of the nominee‟s fashion. They express their thoughts about the nominee‟s fashion choices, removing from the closet and showing the nominee‟s inappropriate or unfashionable clothes. In fact, their comments on the nominee‟s fashion represent the gazes of other people whom the nominee may come across in daily life. These testimonies of friends and family are contrasted with the nominee‟s views on personal fashion choices. This disparity clearly Table 1: The Characters in What Not to Wear Characters The Role of the Character Nominee ▪ Being made over in terms of wardrobe, hair, and makeup ▪ Being criticized about their poor fashion choices Family and Friends ▪ Nominating ▪ Helping to film secret footage ▪ Giving their honest opinions about the nominee‟s look Fashion Expert Stacy London and Clinton Kelly ▪ Fashion stylists ▪ Criticizing the fashion choices and style of nominees ▪ Suggesting fashion rules and helping with shopping ▪ Providing general fashion knowledge Nick Arrojo ▪ Hair stylist Carmindy ▪ Makeup artist Narrator ▪ Introducing nominees to the audience members ▪ Summarizing the progress and anchoring meanings 55 illustrates that a person‟s look has a definitely intelligible meaning, but it does not necessarily have a mutually agreed-upon meaning for an encoder and the decoders (Campbell 1995). Stacy London and Clinton Kelly are the hosts of the show and they play central roles as fashion stylists in the show. They visit a nominee at home, ambush the individual and criticize that person‟s poor fashion choices while watching secret footage together with the nominee. In this criticism, very straightforward and brutal expressions are commonly used. In particular the cross editing between what a nominee says and what fashion experts think creates a structure in which the fashion experts refute what the nominee argues about personal fashion choices. Besides discussing the nominee‟s poor fashion choices, they suggest fashion rules for the nominee based on gender, age, job, social roles and physical characteristics. The nominee goes shopping for two days. On the first day, the nominee is usually unaccompanied while Stacy and Clinton observe through a hidden camera whether the nominee is following the shopping rules; their comments on the nominee‟s choices are inserted through cross editing. On the second day, Stacy and Clinton usually shop with the nominee. Hair stylist Nick Arrojo and makeup artist Carmindy appear as additional fashion experts. Unlike Stacy and Clinton, they usually do not criticize a nominee‟s hair and makeup. Instead, they focus on suggesting appropriate hair and makeup styles based on the nominee‟s outfits, and teach the nominee how to manage hair and do makeup. Finally, the narrator plays an important role in the program, although the audience cannot see the narrator. The narrator introduces the nominee and briefs the progress of the makeoker. The identity of the nominee and the shopping rules are summarized by the narrator. Through this narration, he anchors particular meanings among the multitude of potential meanings. 56 The Flow of the Show In terms of contents, every episode is divided into roughly three sections. Figure 1 shows how the program proceeds in each episode. The first segment focuses on introducing and criticizing the nominee. The narrator introduces the nominee at the beginning of the program. Stacy and Clinton join to watch secret footage, decide that the nominee needs a fashion makeover and ambush the nominee, who has been set up by family and friends. If the nominee accepts the conditions of the makeover, which include surrendering the present wardrobe and following the rules set by Stacy and Clinton, the nominee is eligible to receive $5,000 for shopping expenses. After the nominee accepts the conditions, the makeover process starts with the hosts joining the nominee to watch the secret footage. The most distinguishing characteristic in this section of the show is the contestation between the nominee and fashion experts. Stacy and Clinton criticize the nominee‟s fashion very brutally, and the nominee defends her or his choices more or less fiercely. Here audience members observe the striking differences between intended meanings and received meanings. Such a Figure 1: Flow of each episode Introducing a nominee Ambush Secret footage & 360 degree mirror Shopping Fashion rules Hairdo and makeup Revealing transformation Returning home and revealing to family and friends Confrontation of different meanings Fashion styling knowledge Reflections by nominees and significant others 57 contestation continues in the 360-degree mirrors as well. In particular, 360-degree mirror is the mechanism that represents people‟s gazes. The nominee sees her or his appearance from the different vantage points that have never been available to the nominee. That is, the nominee is confronted with their appearance in terms of what others see. The second section mainly concerns delivering fashion styling knowledge. Stacy and Clinton suggest fashion rules based on the nominee‟s unique situation. Customized fashion knowledge in terms of fit, colors, patterns, and cuts that flatter the nominee‟s strengths while camouflaging weaknesses, are recommended; general rules of fashion are also offered. The ways of managing hair and makeup are also taught by the hair stylist and makeup artist. Product placement, such as exposing the store name and brands of cosmetics for makeup, usually happens in this section. The third section mainly deals with transformation. At first, the nominee seeks approval of