All the rage - why dressing up helps us speak out | Lucy Clayton | TEDxExeter

Can we use something as frivolous as fancy dress as a tool for political protest? Lucy Clayton explores the social significance and psychology of ordinary people in extraordinary outfits, revealing the surprisingly rebellious power of costume.

At TEDxExeter 2019 our theme was The Art of the Possible. We’re living in an age of polarity where many communities are feeling more and more divided against a backdrop of increasingly populist politics which risk dividing us even further. Our talks offer an opportunity to pause and consider the future we want to create, the possibilities that may be obscured in the busyness of our everyday lives, and how we might get there.

Writer Lucy Clayton is curator and co-host of the Dress: Fancy podcast, exploring the social significance and psychology of people in costume. Her career in fashion has taken her from Next to New York and, more recently, Community Clothing, a social enterprise with a mission to sustain and create jobs in the UK textile and garment manufacturing industry.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

I'm going to talk about
political protest and papier mache.

(Laughter)

But for any of this to make sense,
I first need to confess something to you,

something that might not be obvious
just by looking at me.

My name's Lucy,
and I'm a sensible grown-up.

I work hard.

I'm a decent mother

and a responsible member of my community.

But I much prefer dressing up
as someone else.

You see, I have always loved fancy dress.

And since this picture -

(Laughter)

But since this picture was taken,
I've ramped things up a bit.

I've commissioned made-to-measure armor
from a workshop in the Ukraine,

imported professional Hollywood blood.

I've nurtured a collection of 36 tiaras.

I've had a fake wedding,
complete with fake bridesmaids,

fake vicar, fake husband.

I hospitalized myself once

after an incident with a Roman toga
and some very hot glue.

(Laughter)

And I once sent my son to school
looking like this.

(Laughter)

Now, the kind of fancy dress
that I love is not the same as cosplay

with its discipline
and immersiveness and accuracy.

They're the real deal.

But what I adore
is the peculiar eccentricity

of cardboard cut-outs,
dodgy sewing, stapled seams.

It's kitchen-table couture.

The for-one-night-only aspect,
falling into bed drunk

and danced out and still
wearing the face paint.

And there's nothing
disciplined about that.

So in order to have
more fancy dress in my life -

because, honestly, it's awful -

you can't do it in supermarkets
or on average Wednesdays.

So I created a podcast about it.

The only podcast about fashion,
fantasy, and fancy dress.

Or costumes, as they prefer
to call it in the US.

It's a place to explore
the elaborate themes,

intricacies, and influence
of costume in real life.

Because I'm interested

in the distinction between
the performative and the personal.

Ordinary people in extraordinary outfits.

And what struck me
more than any other subject

we've encountered on the show

is the way people use costume
as a tool for protest.

Now, you might be thinking,

"What does dressing up have to do
with the important business of politics?"

(Laughter)

And it does seem counterintuitive.

Why dress silly in order
to be taken seriously?

But from caped crusaders
to modern suffragettes,

people are getting creative with costume
to express their outrage

and garner global attention.

And it's working.

It's worth saying here that fashion
is often treated as a flimsy,

generally female distraction
from the real issues of the day,

and despite being
a three-trillion-dollar industry,

it's often marginalized or dismissed
in commentary about current affairs.

And yet, every day each one of us

uses what we wear as a tool
for constructing our sense of self,

for literally fashioning our identities.

If fashion is considered frivolous,
then fancy dress is really frivolous.

Right?

But actually, it allows us to express
the most extreme version of ourselves.

It allows us to be something other.

Something in-between,
something in development.

And historically, it's always
had a relationship with hot topics.

Here's a gown by Worth worn
by Mrs. Vanderbilt in 1883,

representing the spirit of electricity.

More recently, there's been
a decidedly less beautiful trend

for dressing as the Millennial's
favorite, the avocado.

(Laughter)

Sorry.

(Laughter)

Over the years, fancy dress has
playfully depicted controversial moments,

from this matchgirl factory-strike dress

to Urban Outfitter's
Halloween "Influencer" costume.

It's satire and disruption
and provocation.

