Juliet Ash: Dress behind bars
MA Senior Tutor in History of Design and Dress History and Theory, Royal College of Art, London
“Convicts’ garb is striped pink and white.”(Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal)
“You’re there in your combat BDU (Battle Dress Uniform) with the US flag facing the wrong way because you’re ‘charging towards the enemy’ and I’m here in orange”. (Moazzam Begg: Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim’s Journey to Guantanamo and Back)
Prison dress is considered as an embodied incarceration practise which reflects the materiality of waves of penal policies that affect the identity construct of prisoners as gendered, culturally ‘different’ and, overwhelmingly, from poorer groups. The paper critically evaluates the way the lives of prisoners have been and are visually and/ or verbally constituted as ‘docile bodies’ or permitted limited ‘agency’ as consumption by prison institutions through the examination of visual and verbal documentation, representations of prison dress and archival garments.
Although the paper focuses on a historical case study in Britain, reference is made to contemporary US, European and global practices.
The form of prison dress is not always integral to a specific penal policy although ideologically and materially it is both enforced and becomes part of a convict’s construct of identity and one which can be altered by the wearer only according to the ‘type’ of incarceration regime in operation. Additionally it often represents historical slippage where prison dress changes emerge contingent with prior prison uniform strictures and categorisations as well as being dependent on contemporary clothing production technologies and gender and cultural differences existing outside the prison walls which are subsequently adapted to prison conditions. Prison dress as a visible embodied site of penal ideology becomes iconic in typifying the degree of humiliation meted out to prisoners by specific political regimes and disseminated to the outside world in the popular mythologizing of prisoners’ identity in the media, fashion magazines, film, art and literature.
However, this paper suggests that prison dress is rarely a reflection of just one prison system. Rather, it is both convergent with global ideological positions and is, importantly, historically and culturally specific.
It is in this light that archival garments and photographic representations of prison dress are critically examined as sites of the embodiment of rehabilitation as consumption. Through the specific denial of the haptic and other sensual associations with clothing the subjective identity of prisoners is additionally punished over and above the denial of freedom. The make and fabric of archival garments are considered in relation to prisoners’ accounts of their experience of clothing as both embodied humiliation and/or limited agency.
In part this has been taken up by cultural theorists and historians but generally in relation to the materiality of prison architecture. Prisoners’ dress features rarely in the literature of surveillance and as critiques of prison and political regimes historically. This paper addresses this omission with reference to a variety of media and an archive of prison clothing.
Juliet Ash is writing a book entitled ‘Dress Behind Bars’ for I.B.Tauris.