Dress and dressing an object of communication and activity of culture

Abstract

Dress is a non verbal communicative object and dressing is a part of cultural activity. One of the distinctive features of dress is that a group of people shares a particular patterns or styles of dress. The style of a dress is a consequence of the culture of a society and the traditions which people follow. The way people dress and decorate their body with a variety of jewelry and the methodology of arranging the dress to the body is a communicative activity. Individuals share ideas and beliefs according to their ideologies of culture. Besides, they participate in social agreements by which they live from generation to generation and from individual to individual. The objective of the paper is to investigate the material and non material culture during the period of the Kotte kingdom by focusing on the extended cultural practices amalgamated with dress and dressing. Further this article looks for changes in contextual boundaries of dress signs in order to understand the culture which predominates dress communication. The method adopted for the research was qualitative. Research findings show that dress fashions and dressing in Sri Lanka is made up of a rich set of possible combinations of cultural and communicative objects which entails authentic individuation of an outfit.