As a young girl my dress sense was mostly influenced by my friends at school, I went through a phase where I only wore tracksuits and trainers (tomboy) and I'm pretty sure I did it to fit in with my basketball team. Then I started dressing prettier, very much like my mothers style, I even remember her telling me to stop copying her and to get my own style!! Now, at uni I feel like I've developed my own style but a lot of times notice that certain friends influence my dress sense when I have nights out. This is going to go on all my life and my taste will keep changing, but there are some things that wont be influenced by others, you have to after all put your personality in a few things otherwise you will constantly be copying others.
In general, not only by the way I dress but by everything in my life, I think I've got good taste, but somebody that is totally different to me will say that my taste is awful.. Not everything will please everybody because each person has their own opinion.
The idea that taste has a sociology seems strange but after reading what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu says about taste, it all makes sense to me. Tastes are connected to major social divisions like class,gender and between the highly and poorly educated. That doesn't mean that all upper class people have similar taste though.
My personal opinion is that peoples tastes can't really be affected by class.Take music for an example, it is written for everybody to listen to. Surely, none of the great classical composers ever addressed themselves consciously and exclusively to a ''musically trained public.'' People of lower class think they don't like classical music because of the ideology they have formed in their heads that it is only for upper class educated people, therefore they do not listen to it. I agree that people of different social backgrounds may have different tastes but I also believe that they have a lot of common taste.
Back in the day, the general public were quite musically "literate" and Mozart's operas (for example) were attended by a wide range of people - a bit like The Proms are today.
ReplyDeleteIt's maybe a bit of a British thing, the idea that classical music is for "posh" people. But it's also related to whether a city has an orchestra or opera house. Manchester and Birmingham, for example, have very popular orchestras, as does Liverpool, and their audiences are very mixed.
When I live in Yorkshire I'd go to choral society concerts and the audiences were broad too.
It's not class, it's availability and also education - if you weren't brought up in a house where classical music was played, or went to a school where the music lessons were dull, you're less likely to think about going to a concert. And more likely to think it was people who weren't "like you" who it was for...
When Bourdieu uses "class" he doesn't mean it the way we do - it's used to describe educational background, location, etc etc... :)
I'll explain more about "class" in the last lecture - and show you all the different ways you can be classified!