Abstract
Conducted in Manzini, Eswatini, the study takes interest in the infiltration of second-hand clothes with their prescriptive pint-sized clothes that populate the ‘Bend and buy’ market. It sets out to understand the qualitatively diverse ways that Swati female consumers of second-hand clothing navigate this consumption space as well as the rubrics of the symbolic slenderness meaning that the clothes embody. It also interrogates the consumers’ actions and reactions as an integral part of the meanings they attach to the consumption spectacle as well as the values they embody about body size. Fifteen (15) female second-hand clothes consumers aged 18 and 65 were purposively sampled to inform the findings of the study. Five (5) traders were also purposively sampled for information triangulation.
The study established that there is a variation in the meanings attached by the Swati consumer to the second-hand commodities and it attests to how the clothing/body interaction is a contested site discursively. It is evident from the findings that the prototypical discourse that centres the Eurocentric kind of slenderness as universally desired and idealised is a misrepresentation of the second-hand clothing consumption practice in Eswatini as the symbolism is either embraced, hybridised, deconstructed or rejected by the consumers. The saturation of the market with pint-sized clothes in an effort to subjectify and foster compliance has been found to be a condition that in turn necessitates the cementation and embracement of ‘indigenous’/local body value standards. The desired kind of slenderness among Swati female consumers is a balance between societal acceptance, beauty, womanhood and health. There is thus a misalignment between the body size needs of the Swati consumers and the second-hand clothing items that the ‘Bend’ market prescribes.
M.A. (Industrial Sociology)