Jean-ealogies: material culture approaches to understanding relationships through people's clothing

This is a recording of a presentation given at Methods in Dialogue: Researching Closeness, 10 November 2010 at the University of Manchester.

This research draws upon a material culture approach, which focuses attention upon materiality and people’s relationships to objects. In particular, I consider the relationships people have to clothing, which are always dynamic in terms of the materiality of the clothing as it changes through wearing, and also the dynamism of people’s lives and relationships more broadly. By focusing upon material culture, the methods adopted allow clothing to be understood as a medium for understanding people’s relationships to others and to their own lives and biographies. In particular, this talk will outline the methods adopted in research women who wear their boyfriend’s jeans as a means of negotiating the often fragile nature of these relationships. Using ethnography and object interviews allows an understanding of closeness as a material and embodied process that is simultaneously a negotiation of a relationship to another person.

One advantage of this approach is that it examines social hierarchy by focussing on choices that are socially meaningful to the people concerned. However, there are conceptual and methodological issues that arise from how social closeness is defined and measured.