Indigo Bodies : Fashion, Mirror Work and Sexual Identity in Milan

Drawing on situated biographical interviews conducted in participants’ bedroom spaces and photo-elicitation, this chapter explores the everyday sexualisation of the body by focusing on clothing as a biographical and subjective toolkit. The empirical focus is on denim jeans and on the clothing practices of young Millennials in Milan. Although jeans are routinely codified as potentially sexy, they remain a mundane and ubiquitous item, valued for their versatility in ordinary life while also being deeply embedded in fashion dynamics. They thus provide a productive site for examining sexualisation as an ordinary accomplishment, emerging from everyday routines as much as from specialised spaces and glamorised symbolic forms. Rather than approaching fashion primarily through a semiotic analysis of how the fashion system appropriates fetishism and sexual subcultures, I start from the meaningful everyday uses of an ordinary garment to examine how clothing mediates the relationship between identity, embodiment and sexuality. I also attend to the affective and moral registers through which material culture becomes implicated in the making of embodied selves, as feelings of comfort, confidence, propriety and attractiveness are negotiated through clothing. I show how denim becomes involved in what I call “mirror work”: practices of looking at oneself reflected in mirrors through which subjects negotiate their bodily self-perception in relation to normative ideals of beauty and sexuality. Jeans afford a sense of bodily adequacy or “fitness”, articulating comfort with compliance and authenticity with adaptability. The chapter concludes by highlighting the enduring role of normativity in embodied sexual subjectivity: feeling “fit” is central to feeling sexy, and this feeling remains articulated through gendered understandings of attractiveness and seduction.