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Older women's rituals of dress demonstrate the interrelatedness of two tasks of our later years: to re-create and reaffirm identity and to accept the inevitability of biological aging and death.
In 2008 I became fascinated by the artist Cindy Sherman's photographs of herself staged as imagined versions of older, wealthy women. In one image, Sherman poses with gray hair and sagging breasts, wearing an expensive but outmoded knit dress and standing near her impressive art collection. In another she wears a black gown and white gloves, her hair dyed black and her makeup caked, standing imperially in front of a staircase on her landscaped estate. Sherman's images suggest both selfaffirming concepts of productive aging and an "unmasking" of the strategies older women adopt to disguise their age when they have internalized negative media images demeaning their appearance.
Sherman's photographs led me to wonder how older women manage the bodily manifestations of age in Western societies-societies in which physical appearance is integral to our sense of who we are (Giddens, 1991) and the presentation of self is a statement of identity (Goffman, 1959) as well as a source of social capital and status (Bourdieu, 1984). What might women's choices of clothing and ways of presenting their appearance reveal about the relationship between body and self-even the remaking of identity in old age? To what extent might the rituals of getting dressed each morning help older women claim and affirm the aging body or, conversely, control, conceal, and efface it-or do both simultaneously?
I interviewed twenty-five women, ages 63 to 99, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Some participants agreed to be videotaped and photographed by photographer Gay Block. My undergraduate college provided entrée to some interviewees; others were people we knew personally or were suggested by women I had already interviewed.
In keeping with Sherman's photographs, I selected women who were relatively affluent and well-educated, many of whom were involved in the arts. Studying women from this socioeconomic stratum is useful because their economic means give them maximum freedom of choice in self-presentation. They can decide, for example, whether or not to buy Armani or only lesser brands on sale. They can choose whether or not to have cosmetic surgery or to have their hair professionally...