`It's play, really, isn't it?' Dress, creativity, old age

This chapter brings together and depicts some broad and contested concepts: dress, creativity, old age. Through the medium of dress, we seek to understand how creativity may function in certain everyday, mundane yet socially charged practices of the elderly. Creativity, too, has been understood in many ways. One definition, from a neurological point of view, is that it ‘involves the ability to produce something that is both original and appropriate to the goal it was designed for’. Creative processes are thus linked to acts of production, to individual motivations and emotions; creativity is associated with self-actualisation and expression of one’s inner self. While creativity in dress was central to these women’s self-perception, their styles also expressed many more or less subtle forms of normative conformity