Influence of Religion and Culture on Fashion
Religion and Wearing apparel
The interaction betwixt religion, civilization, and dress is fascinating. Dress can be a window into the social world, which is bound by a tacit set of rules, customs, conventions, and rituals that guide face-to-face interaction. To many religious organizations, clothing is an important symbol of religious identification. Withal, for most groups, the regulation of personal appearance goes beyond habiliment. The term dress as it is used here includes wearable, preparation, and all forms of body adornment. Dress also includes behaviors related to the control of the body, such as dieting, plastic surgery, and cosmetics. Holistically, then, clothes functions every bit an effective ways of nonverbal advice. Ideas, concepts, and categories central to a group, such as age, gender, ethnicity, and faith, help to define a person'southward identity that is so expressed outwardly through a person'south appearance. Both private and group identity is projected through dress because people use self-presentation and self-promotion to visually nowadays identity that is congruent with their conventionalities systems.
The Sacred and the Secular
Where religion is concerned, wearable can be divided into 2 categories ofttimes referred to as the sacred and the secular (or profane). In some instances, what is treated every bit sacred is merely a garment that has of import cultural implications with regard to gendered power. In patriarchal religions where the perception is that males are given the responsibleness of seeing to the enforcement of religious rules, some garments go associated with the sacred primarily through the prescription and enforcement of a dress code. The nigh recent instance of the conflation of gendered power and dress is the prescription that women in Afghanistan in the early 2000s were required to clothing the burqa (or chadaree).
While secular clothes is non exclusively associated with religious activities, secular dress is used in ritual or is worn by certain religious practitioners such equally the clergy. Dress used for religious ceremonies and rituals is referred to every bit ecclesiastical dress; modern apparel for Roman Cosmic priests resembles dress from the early on days of the Christian church when the clergy were not distinguished from other male person members of the church by their dress. Nonetheless, in the sixth century as fashion changed, the clergy did not prefer the new fashions and continued to wear the older styles. Ecclesiastical dress has become a form of fossilized fashion, a phenomenon where the garments worn seem frozen in fourth dimension and continues to exist worn even as other forms of clothes evolved.
A common theme with regard to liturgical garments worn by male person clergy is the demasculinization of sacred apparel. For many religions, sacred apparel for male clergy commonly avoids pants in favor of loose, flowing robes. Because hair is symbolic of sexuality, it is controlled in many religions. Some orders of priests, nuns, and monks shave their heads, remove a lock of hair, or cut their hair to symbolize their turning abroad from the pleasures of the world.
Interestingly, everyday dress for certain ethno-religious subcultures, such as Hasidic Jews, Amish, and conservative Mennonites, is considered sacred, peculiarly in the symbolic separation of the ethno-religious subculture from a dominant culture. As religious groups meet social change, clothes often symbolically becomes important as certain items of a religious grouping'due south clothing may be classified equally sacred in contrast to what is considered secular. Generally the nearly symbolic clothes features of Amish and Mennonites (hats, beards, head coverings, bonnets, aprons) are considered sacred. Similarly, amongst bourgeois Muslim women, very fashionable vesture may be worn underneath the veils (sacred garments), known equally chador, chadaree, or burqa, that are seen past outsiders. Sacred clothes worn externally then becomes used intentionally to visually separate these religious groups from the larger culture. Often, the rules every bit to dress codes are imposed past male clergy on female members of the community, and in doing and so, these patriarchal religious societies intentionally use dress codes to maintain a gendered imbalance of power.
Some religions have sacred garments that are non visible to outsiders. Mormons who accept been to temple wear sacred undergarments beneath otherwise ordinary clothing. The sacred undergarments reinforce their commitment to their religion.
Religious Ideologies
Organized religion has used dress in two related means: to maintain the customs and traditions of the organization, thereby establishing a visual identity for the religion; and to simultaneously command the individual identities of its members by symbolically denoting dress as inneed of command. Religions create dress codes to overtly define morality and modesty while covertly decision-making sexuality. Fundamentally, dress codes are less about clothing than about the control of the body past the more powerful church building members who enforce their groups' ideologies. Religious dress codes express grouping identity and simultaneously office as a means of reinforcing male person patriarchal control.
When a faith uses dress to reinforce tradition, information technology will usually be seen in opposition to fashion, which past its very nature is dynamic. Religious apparel will change slowly every bit organized religions oft reject mode every bit an attempt to focus on individuality rather than salvation.