So I'm going to take us
beyond slogan T-shirts

to look at the ways
bonkers subversive garments

are being used to take on
the establishment.

Here, we can see an anarchic continuity

from gunpowder plot
through to Occupy Wall Street.

These masks taken from
the comic book "V for Vandetta,"

are used as a public face
of the anonymous movement.

They're a variation on a Guy Folks theme,

and they hark back
to ancient carnivals and masquerades

where the usual societal
rules don't apply,

and everything is temporarily topsy-turvy.

Here, "Handmaid's Tale" costumes
are appropriated for demonstrations

against the Trump administration,

and we saw a lot
at the Kavanaugh hearings -

taking a moment in fiction
from Margaret Atwood's 1985 dystopia,

and applying it
to a very current conflict,

lines of silent, highly visible women
outside courtrooms and the Capitol.

Hilariously, later, in a complete
misjudgment of the cultural mood,

the retailer Yandy prompted
wide-spread disgust

when they launched
a sexy version of the Handmaid.

(Laughter)

I don't think they'd read the novel.

(Laughter)

Elsewhere, the visual language
of the suffragettes

is borrowed from new battle,

purple for dignity,
white for purity, green for hope.

Powerful Pantones and a pre-hashtag way
of building momentum.

Sentiments like
"Same shit, different century"

are rendered ever so lady-like.

(Laughter)

The campaign group Fathers for Justice
uses a range of costumes in their stunts

from Batman to Santa.

Clear statements in a contentious debate.

By using classic icons of good,

by hijacking the visual grammar
of superheroism,

they're trying to invoke
an almost an instinctive, nostalgic,

sympathetic response in the viewer.

The Pink Pussyhat Project
took a traditional domestic skill

and rendered it the opposite
of calm or comforting.

This open-source knitting pattern,
this moment of craftivism -

originally conceived the people
who wanted to march but couldn't -

was quickly embraced
by women's activists all over the world.

Sarah Mower called it

a global cheerful symbol
of feminist defiance in British Vogue,

and it's considered so important
a moment in fashion history

that the V&A's brilliantly titled
Rapid Response Collection

have already acquired one.

Now, imagine if you took
the costumes away in all these examples.

If they were just standing there
in jeans and anoraks.

What does that do the occasion,

the atmosphere, the news cycle?

Each of these examples
uses cultural referencing

to make a statement without saying a word.

It's free speech without speech,

the messages writ large on the body.

And how do you express
your feelings about issues

that are so complex,

so shifting, so delicate, so divisive

that sometimes language eludes

even the very best of us?

I just love her face in that picture.

(Laughter)

At a time when the words of experts
are ridiculed and critics are trolled,

when fake news rebrands truth as fiction,

perhaps we need tools
that are beyond language

to securely assert our values.

I think there's a link
between fancy dress and ambition.

It's why we love it growing up.

You can be a ballet dancer
and a firefighter,

all in the same afternoon.

But for the game to work,

you have to do more
than just put the clothes on.

You need to aspire into those costumes.

Fancy dress isn't just a tool
to passively join in,

but an opportunity
to project our future selves,

our hopes.

And I believe there's a relationship

between the way we dress
and how brave we feel.

I know that because it took me weeks
to decide what to wear today.

(Laughter)

Perhaps, dressing up gives us courage
to behave in ways we wouldn't otherwise.

Here are some extreme
illustrations of that.

During the American Civil War,
Frances Clayton dressed as a male soldier,

becoming Jack Williams.

She fought with the Missouri
Regiment in 17 battles

before her identity was revealed.

She used uniform
first to disguise her gender,

second as armor, a layering
of costume that allowed her

to elude the male gaze

and instead train her eye
to fight alongside them.

Which, I wonder, was the more dangerous?

By wearing her warrior status,

Frances was dressing up
in order to be allowed in.

A whole life born out of those clothes.

The women of the 18th century
often used the masquerades

as an opportunity to elope or escape.

Being masked and unchaperoned
gave them an unusual freedom,

a socially sanctioned moment of disguise

to pursue a life beyond
the one ascribed to them.

