The National and the Fashionable: Everyday Nationhood as Dress

Abstract

This chapter sees ordinary fashion as an exemplary instance of what Georg Simmel understood by modernity. Specifically, asking about the wearing of national dress in the Emirate of Ras Al Khaimah reveals that the fashionable becomes a concrete testimony to how the modern subject navigates social forms of the national between collective stabilization and individual transgression in everyday interaction. It begins with Georg Simmel’s understanding of fashion and the way it was criticized by Herbert Blumer. It then shows how the problem of fashion reverberates in the study of everyday nationhood. Finally, the chapter analyzes the dualism between cultural framings and individual re-framings through the wearing of Emirati national dress in the everyday.