To empathise how dress is expressive of religious ideologies, it is helpful to empathise how each of the earth's major religions perceives the office of dress as a means of identity expression. In a later section, more detail will exist given as to how particular religious groups use clothes to establish sectarian identities.
Hinduism is a polytheistic religion encompassing a holistic view of life in which the inner cocky is highly valued, and life in the world is seen as temporary. Reincarnation is a belief at the base of operations of both the caste system and religious expression. The private works through levels of moral evolution that are indicated by caste. It is believed that the higher the person's caste, the closer the individual is to the spiritual earth. Since the focus in Hinduism is on the inner cocky, dress, an expression of the external self, is less important. Wearing apparel is tradition spring, and slow to modify by comparing to costume plant in other religious groups. Clothes and adornment in Hindu society does testify a person'southward caste, level of piety, or the specific god to which the individual is devoted.
Islam is the newest of the major religions and its followers are commonly referred to as Muslims. This organized religion emphasizes the group over the individual, and Islamic ideology focuses on male ability and the separation of the sexes through both concrete and visual means. Dress codes for Muslims have great impact on daily life, which involves frequent religious expressions and rituals. Among Muslims, codes of modesty go across the covering of women'due south bodies to include restriction of women's beliefs. The Koran requires women to wearing apparel modestly, just does not specifically state that they must vesture veils. Dress codes regarding veiling vary among Islamic families and cultures; however, amongst the most conservative Islamic groups the requirements for women to clothing veils are seriously enforced. In addition to their ostensible function to protect gender segregation, these rules also are intended to tedious down assimilation that began after World War 2 when westernization started in Islamic societies. As western dress became common, the Islamic fundamentalist movement began pushing for a return to tradition. Pocket-size apparel and veils became symbolic of both the acceptance of patriarchal power and nationalism. Throughout the larger cities in Iran, posters announced the specifics of the wearing apparel code requiring women to dress in chadors that cover all only the face. In Transitional islamic state of afghanistan under Taliban control, women were killed if they did non wearable the all-enveloping burqa or chadaree.
Judaism, the oldest of the major monotheistic religions, is based on the concept that people be to glorify God; to exist appropriately dressed, then, is a religious duty. Historically, the aboriginal Jews had customs that indicated dress was seen as symbolic. Since the upper body was seen every bit pure, but the lower body was perceived every bit impure, Jews wore girdles to brand the division between pure and impure visibly articulate. Morality was connected with clothes early on; Moses forbade nudity. Similarly, he forbade Jews from wearing the clothing of not-Jews in an endeavour to proceed his people carve up from influences that might lead to assimilation. In recent times, levels of Judaic conservatism are denoted by dress where the most alloyed Jews dress like not-Jews. However orthodox and Hasidic Jews wear specific garments to visibly show their religious conservatism.
Christianity is less articulate about values pertaining to dress than is Judaism. Values in Christian theology relating to the torso are alien; women's bodies are seen as the site of temptation, in that male sexual guilt is projected onto the female person trunk. Adam's autumn from grace is attributed to Eve'southward sexuality. Christian women are required to dress modestly, but this standard is not equally practical to Christian men. Modesty with regard to body exposure is an important value that is a key indicator of religious conservatism.
During the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, early on leaders used wearing apparel equally a symbol of piety. Fashionable, colorful wearing apparel and adornment were equated with sensuality and pride, while somber clothes showed the Christian's focus on salvation. For fundamentalist Christians (who evolved out of the Reformation) such as the Anabaptist groups (such as Amish, Mennonites, and Hutterites) who believe themselves to exist uniquely separate from the larger society, dress is used to show that separation. In these groups, dress is often hyperconservative or may even exist a form of fossilized fashion.
Sectarian Wearing apparel
Some of America's sectarian ethno-religious groups employ fossilized style to divide themselves from the outside world. Notable among these are the Shakers, Amish, Hasidic Jews, Hutterites, and several bourgeois Mennonite groups. Fossilized manner has been explained every bit a sudden "freezing" of mode whereby a group continues to wear certain wear long later on information technology has gone out of style for the general population. This phenomenon has been explained as expressing nobility and high social condition or the group's religious, sometime-fashioned, sectarian identity. Within sure ethno-religious groups, fossilized mode is used in contemporary settings every bit a visual symbol of traditional gender roles for women; this generally occurs in societies that find change to be a threat.
