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What’s This About
Culture shapes what people wear, and clothes carry cultural meanings of place, community, belief and history that can change as garments travel.
This guide explains how culture and fashion influence each other, such as
Why fashion museums treat dress as an art form
Geertz’s definition of culture and what it means for clothing
How the history of wax prints connects Europe, Indonesia and West Africa
Hair and clothing as statements in the Black is Beautiful movement
Cultural appropriation, from festival headdress bans to the durag
and many more!
A garment rarely has one fixed meaning, so context matters as much as the garment itself.
Key Points
01Traditional garments, textiles and craft skills carry the history of the communities that made them.
02Textile histories are often connected. West African wax prints, for example, began as Dutch imitations of Indonesian batik.
03Appropriation usually means taking symbols without understanding, credit or fair benefit to the people they come from.
04Learn what a garment means, buy from its makers where you can and avoid sacred or ceremonial regalia.
Culture shapes what people wear, and clothes in turn carry cultural meanings of place, community, belief, history and occasion.
Those meanings are not secret, but they are easy to miss, because the same garment can carry different meanings in different places and to different people.
This guide explains how culture and fashion influence each other, gives examples from textiles, traditional dress and political movements, and suggests how to wear clothes from other cultures with respect.
For the difference between fashion as an industry, a style, an aesthetic and a trend, start with our guide to what fashion is.
From culture to fashion and back
“Fashion” can mean the industry of designers, fashion houses, manufacturers and retailers.
In France the industry has unusually formal structures. Haute couture, for example, is a legally protected term, granted to houses that meet criteria overseen by the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode and the industry ministry.
“Fashion” also means what is popular at a given moment, and what is in fashion often reflects wider changes in society, politics and the arts.
Trend forecasting agencies, of which WGSN is one of the best known, study those wider changes to anticipate what people will want to buy.
Clothes also communicate.
The 2016 HBO documentary Suited, directed by Jason Benjamin, follows the Brooklyn custom tailor Bindle & Keep, co-owned at the time by Rae Tutera, as it makes suits for clients including transgender people preparing for weddings, job interviews and court appearances.
The film shows how a well-fitting suit can help people present themselves as they wish to be seen, and how others read those signals.
Fashion in the museum
Museums also treat fashion as an art form.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) both hold major fashion collections and stage regular exhibitions.
Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty opened at the Met in 2011 and drew 661,509 visitors, making it one of the Met’s most visited exhibitions.
An expanded version at the V&A in 2015 drew 493,043 visitors, then a record for a paying exhibition at the museum.
The exhibition showed how collections can tell stories and comment on history and society. The Widows of Culloden (autumn/winter 2006) drew on Scottish history, and VOSS (spring/summer 2001) was staged inside a two-way mirrored box.
What is fashion culture?
Garments are bound up with history and heritage.
In Bengal in the nineteenth century, for example, many women wore the sari without a blouse, and the blouse and petticoat worn beneath it today are reported to have spread among urban women under colonial-era ideas of propriety.
Fashion and style are personal choices, but they are made within a cultural context.
Culture covers a community’s shared values, beliefs, norms, practices and rituals, and dress is one of the ways those are expressed.
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz described culture as “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life” [1].
Dress scholars study clothing in this way, looking at everyday dress, memory, textile heritage and manufacture, the body and fit, consumption, costume and performance, and global fashion.
What makes up a culture?
Cultures include tangible objects and patterns, such as textiles, motifs and symbols, and intangible beliefs, values and practices.
The sociologist Émile Durkheim described “collective representations” that give a community its shared character [2].
1. Beliefs and symbols
Belief systems, whether religious, philosophical or political, shape how a community understands the world.
Symbols such as flags, religious motifs, artistic patterns and recognisable fashion styles can bring people together under a shared identity.
The bald eagle, for example, has long been used as a national symbol of the United States [3].
2. Practices and rituals
Practices and rituals are recurring activities or ceremonies that strengthen a community.
The Japanese tea ceremony, with its carefully prescribed movements, objects and dress, is one example [4].
3. Transmission and change
Cultures change through internal developments and outside influences.
Marshall McLuhan’s idea of the “global village” describes how electronic communication brings distant cultures into contact [5].
Motifs, patterns and symbols travel with that contact into architecture, art and clothing manufacture.
