Open Collections

Nkoghe, Tristan

University of British Columbia

The sociological relevance of the body is increasingly pertinent to how we understand ourselves and how we relate to each other. The modern tendency to quantify experiences, meanings, and our embodied reality leaves out the prevailing uncertainty of our interactions with others and the ambiguity of our sense of self. I theorize the liminal body as an extension of John O’Neill’s ideas on the physical and communicative bodies with the anthropological conceptualization of liminality by Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. Through Bourdieu’s emphasis on embodied social structures, I highlight the emotional dimension of embodied experiences and complicate how the body operates in social interactions. Building on this novel conceptualization of the liminal body, I then examine the ambiguous and intricate relationship of bodies with fashion and clothing. Utilizing the classical and contemporary sociologies of Simmel, Veblen, Blumer, Barthes, and others, I highlight the social and cultural relevance of fashion and clothes on how people experience their bodies and express embodied experiences. Specifically, I look at Virgil Abloh’s first runway collection as the Men’s Artistic Director at Louis Vuitton in 2019 in order to highlight the empirical relevance of the liminal body and its broader applicability. Through an analysis of photographs and show notes of the runway show, I present both a textual and visual exploration of the liminal body through Virgil Abloh’s clothes and models. On the one hand, my research demonstrates how and why Virgil Abloh presents the body as liminal. On the other hand, my research reveals that the liminal body is theoretically significant because it offers an understanding of the body as always changing and fluctuating, allowing context and interactions to meaningfully alter and shape our understanding of bodies and seeing them as fundamental in how we relate to others and to ourselves.

Text

2023-07-04

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/85186

Sociology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/