The mask made them dangerous and daring.

We know how extreme
the psychology of this can be

because the worst imaginable atrocities
have been committed masked

and in a kind of costume.

A corrupt courage.

Cloaked and criminal.

A group united
as a chilling icon of hatred.

Costume isn't intrinsically innocent.

And a disguise can free
an innermost evil, too.

Costume for unity can be seen
in a completely different way here:

where it says,

"She is getting married, so we're having
organized compulsory fun."

(Laughter)

We've all been there.

Or here, at the State of the Union,

where it says we are part
of an empowered tradition

honoring the suffragettes' legacy.

Simply put, when an activist
puts their identity alongside a placard,

they show that they,
as an individual, express a view.

If they want to connect it with a wider
movement, they can use a signifier,

like the suffragette colors

or the "hi-viz" vests
of the French "Gilets jaunes."

It's tribal.

Whereas in fancy dress, the costume
subsumes the individual entirely

into the view they're expressing.

It's as if, bizarrely,
when someone is concealed,

their true values
become completely visible.

The arresting protest images
I've shown you today,

and of course there are many more,

all, unequivocally,
communicate collective hopes.

By protesting in costume,
these people are giving voice

to their democratic right
to imagine a potential future,

to identify with each other,

and to express their freedom.

So costume has real potential
to challenge and confront,

for disruption and dissent.

By dressing outside ourselves,
we trick the eye,

attract the focus, demand recognition.

We creatively tell the people in power
that we're not comfortable conforming,

that the collective issue is bigger
than our personal perspective.

Fancy dress is not bound
by who you are or how you identify

but by the message you want to embody.

And those messages aren't constrained
by the limits of your experience

or your environment.

Only by your imagination.

And we have to imagine our utopias
before we can build them.

It is imagination that sells

thousands of cheap and cheerful
Marilyn Monroe dresses every year.

Imagination that sends kids to school
clutching Harry Potter wands,

and sales figures for grotesque rubber
presidential candidate masks

have correctly predicted
U.S. election outcomes since Nixon.

Isn't he handsome there?

(Laughter)

Unlike any other kind of getting dressed,

fancy dress is fundamentally
about infinite possibility.

That's why we keep it alive,

even when technology offers up
far more sophisticated vehicles

for experimenting or escapism.

We still throw another party,

hand down our treasured dressing-up boxes,
those time capsules of ideas

and interpretations.

So if dressing together
as one brilliant rainbow crew

gives you a sense
of strength and belonging,

a palette just about big enough
to celebrate your pride,

then use all the colors.

Or if you wake up one morning thinking
Brexit is a job for Wonderwoman ...

(Laughter)

you might be right.

Or if you're moved to rise up
in solidarity in a crowd of pink hats

that say in glorious, loving shorthand
how your body is equal,

how it is not there for grabbing,

how it belongs fiercely to yourself,

then get knitting.

Just as children dressing as astronauts
aren't trying out a future career,

they're playing
with an alternative reality.

So we can use the freedom of fancy dress
to communicate an imagined,

better version of our lives.

Because fancy dress says, "This tawdry
reality isn't good enough for me."

Think of it as dressing up for the job
you want, not the job you have.

Or for turning one night only

into a blueprint
for a magical tomorrow, too.

Lets remember,

fancy dress has a grown-up role to play
beyond stag parties and Halloweens.

Its principles even have a place
at the State Opening of Parliament

and the State of the Union.

From full get-up to subtle signifiers,
this is about being emboldened.

Massive movements
are born of micro demonstrations.

Things that seem trivial or frivolous
can be potent symbols

of what you stand for,
or what you won't stand for.

There's real power in putting
on those knitted ears,

in choosing to wear a cape
for good versus evil.

Fancy dress has a unifying quality
that we can use to fight for change,

armed only with glue guns and gumption.

And if costume makes up braver,

it gives us the courage
to explore imaginative alternatives.

The courage not just to turn up
but to be noticed.

So I hope we never grow out of it.

Thank you.

(Applause) (Cheers) (Whistles)