Most of the bourgeois ethno-religious groups who wear fossilized fashion continue to wear clothing styles that were in use for the full general population during the time their sect originated. For example, the Amish separated from the larger Mennonite movement in the outset of the seventeenth century; their garments in the early on 2000s include full-fall trousers for men, and for women, dresses, bonnets, capes, aprons, and head coverings like their forebearers. Like the Amish, Shakers and the most conservative Mennonites in the The states continue to wear long dresses with aprons that provide an boosted covering of the bust and stomach, again, similar their forebearers. Other Mennonites wearing apparel in styles that were pop when their sect broke off from the larger Mennonite movement. Hasidic Jews take retained a circuitous lawmaking of dress for men that indicates a man's level of religiosity; these garments include detail hats, shoes, socks, and coats that are identifiable past members of their community. For Hasidic Jewish women, wigs are worn to comprehend their natural hair.
Modesty and Female Sexuality in Wearing apparel
Among all of the major religions, modesty in women's dress is associated with gender norms; this is a major issue to religious groups. Gender bug are paramount in the dress codes of bourgeois religious groups since the control of female sexuality is ofttimes of groovy importance in patriarchal religious groups. The dress codes generally relate to modesty and crave clothing to encompass the contours of the female body. Additionally, some religious groups, particularly the virtually conservative Islamic, Anabaptist, and Jewish sects, also require that women'due south hair exist covered as well.
Every bit used past religious groups, the effect of modesty goes beyond the roofing of the body in order to disguise female curves and secondary sexual characteristics; in the conservative strains of all of the major religions, dress codes besides bargain with the care and roofing of women'due south hair as it is associated with women's sexuality (Scott, p. 33). Further complicating matters, wearing apparel codes are conflated with gender and power issues in religious groups. At the root of this issue is the control of female sexuality that is perceived to be necessary by some religious groups equally a means to maintain social order.
An agreement of how apparel works inside religious groups calls attention to the complexity of meanings surrounding visible symbols such as dress, and sheds calorie-free on the ways that bodies can communicate social and religious values. The dress of religious groups can be used to facilitate social and ideological agendas. Wear and personal adornment are used for establishing and maintaining personal and social identities, social hierarchies, definitions of deviance, and systems of control and power. As a consequence, then, dress inside conservative religious groups is a symbol of the individual's delivery to the group while it too symbolizes the group's control over private lives. For America's fundamentalist Christian groups, and the Anabaptist groups in particular, clothes is particularly important with regard to its role in social control and in social change.
Wearing apparel and Social Command
Dress is an firsthand and visible indicator of how a person fits into his/her religious system. As a marker of identity, dress tin can be used to guess the person'due south delivery to the group and to the religious value system. In many conservative groups, suppression of individuality is expected, in obedience to the rules of the religious organization. Several religious groups are besides ethnically homogenous; these are referred to as ethno-religious groups (In the The states, some of these groups are the Amish, Mennonites, Hutterites, Hasidic Jews, Sikhs, and sure Islamic groups.) The conservative branches of ethno-religious groups frequently use clothing to simultaneously limited ethnicity, gender norms, and level of religious involvement (religiosity). Through conformance to a strict religious value system, the nigh bourgeois of the religious social bodies exert control over their members' physical bodies. Since strict conformity is often equated with religiosity, compliance to strict codes of behavior is demanded. The internal body is field of study to control by the religious culture, especially with regard to nutrient and sex. The external torso, yet, is much more visibly restrained. Strict wearing apparel codes are enforced considering dress is considered symbolic of religiosity. Clothing becomes a symbol of social control equally it controls the external body. While a person's level of religiosity cannot exist objectively perceived, symbols such as clothing are used as bear witness that the member of the religious group is on the "right and true path."
Normative social command begins with personal social control through self-regulation, followed past informal social control. The fellow member wants to fit into the group, and expresses role commitment by following the social norms, visibly expressed in the group's wearing apparel code. When the individual begins to offend, for instance past wearing a garment that is as well revealing of body contours, peers may disapprove and employ subtle methods of informal control to pressure level the individual to adjust to the group norms. Finally, the threat that an offender introduces to the social order is managed through formal social control measures, such as disciplinary measures and expulsion administered past specialized agents, including ministers, rabbis, and other moral arbiters. Thus, norms are managed through social control to inhibit deviation and insure conformity to social norms at even the most-minute level.
Through symbolic devices, the physical body exhibits the normative values of the social body. Symbols, such every bit dress, help delineate the social unit and visually ascertain its boundaries because they give nonverbal information nigh the individual. Unique dress fastened to specific religious and cultural groups, then, tin role to insulate grouping members from outsiders, while bonding the members to each other. Normative behavior inside the culture reaffirms loyalty to the group and tin be evidenced by the wearing of a compatible type of attire.
