Anna Hanchett
About me
Currently, I am a guest researcher in Gender Studies at the Department of Ethnology, Gender Studies and the History of Religions. In 2024, I earned my PhD in Fashion Studies from the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. Prior to my doctoral work, I earned my MA in Fashion Studies from Stockholm and my BFA in Studio Art and BA in Art History from Calvin University. My research interests include fashion and gendered embodiment; women’s, gender and sexuality studies; feminist theories of difference; dressing practices and practices of making; and fashion and phenomenology.
My doctoral thesis, which was defended in 2024, is entitled Sartorial Becomings: Women, Tailored Suits, and Feminine Difference, and is an investigation of women’s embodied experiences of the tailored suit. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, auto-ethnographic reflections, and interview material, the thesis highlights three areas of women's embodied experiences, including their embodiment of an imaginary of tailoring, of the space of the tailor's shop, and of the tailored suit itself. The material is considered within a feminist framework of sexual difference and phenomenology of embodiment, revealing, ultimately, how women's subjectivities are formed and reformed with and through the tailored suit. Overall, the research challenges the history of the suit as an inherently masculine item, and it demonstrates how women, through their engagement with the tailored suit, actively rework a masculinist imaginary of the suit in ways that nurture women's subjectivity and, in turn, cultivate new modes of feminine embodiment.
Research
My doctoral research project is at the intersections of fashion studies and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies. Adopting the multiple methods of semi-structured interviews, auto-ethnography and ethnographic observations, I investigate lived woman-embodied experiences of the tailored suit. Previous research on women’s engagement with the suit has attributed the practice to masculinity, with the consequences of such association limiting our knowledge of suit-wearing practices to a masculine imaginary and, therefore, neglecting women’s own experiences and interests. The aim of my study, then, is to remove the suit from the hold of a masculine symbolic by exploring how women themselves experience the tailored suit, considering the cultural, social and personal aspects of their embodiment. To realize this aim, I assume a feminist framework of sexual difference theory and phenomenology of embodiment to think through women’s accounts of their acquisition and embodiment of tailored suits.
The research highlights the various structures which constitute women’s experiences, including how tailors approach the construction of the suit, how women respond to their social environments within tailoring as well as in their everyday lives, and how women relate to either masculinity or femininity through their adoption of the suit. By bringing these various dynamics to light, what is learnt from the study is how women, through their suit-wearing practices, actively rework the imaginary of the suit in ways that nurture female subjectivity and cultivate new modes of feminine embodiment.
To read the dissertation, please visit its DiVA Open Access page here: https://su.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1891181&dswid=9481
Publications
Anna Hanchett. "Style Politics and the Black Panther Party" in eds. Louise Wallenberg and Andrea Kollnitz, Fashion Aesthetics and Ethics (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2023), pp. 167-178.
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