fashion experts before returning home. The fashion experts marvel at the nominee‟s transformation and reinforce how the nominee looks beautiful or handsome, well put together and sophisticated. The nominee also confesses what she or he has learned through the process. In this section, a striking contrast between the old and the new self is shown. Such a contrast is also reinforced one more time by the testimonies of family and friends expressing their admiration for the transformation. At the last moment, the nominee acknowledges that she likes her changed self and will keep the changed look from now on. Methodology Laclau and Mouffe‟s Discourse Theory as an Analytical Framework Among various approaches of discourse analysis (Finlayson 1999; Gill 2000; Schiffrin 1994), I will use the conceptualization by Laclau and Mouffe (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Laclau and Mouffe 1987) as a guide to analyze the collected data. The discourse theoretical 58 framework of Laclau and Mouffe is befitting for analyzing What Not to Wear because their theory did not distinguish the linguistic and the extralinguistic. Instead, it affirms that every object is constituted as an object of discourse and that any distinction between what are usually called linguistic and behavioral aspects of social practice is an incorrect distinction (Laclau & Mouffe 1985) because the boundary between the linguistic and the nonlinguistic in a certain social practice is not clear (Laclau and Mouffe 1987). This is a very important aspect in analyzing What Not to Wear because the linguistic aspect, what fashion experts and people around them say about a choice of outfit, and the material and behavioral reality, which includes nominees‟ wardrobes and behaviors, are intermingled in the program‟s signification process. This legitimates the use of Laclau and Mouffe‟s discourse analytical tools to analyze all aspects of the signification process in the program including physical reality, such as the body and the material world (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002). In particular, I focus in this essay on the concepts of antagonism, nodal points and logic of equivalence and difference. Antagonism refers to the situation in which the presence of an „Other‟ within the social field prevents one from being totally oneself (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Antagonism can be found when discourses collide, and this antagonism can be dissolved through hegemonic interventions (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002; Laclau 1996; Torfing 1999). In fact, antagonism abounds in What Not to Wear. Actually, the conflicts between the fashion experts and the nominee, and the resolution of these conflicts through the transformation are a key to the entertainment value of the program. For this reason, antagonism needs to be a center of analysis for this program. To reveal the configuration of the discourse, nodal points, as well as the logic of equivalence and difference will be utilized for the analysis. According to Laclau and Mouffe, every discourse is constituted as an attempt to dominate the field of discursivity and to 59 construct a center. These privileged discursive points within the discourse are called nodal points (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Around a nodal point, other signs are ordered; these other signs acquire their meaning from equivalential or differential relationship to the nodal point (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002). For instance, in the discourse that appears in What Not to Wear, style as a nodal point plays a central role in connecting different elements such as appropriateness for certain age, job, lifestyle, and situation into the moment of the discourse. On the other hand, wearing clothes according to personal preference and taste is not necessarily considered as having style because their preferred fashion items are inappropriate for their identity and situation. As seen in this example, nodal points, and the logic of equivalence and difference will be very useful concepts because they can show how the multitude of elements is articulated within the discourse. Data Set The data for this study include the episodes of What Not to Wear: Best of DVD with a run time of 10 hours and 45 minutes for 15 episodes. The selection of samples from the population of episodes is not based on probability. Instead, I use the best episodes chosen by the producer of the show as texts for analysis. I use these episodes because it is expected that the producer‟s choice of the best episodes would have high entertainment value for the audience resulting from the most dramatic changes in nominees, which will magnify the effect of mainstream fashion discourse on a consumer‟s fashion styling. Although the program is a reality show, the narrative is very tightly structured. Each episode starts with conflicts, but the nominees tend to accept the fashion experts‟ advice meekly and at the last moment all conflicts between two parties are resolved. This repetitive pattern suggests the possibility that the storyline of each episode might be scripted. For this reason, the episode of Desirée was included in the analysis as a negative case. She was very 60 resistant throughout the process of makeover, and even resisted Stacy and Clinton at the last moment of revealing. Including this negative case is expected to increase the variability in the data enabling a determination of the extent to which the analysis and results hold even in a seemingly diff