Consuming Clothes and Dressing Desire in the Twilight series

Abstract

‘In the beginning’ clothing was the biblical mark of sin when ‘The Lord God made for Adam and for his wife coats of skins, and clothed them’ (Genesis 3.21, English Revised Version) and the Old Testament warned against ‘the bravery of their tinkling ornaments’ (Isaiah 3.18 King James Version). From the Christian Bible’s association of clothing with sin and adornment with earthly vanity to the Mormon’s use of clothing to reaffirm vows to God there has, across religions and cultures, always been a weight of symbolism and subtext to clothing. There is then a complex relationship between the wearer’s sense of self, their skin, the body it is veiling and ornamenting. It is a complexity that plays out both at a macro and micro level. At a macro level in terms of society, dress operates as a communication system heavily weighted with code and has to be read as ‘a situated practice that is the result of complex social forces and individual negotiations in daily life’ (Entwistle, 2010, p. 65). On a micro level, it is the complex relationship the individual has with clothing from the tactile sense of touch, the skin and the material to the spectrum of masking and veiling.