Margaret Thatcher, Dress and the Politics of Fashion

Through Margaret Thatcher’s private and public performances, the micro-politics of dress translated into the macro-politics of power. Thatcher’s changing career can be traced through her dress (see Young 1991: 416-417); analysis of her dress leading up to and during her Premiership reveals both her aspirations and increasing power. Understanding of Thatcher’s agency in her embodied, dressed performances can be informed and developed through Butler’s (1999) conceptualization of performativity. Through adaptation, repetition and divergent dress, Thatcher constructed different identities, some of which became iconic symbols of her self and her politics. Examination of Thatcher’s dress refines the understanding of the relationship between constraints and agency experienced by actors in the public realm. Upon becoming party leader, Margaret Thatcher’s gender, class and ideological viewpoints were incongruent with her unprecedented political status and she faced many challenges in attempting to overcome this. Dress became a potentially destabilising focus for her critics and symbolic of her “outsider” status. Yet in the face of these challenges she recognized and learned from the expectations of others, adapting and changing her dress. However, this was not an instantaneous, complete or permanent transformation. What Thatcher achieved, as she crafted her dressed performances, was agency over a further aspect of her life and her politics. There was also an evolving alignment of her dress with her political ideology and domestic and international roles over time.

Media amplification of brand crisis and its affect on brand trust

This paper explores the ways in which consumers’ brand trust during a brand crisis is affected through direct experience versus when it is amplified through mass media. By using case-study methodology, our findings reveal that generalised public images of a product crisis initiate a public perception of risk, which provides more negative effects on brand trust than the actual consumers’ experience does. We introduce the media as a third partner influencing the trust relationship between consumers and brands, and offer suggestions for restoring and preserving customers’ brand trust.