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How successful is communication via clothing? Thoughts and evidence on an unexamined paradigm

This paper presents the ‘wardrobe approach’. This approach, now widely adopted, changed the focus from couture to everyday fashion, contesting the paradigm of costume scholarship that clothes constitute a system of precise meanings indexing stable categories like gender and status. The author introduces qualitative methodology to examine sartorial meanings from the perspective of the wearer, not the expert observer. The studies reported provide the empirical evidence for the author's hypothesis through qualitative and quantitative methods, that communication of meaning through clothes is neither stereotypical nor clear-cut but contextual, and non-predictive, and often results in miscommunication.