Browsing by Subject "symbolinen interaktionismi"

Dress and clothing have been studied a lot from the symbolic interaction perspective where dress is seen as a message. According to symbolic interactionism a person tells about him or herself and expresses the self through different identities. In this study, I ask how women express their self and identity through dress and what is other persons' role in women's expression of their dressing identity. In addition, I look for answers to the questions why women are preserving clothes they do not use and what kind of meanings they attach to these clothes. I used a combination of thematic and narrative interviews for collecting of data. I interviewed nine women between 19 and 64 years of age. In the course of the interviews, informants presented clothes they liked, clothes that were special for them and clothes that they had but which they no longer used. I coded the data with Atlas/ti program. I analyzed the data by using a theory dependent approach. Women express their self through various identities that are affected by social context. Women also define their identities by rejecting such ways of dressing that they think are uncharacteristic for themselves. They are careful not to reveal too much. They are also sensitive about overdressing and being labeled into a wrong age group. Women's dress is affected by an imaginary other person's look, an image of how other people see them. This is especially evident in work and formal dress. Women's favorite clothes made them feel comfortable, they felt that these clothes reflected their own style, and women believed that they looked good in wearing those clothes. Women preserved clothes that they did not use because they believed that they still one day would use them or they wanted to keep them as memories. The clothes kept as memories build up women's present day identity by disclosing what she had been before and reminding her of positive moments in the past.