Dress Devolution 3: Still playing dress-up: age, clothing and costume

Dress Devolution Three focuses on age as a category that excludes and challenges mainstream dress practices, both onscreen and off.  Since the ‘youthquake’ of the 1960s, young people became the arbiters of taste and the key practitioners of fashion, popular culture and style.  Many of the vanguard of this cultural shift are today octogenarian icons who continue to shape the cultural norms of their great grandchildren’s generation. 

More broadly, though, in the Global North, fashion continues to prioritise the young.  A more expansive gaze, encompassing globally diverse geographies of taste, offers a different perspective, wherein the body capital of youth has less value.  On screen, the complex articulation of gender, maturity and physical beauty has often been flattened and binarised to create of popular stereotypes of age.  In our daily lives, these archetypes are mapped out onto cultural expectations of age-appropriate dress.

The third Dress Devolution conference seeks to explore the full spectrum of life stages and the blurred and shifting relationship experienced in them to dress, textile and costume practice and representation.

The conference is supported by the Fashion and Textiles Institute at Falmouth University and will take place at the University’s Penryn campus in Cornwall UK.  We invite proposals for 20-minute presentations, panels of three speakers, or 10-minute flashtalks on themes that might include but are not limited to:

• Costuming age on screen
• Representing youth culture in media and onscreen
• Dandy grannies and grandma-core
• True vintage lifestyles
• Global challenges to youth’s dominance
• Wrinkly rockers, silver foxes, age and gender
• The silver sisters movement
• Plushies, Lolitas and childhood nostalgia

Please send a 300 word abstract and 100 word bio to DressDevolution@Falmouth.ac.uk by 28 February 2025.