The Porous Sheath and Everyday Fashion Sharing

This study examines everyday fashion sharing through the lens of Erving Goffman’s concept of the sheath. Drawing upon 40 qualitative interviews, we extend the concept generatively, beyond its egocentric function as a personal bodily territory encasing the body, by establishing its social, utilitarian and hedonic functions in the social order of everyday fashion sharing. These functions enable consumers to express, strengthen, explore and perform the self in daily social situations. We thereby contribute the novel concept of the porous sheath for shared fashion items, characterised by additional functions, other-orientation and permeable co-territorialisation. We also contribute the concept of self-blending, which occurs when the porous sheath enables fashion sharers to assimilate perceived aspects of another’s self into their own. These concepts are significant in that they expand fashion sharing vocabularies and imaginaries beyond the sharing economy through a return to the dynamics of fashion sharing in everyday life.