Within American culture there are specific ethno-religious groups that intentionally separate themselves from the balance of guild and attempt to reestablish the pocket-size, face-to-face customs. Many originated in Europe and moved to America when religious freedom was promised to immigrants. Shakers (Scott, p. 54), Mennonites, Hutterites (Scott, p. 72), and Amish (Scott, p. 87) are such groups. These groups are often perceived by the exterior world as quite unusual, just that derives more than from their deviant behaviors, visually manifest in apparel, than from their religious differences from mainstream Christianity. An essential cistron in ethno-religious groups, social control is significant in terms of the survival prospects of the group. Among orthodox Jews (Scott, p. 57) in Williamsburg New York, social command was achieved in means remarkably similar to those used by the Amish and conservative Mennonites. The nigh important features included isolation from the external guild; accent on conformity with status related to religiosity, symbolized by clothing status markers; a powerful clergy and rigorous sanctions to insure conformity to norms.
Dress and Social Change
With changing social, political, and economical environments, even the most sectarian religious grouping has to fence with the impact of social change. Changes in dress often signal underlying changes in social roles too as gender roles. Traditional gender roles can be marked past a detail form of dress where the roles are stable for long periods of time; when dress changes suddenly in these groups, we can expect to find a change in gender roles. A good example is that of the change in the wearing apparel of Roman Catholic priests and nuns following the changes instituted past Vatican II in the 1960s. The changes were more than pronounced for nuns equally their roles within the Church dramatically inverse; so too did their wearing apparel. Additionally, when roles are restrictive, we tin expect to see a restriction in women'southward dress, in the form of either dress codes or physically restrictive clothing.
With clearing and colonization, clothing figured into the power imbalance betwixt people of different religious backgrounds. As American missionaries in the nineteenth century encountered ethnic people, clothing became an issue almost immediately. Christian missionaries advanced their own ethnocentric perceptions of appropriate behavior and apparel and, often through subtle coercion, guided the acculturation of ethnic peoples. Missionaries have oft taken on the part of introducing western clothing to indigenous people as a means of "civilizing the natives." In some cases the transformation to western-styled clothing was part of the demand of a religious group to dominate an ethnic culture. In other cases, a religious grouping immigrating to another country might also voluntarily make changes to their wearing apparel to facilitate their assimilation into the new society. One such example is that of Hawaii where missionaries objected to the indigenous dress of kapa skirts with no roofing of the breasts. The missionaries required Hawaiians to wear western dress when at the missions; a particular garment called the holoku was created for Hawaiian women to wear. As Christianized Hawaiians became missionaries to Oceania, they brought the holoku into the islands, just the garment was known by different names outside of Hawaii.
Occasionally a reciprocal relationship occurred, in which the ethnic group more willingly took on the dress of the more than powerful religious group. Strategic shifts from traditional dress to western dress amidst the Dakota tribes in Minnesota were somewhat voluntary. Similarly, the immigration of European Jews to America led to many Jews using clothes as a means of blending into the larger society. On the other paw, Hasidic Jews chose to reflect their ethnicity past retaining fossilized manner to intentionally separate them from the larger American culture. At the end of the twentieth century, some Christian and Roman Catholic churches began to contain indigenous textiles in their liturgical garments used in religious ceremonies. While this practice is seen primarily in missionary work of churches establishing missions in Africa and other locations such as the Philippines and Southward America. The use of indigenous textiles in African American churches has been a long-standing tradition that honors African heritage.
In determination, many religious groups have developed cultural norms with regard to clothes. Wearing apparel codes, both formal and informal, exist as a means of showing group identity. Members of religious groups actively construct their ain lives and use wearing apparel symbolically to express religious behavior, adaptation to social change, and the conformity to social norms and religious dominance.
See also Ecclesiastical Clothes; Gimmicky Islamic Dress Jewish Clothes.
Bibliography
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Damhorst, Mary Lynn, Kimberly Miller, and Susan Michelman. Meanings of Dress. New York: Fairchild Publications, 1999.
Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, Due north.J.: Doubleday, 1959.
Hostetler, John. Amish Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1989.
Poll, Soloman. The Hasidic Community in Williamsburg. New York: Glencoe Complimentary Press, 1962.
Scott, Stephen. Why Do They Apparel That Style? Intercourse, Pa.: Good Books, 1986.
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