What will I wear today?

Our self identity is affected by our daily chore of, for example, what we will wear today. Jacqueline looks at her wardrobe. She ponders - if she wears the leather skirt, she may exclude herself from being viewed as a feminist. If she wears the dungarees, she may be viewed as a feminist but a feminist perhaps with doubtful sexuality. If she wears that suit with padded shoulders to the office, she is accepted into the business world but it is at the behest of men and she is excluding herself from being seen as a feminist. For many of us our subjectivity is at the behest of such dress code whims.

Such dilemmas around clothes might be termed limits, unseen strictures which if not imposed on us are somehow ‘out there’, perhaps in the vaporous nature of a discourse. Some advocate breaking away from these constraints by what might be termed a higher order critique of the ‘self’. In regard to our subjectivity and dress code whims, Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements (1978), for example, rather than saying I am any one of the above, argues that I am indeed all of them.⁹