4. Acculturation and assimilation
Acculturation describes the cultural changes that happen when two or more cultures meet and influence each other, sometimes producing new hybrid forms.
Assimilation describes one group adopting another’s culture, often losing some of its own markers in the process.
Both processes are visible in fashion, where designers and wearers continually combine garments, techniques and motifs from different sources.
How culture shapes fashion
Traditional garments
One of the clearest influences is traditional dress.
The sari takes many regional forms across South Asia, with different weaves, draping methods and occasions.
The kimono has a long history in Japan and is now worn mainly for formal and ceremonial occasions, with rules about colour, pattern and season that vary with the wearer and the event.
Materials and textiles
Local resources and skills shape materials.
Silk is closely linked with China, where sericulture, the farming of silkworms, has a very long history.
Harris Tweed is defined in UK law as tweed handwoven by islanders at their homes in the Outer Hebrides, finished there, and made from pure virgin wool dyed and spun there.
Textile histories are also often more connected than they look.
The wax prints, sometimes called Ankara, now strongly associated with West African dress began as Dutch industrial imitations of Indonesian batik, exported to West Africa from the 1850s, according to the Textile Research Centre in Leiden.
West African wearers and traders gave the designs local names and meanings, making them their own.
Social and political movements
Clothing and hair have often been used as a form of protest or to express identity.
In the 1960s, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture notes, the Afro became a sign of the “Black is Beautiful” movement, and garments such as the dashiki were also worn as statements of African heritage.
Cultural appropriation in fashion
Cultural appropriation usually means adopting customs, dress or symbols from another culture, often one with less power, without understanding, acknowledgement or fair benefit to the people they come from.
It can turn meaningful symbols into commodities, spread stereotypes and erase their original context.
In October 2014 Glastonbury Festival confirmed that it would ban the sale of Native American-style headdresses on site from 2015, following a petition.
The durag is another example. It protects hairstyles, and within Black communities it has also become a symbol of shared experience, and some celebrities who wore it purely as a fashion accessory have been criticised for ignoring that history.
Craft traditions belong to the same story.
Block printing in India and Miao embroidery in China support the livelihoods of skilled makers and their communities, and the skills are often passed on through hands-on training.
Haute couture, too, depends on specialist workshops in France.
Culture beyond clothing
Cultural influence extends to accessories, hairstyles and body adornment.
Braids and locs, turbans, bindis and henna have all been worn as fashion statements around the world, sometimes with little awareness of their cultural or religious significance.
How to wear clothes from another culture with respect
Appreciating another culture’s dress is different from appropriating it, and the difference usually lies in understanding, credit and context.
Learn what it means. Find out whether a garment or symbol has religious, ceremonial or status significance before wearing it, and avoid sacred or earned regalia such as feathered headdresses.
Buy from the makers. Where you can, buy from artisans or businesses from the community the textile or garment comes from.
Name the source. If someone asks, say where the garment or pattern comes from rather than presenting it as a generic trend.
Read the setting. A garment offered to guests at a wedding or festival may be welcome there and out of place as a costume elsewhere.
Wear it as clothing, not a costume. Combine a block-printed cotton shirt, for example, with your usual chinos and loafers rather than assembling an imitation of someone else’s traditional dress.
Subcultures raise similar questions, and our guide to fashion subcultures explains how styles such as punk and goth carry meanings for their communities.
For the clothing features that make a style recognisable, see our men’s fashion style guide.
Clothes as everyday culture
Clothes belong to daily life, and they carry history with them.
When you put on a shirt in the morning, wrap a scarf around you in the cold or dress up for a party, you draw on conventions shaped by history, politics and culture.
In the opening of Tom Ford’s 2009 film A Single Man, Colin Firth’s character, George, describes dressing each morning as the way he becomes the man he is expected to be.
Most people do something similar, whether or not they think about it.
Bibliography
[1] Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York, Basic Books, p. 89. The definition first appeared in Geertz’s essay “Religion as a Cultural System” (1966).
[2] Durkheim, E. (1912) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life; extract reprinted as The elementary forms of religious life, in Social Theory Re-wired (2016), pp. 52 to 67, Routledge.
[3] Terrell, E. (2019) The Bald Eagle, Creature of Nature and an American Symbol. The Library of Congress.
[4] The Japanese tea ceremony, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
[5] McLuhan, M. (1964; MIT Press edition 1994) Understanding media: The extensions of man. MIT Press.