Sartorial Becomings: Women, Tailored Suits, and Feminine Difference

About the seminar

This talk presents an overview of Anna Hanchett's doctoral research. The thesis, which was defended in 2024, is entitled Sartorial Becomings: Women, Tailored Suits, and Feminine Difference, and is an investigation of women’s embodied experiences of the tailored suit. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, auto-ethnographic reflections, and interview material, the thesis highlights three areas of women's embodied experiences, including their embodiment of an imaginary of tailoring, of the space of the tailor's shop, and of the tailored suit itself. The material is considered within a feminist framework of sexual difference and phenomenology of embodiment, revealing, ultimately, how women's subjectivities are formed and reformed with and through the tailored suit. Overall, the research challenges the history of the suit as an inherently masculine item, and it demonstrates how women, through their engagement with the tailored suit, actively rework a masculinist imaginary of the suit in ways that nurture women's subjectivity and, in turn, cultivate new modes of feminine embodiment.

About Anna Hanchett

Anna Hanchett is a guest researcher in Gender Studies at Stockholm University. In 2024, she earned her PhD in Fashion Studies from the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. Her doctoral thesis, Sartorial Becomings: Women, Tailored Suits, and Feminine Difference, is a contemporary study about women’s embodied experiences with the tailored suit. Alongside her research, Hanchett works in the fashion industry through her role as Editor Scandinavia at WeAr Global Magazine and as a product advisor in menswear. Her research interests include fashion and gendered embodiment; histories and theories of tailoring; women’s, gender and sexuality studies; feminist theories of difference; and fashion and phenomenology.