La veste retournée

Abstract

Manuel Charpy tries to understand, through the secondhand clothing market, how clothes were turned, converted, transformed, physically and socially. The observation of the everyday practices shows that the secondhand market was not the place of imitations, disguises and social dressing-up but one of the places of the construction of fashion identities, petit-bourgeois and over all popular. These reversale of social signs was also a way to contest the social and political orders when they were made by marginal groups — students, artists, Apaches, colonized peoples… Thus, the century which created the clothing industry created also a culture, especially popular, of clothing where the signs were twisted and returned for social and political ends.

Keywords

• Secondhand Clothes
• Clothing
• Marketplace
• Trade
• Subcultures
• Social Identities