Abstract
The Westminster Menswear Archive, housed at the University of Westminster held an exhibition in 2019 entitled ‘Invisible Men’. The purpose of this show was to “shine a light” on men, or more accurately menswear which had been hitherto neglected by scholarship and exhibitions featuring dress (Groves and Sprecher, 2019). This article draws on research conducted at this exhibition to ask anthropological questions as to the nature of menswear both in the gallery space and beyond. Fundamentally this will question the invisible nature of menswear and whether such invisibility really exists. In order to accomplish this, this article will suggest a new theory of the gaze that exists in the gallery or exhibition space – the gallery gaze – and use it to provoke analysis of the ethnographic material presented. This article acknowledges a distinction between intellectual, semiotic and symbolic invisibility but suggests a different approach, arguing for an (in)visibility of progressive degrees.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 192-216 |
| Number of pages | 25 |
| Journal | Journal of Material Culture |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| Early online date | 16 Dec 2021 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jun 2022 |
Bibliographical note
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage)Keywords
- menswear
- gaze
- fashion
- museum anthropology
- anthropology of clothing and adornment
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Gender Studies
- Anthropology
- Cultural Studies