One of the more difficult sociological concepts to explain is the social institution. When sociologists talk about institutions they don’t mean hospitals or churches or any of the concrete organizations that easily come to mind, they mean something much bigger and more difficult to pin down. They mean institutionalized ways of doing things or, as I’ve defined them elsewhere:
Persistent patterns of social interaction aimed at meeting the needs of a society that can’t easily be met by individuals alone.
Education, then, is an institution, as is medicine and transportation. In my textbook, I discuss the examples of sanitation and sport. One can’t play on a team all by oneself and it’d be pretty gross to take a personal potty with you everywhere you went. Instead, we have organized sport and the provision of toilet facilities. Eventually, institutionalized ways of solving social needs get taken-for-granted as the way we do things, often to the point that we forget that they were invented in the first place.
I was inspired to write about this by a post at Sociological Cinema by sociologist Tristan Bridges. He uses a clip from The Devil Wears Prada to illustrate just this phenomenon. Meryl Streep plays the editor of a fashion magazine. Fashion is an institution because we can no longer feasibly make our own clothes. Even the most industrious and clever among us, those who make their own clothes, will buy the fabric with which to do so. Almost no one in a Western country has the faintest idea of how to make fabric, let alone the resources.
In the clip, Streep’s character responds icily when a holier-than-thou fashion outsider scoffs at her as she goes about her work.
She says:
You think this has nothing to do with you.
You go to your closet and you select, I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back.
But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean.
And you’re also blithely unaware of the fact that, in 2002 Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns and then I think it was Yves St. Laurent — wasn’t it? — who showed cerulean military jackets…
And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled down into some Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.
However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it’s sort of comical that you think you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.
An institution has emerged to put clothes on our back. The scoffer who inspires Streep character’s rant would like to think that she is outside of the fashion industry, that it has nothing to do with her. Likewise, many of us would like to think that we’re outside of the institutions that we don’t like. But we’re not. That’s the rub. No matter how enlightened or inspired we are to fight social convention, we can’t get outside the institutions that organize our societies. We’re in them whether we know it or not.
Here’s the clip; it’s worth it, even given the advertisement:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL-KQij0I8I[/youtube]
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Comments 19
Lunad — September 15, 2014
Not arguing with your general point, but quite a few people make their own fabric. It is called knitting. Few people weave, and few spin their own yarn, and most people who knit a sweater use a pattern (which is created by the dictates of fashion), but it is hardly a bizarre activity.
Elena — September 15, 2014
Not the turquoise sweater, but I still see the Miu Miu swallows once in a while in new clothes. Their staying power is amazing.
Bill R — September 15, 2014
The thing that nails you hard about fashion in our society is how it separates those who use it dispassionately, to present themselves as reasonably acceptable to others, and those who attempt to use fashion to look extraordinary. The latter are the saddest, those who feel they need a prop, who don't accept themselves, the weak who evoke our empathy.
TlindaT — September 23, 2014
But Streep's character's point is also invalid because the fashion industry didn't invent cerulean and it certainly wasn't used for the first time in 2002 by Oscar de la Renta . Humans hundreds of years ago made this color by mixing pigments of copper and cobaltous oxides in an attempt to mimic the color of the sky. It was replaced by today's cerulean blue made mostly from cobalt stannate in 1806 which took out the greenish tinge of the copper and made it even more sky blue. So the character in this movie isn't wearing cerulean because of the fashion industry, she is wearing cerulean or any other color because humans are ever trying to replicate what they see in the world around them and whether Oscar de la Renta looked at the sky searching for inspiration, saw paintings of it or saw the color somewhere else doesn't really matter. Clothes have been cerulean blue, ochre orange and crimson red before and they will be again, because and in spite of Oscar de la Renta and others.
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