Magdalena Petersson og/and Magnus Mörck: Containment and Transgression in the Visual Marketing of a Workwear Kilt
Center for Consumer Science
Göteborg Univeristy
Our paper concerns the visual coding of gender and sex in the marketing of a piece of clothing that has a highly ambiguous potential. Women can wear men´s clothes, while men avoid borrowing from the female closet, due to fear of losing their privileged position. Men don´t wear skirts, although many fashion designers have had their glamorous haute couture versions of it, from Gernreich to Gaultier. Skirts for men have never become popular, but this might change, as shown in our case study. By being taboo this piece of cloth at the same time becomes potentially interesting, raising questions about the gender norms of fashion. In his study of the men´s skirts Bolton points to the cloth as open to different renderings: it can be used to create femininity, as with transvestite use, but it can also be coded masculine – here he points to history and to the present use of the kilt, a skirt that somehow can be conceived as safely masculine.
In 2005 the Swedish work wear manufacturer Blåkläder launched an experimental piece of work wear, a kilt for construction workers. Our contribution to the theme of visualisation starts out from the advertising image used by Blåkläder in their catalogue, including a photograph, graphics and text that outlines the story of the product. The work wear kilt is an adaptation of a Scottish kilt, with the addition of many functional details borrowed from ordinary work wear. It was created as a media stunt to attract attention, at first it was only produced in a limited number, and circulated mainly as an image in the press and on Swedish television were it became popular among scene technicians. The paper offers a visual analysis of the image that was used to code the kilt as serious, functional, masculine and in fact rooted in tradition. Our interviews with company marketers shows how they tried to avoid the pitfalls of making a feminine product or a product that would appear “funny” or unserious. The image is coding the intentions of the marketers, but there also seems to be an excess.
Theoretically the paper deals with masculinity and visuality and tries to relate new work on fashion images (Jobling) and visual marketing (Schroeder) to post-structuralist feminism. It is a sub study of a project funded by the Swedish research agency Vinnova that also includes work on design projects that all in some way are challenging the status quo of the heterosexual gender order including among other examples the Volvo YCC, a car designed by an all female team, a feminist pin up calendar, power tools with flower decorations and furniture with a gender message.