This paper explores the role of the mirror in the act of getting dressed. It argues that in daily practices of dress/ing the predominance of the sense of sight in defining the experience of both dress and our self is materialized and enhanced by the omnipresence of an object: the mirror. Despite being mostly ignored in analyses of dressed body, the mirror performs a crucial role in defining both dress and the self in visual terms. By considering how the mirror is implicated in processes of subjectification , we analyse how this affects the relationship people have with clothes as signifiers of their selves. We maintain that in order to escape the gaze and its solidifying effect, we need to look away from the mirror and think of the body not as a subject, but as a fluid composition of forces. By drawing insights from phenomenology and then adhering to the Spinozian philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, we interrogate the body as something that affectively transforms in the encounter with clothes to then explore it as a site of becoming with and through clothes. It is our aim to offer an experimentation in thinking that might lead to different ways of experiencing our clothes in the everyday as well as of theorising about their relationship with the human body and the wearers' (supposed) identity.1 Analyses of the role of the mirror in relation to fashion have been undertaken in more art-based scholarship; see Evans (19990 and Shane (2018). 2 Authors who have explored dress as a multi-sensory embodied practice include: Cunningham (2011), Johnson and Foster eds. (2007( ), Shusterman (2017.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract