This thesis explores high-end and bespoke menswear, tailoring and fashion, asking the question - why do some men choose to spend large sums of money to have clothes made for them? Using tailors and high-end menswear as a lens, this thesis unpacks how men construct their notion of self in the digital and terrestrial worlds through the clothes that they wear and the identities they perform. Based on twelve months' terrestrial fieldwork in London and twenty-four months' concurrent digital fieldwork with Instagram, this thesis examines notions of dress, performance and the individual across a multi-dimensional fieldsite set within a blended digital and terrestrial landscape. The fieldwork comprised visiting and interviewing tailors, and observing inside their workshops and at their fashion shows. In addition, the analyst-as-client built relationships with tailors, and constructed a digital self within Instagram through the publication of self-portraits and images of clothing. This thesis is presented in four chapters, flanked by an Introduction and Conclusion. These chapters move from an exploration of terrestrial research in the first two, to an analysis of digital research in the latter two. Five major motifs emerge in this thesis: the importance of the anthropology of clothing and adornment within western society; the nature of the individual in a digitised world; the difficulty in conducting western-centric fieldwork without an element of digital analysis; a methodological restructuring of digital anthropology; and the idea that a digital self can acquire agency. This thesis employs a pioneering blended methodology which brings together the fields of digital anthropology, visual anthropology and material culture to question how selves are constructed in a rapidly changing and increasingly digitised modernity. In conclusion, the thesis argues that individuals construct multiple digital selves and a sense of identity (around the notion of 'authentic individualism') that is illusory.

Working through methods of abstraction and comedic mimicry I choreograph awkwardly balanced sculpture with objects of adornment as a means to defuse personal sensitivities surrounding my experiences of gender, desire, and home. The research that follows is concerned with the adjacent, the in between, above and underneath, because I feel that this kind of looking means that you are, to some degree, aware of what lies at the edges. Maybe this is what Gertrude Stein means to act as though there is no use in a center—because this concerns a way of relating, though there are many things in the room. ‘A spectacle and nothing strange’ is an arrangement of gestures, of made difference, of kinships, of orientations and possible futures, sustained tension, coded adornment, big dyke energy, shifts in hardness, leaning softness, much more than flowers, ...and in any case there is sweetness and some of that.

Three-dimensional (3D) laser scanners are becoming increasingly more affordable and user-friendly, making 3D-modeling tools more widely available to researchers in various countries and disciplines. In archaeology, 3D-modeling has the particular advantages of facilitating the documentation and analysis of objects that are fragile, rare, and often difficult to access. We have previously shown that 3D-modeling is a highly useful tool for shape analysis of archaeological bone material, due to the high measurement accuracy inherent in the latest generation of 3D laser scanners (Sholts et al. 2010; 2011). In this work, we explore the utility of 3D-modeling as a tool for Viking Age artefact analysis. To test the usefulness of 3D-modeling when analyzing artefacts with a very complex morphology, we chose highly ornate Viking Age baroque shaped brooches as study objects. These baroque shaped brooches constitute a group of dress ornaments mainly encountered in eastern Viking Age Scandinavia. Due to their large cast and/or attached bosses they obtain an almost baroque appearance, hence their name (cf. Jansson 1984: p. 81). They appear in two major versions, i.e. circular or equal armed, and in two kinds of material, i.e. silver- and copper-based alloys. Because of the position of bronze brooches in burial contexts, it appears they were used to fasten the cape or shawl in the female dress (cf. Jansson 1984: p. 75ff., Aagård 1984: p. 96ff.; Neiß 2006, figs. 3, 4; Capelle 1962: p. 106). For the present work a recently excavated brooch from Denmark was analyzed, together with three Russian brooches with nearly iconic status in the field of Viking Age studies. In the three case studies, we investigated possible uses of 3D-modeling for artefact analysis, artefact reconstruction, and tool mark and motif analysis. Exploring the usefulness of 3D-modeling for these purposes allowed us to draw conclusions regarding how 3D-analysis can be best incorporated into future artefact analysis. In addition, the case studies allowed us to gain new insights about the baroque shaped brooches and their uses. / <p>Forskningsfinansiärer: Helge Ax:son Johnsons stiftelse, Svenska institutet (Visby-programmet), Kungliga vitterhets historie och antikvitets akademin (Montelius minnesfond); Svenska fornminnesforeningen</p> / 3D-laserskanning som verktyg vid vikingatidsstudier