Anna Hanchett

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.