Tag Archives: transition

The sociology of cleaning out your closet

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A wardrobe consultant with a PhD in visual sociology discusses how cleaning out a closet can lead to catharsis:

Akbari explains that we are emotionally attached to items of clothing and their history. Sorting out our clothes is a therapeutic process that goes beyond aesthetics. Her focus is on the relationship between the visual appearance and self-presentation and how this affects one’s ability to claim power. Clothing allows people to play with the different facets of their identity.

The people that reach out to wardrobe consultants are generally going through some form of transition. They could be wanting a new job or dating new people. It’s an identity construction, the shedding of an old self and embracing of something new…

“Our clothes are an extension of our bodies and our identity and our social success depends on our ability to communicate, our intelligence, and our appearance — we come as a package.”

This seems a Goffmanian take on closets and clothes.

Perhaps this also explains why people are unwilling to clean out a closet full of clothes – they are not just clothes but rather symbolic objects that say something about the individual and making decisions about such symbols can be difficult. Having a full closet implies that one has a lot of options about one’s identity while removing some of those clothes might close off some of those identities.

The changing demographics of American kindergarten students

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Many researchers have noted the existing demographic transition in America away from a large majority of whites to a more diverse population. USA Today has some statistics about what this looks like at the level of kindergarten classes:

•About 25% of 5-year-olds are Hispanic, a big jump from 19% in 2000. Hispanics of that age outnumber blacks almost 2 to 1.

•The percentage of white 5-year-olds fell from 59% in 2000 to about 53% today and the share of blacks from 15% to 13%.

“This is not just a big-city phenomenon,” Johnson says. “The percentage of minority children is growing faster in the suburbs and in rural areas.”

Measuring this at the level of kindergarten classes might be a decent proxy for measuring the next generation.

I wonder how this will impact the image of suburbs which have traditionally been thought of as lily-white places. The suburbs of the 2050s will look quite different in population than the suburbs of the 1950s, post-World War II era.