The Art of the Ordinary? Exploring How Girls Mediate Class Privilege Through Fashion

The concept of ordinary to think through how individuals understand themselves and fit into their social environments is used in both material and class analysis, yet rarely together. This article concentrates on middle-class teenage girls’ uses of joggers to reconcile these debates and critically interrogate what it means to be ordinary. The article draws on qualitative research with 24 girls aged between 15 and 17 which explored their uses of fashion. The article recognises the ambivalence and defensiveness that accompany class categorisations, which creates new challenges for understanding young people’s relationships to class and our understanding of class (re)productions. I evidence how individual material practices are effected by the imagined gaze of others in which ordinariness acts as a response to a self-consciousness of positionality. The article interrogates how class privilege can also be mediated in this space. I argue that middle-class girls are exquisitely attuned to their relationship to privilege and thus work to mediate against negative affects associated with privilege and wealth through ordinary dress. Yet subtle hierarchies remain in how they position their ‘successful’ negotiation of style and spaces. The art of the ordinary is in its fluidity.