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Professor investigates dangerous dressing
10:02 a.m., Oct. 26, 2006--While it's not news that crime, terrorism and war routinely take lives, it can be disconcerting to find that messages conveyed by clothing can lead to community conflict and even death. Janet Hethorn, associate professor of fashion and apparel studies at UD, studies and experiments with style and expression through clothing and appearance, as well as visual response to style. She also researches fashion's consequences in various settings and for various communities. In 1990, Hethorn read a magazine article about kids being murdered for the colors they were wearing. She decided the research methods she had developed in earlier studies on fashion change and meaning could be applied to the situation for better understanding of the visual dynamics. Hethorn moved to Los Angeles, and after speaking with several sources from the article, met with Wes McBride, head of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's gang unit, Operation Safe Streets. “We met one afternoon for several hours, and he agreed that I had something to contribute,” she said. “He set me up that night in my first ride-along--with two gang investigators in Carson, Calif. I proved my sincerity and developed ongoing research relationships. From there, I followed the connections and kept going.” Hethorn received a research grant for her project and began working with 23 different gangs in an East Los Angeles high school. With full access to the kids, Hethorn made a documentary and created a web site, “A Study Guide to Gang Identity,” which received media attention in 1996. Hethorn also made a video, “Los Angeles Style.” When labeling a person as a gang member, Hethorn said it is important to focus on behavior, not style. “There's a lot of intended power in clothes,” she said. “We tend to put a lot into our clothes.” She also studied inside-versus-outside perspectives and discovered hidden meaning in many styles, such as pleats on shirts or pants, which helped two major prison gangs identify each other. At the end of her gang study, Hethorn began researching school uniforms and issues of fit and function. Currently, she is compiling a database to manage 150 responses. Students viewed photographs and made value judgments, labels, described the action in the pictures, assumed intent of outfit choice and described the visual elements of the outfit. One image can hold different meanings for different persons, and when it is assumed others share a visual understanding, meaning and context can be misconstrued, Hethorn said. The consequences of this visual misunderstanding can lead to community conflict or even death.
“The dead person had been carrying two colors, thinking that depending on the situation, he would pull out a rag to show his affiliation with one group or the other, and he would be safe,” she said. “But, he had misread the signs and had selected the wrong color. Thus, he was killed by a gang member who had perceived him as claiming alliance with a rival gang.” Hethorn said she thinks we all have a long way to go in terms of visual communication and visual understanding, especially with the dangers in the world. “Maybe we ignore the varying perspectives because it's too hard to discuss visual symbols and meaning,” she said. “We don't have a shared language. Visual literacy isn't widespread.” Hethorn began studying young people and how fashion changes among them in the early 1980s. During graduate school, she began researching how individuals respond to clothes and style and wrote her doctoral dissertation on MTV's influence on fashion. Her very first subjects were students at her daughter's junior high school, who helped Hethorn take photographs of classmates. The students organized the pictures into representative styles and rated them from least acceptable (“the headbangers”) to most acceptable (“preppy”). Hethorn noted that in the 1960s, the Beatles shocked people with their long hair, but over the years that look became acceptable. It is this context of change, she said, that can alter the significance of clothes. “Oftentimes there can be a piece which is exactly the same but when it's put in a different context, it takes on a whole different meaning,” she said. Hethorn said it usually it does not matter if individuals see things in the same way, because differences can be positive. “We see and experience the visual world all the time,” Hethorn said, “responding to it almost intuitively as we navigate through it, selecting what we pay attention to, and the rest becomes invisible. “It is when aesthetics are in conflict and there is an additional heightened sense of fear or anger or intimidation that it becomes critical to make the effort to explore visual differences, their contexts and meanings,” she said. “This effort can be the first step toward real problem-solving.” Article by Julia Parmley, AS '07
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