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social status. All the different styles and modes of fashion particularly in regards to female
fashion are socially constructed by class system and taste culture (Berger 70). Herbert Gans’ five
American taste cultures can be applied to the department store division of clothing by gender
because of its use of class, religion, education, age, and other factors (70). However, Gans
weighs personality traits in his division, but does not make allowances for personal gender
identity (70). Gans’ high culture, upper middle culture, lower middle culture, quasi-folk low
culture, and youth, ethnic and black culture are influenced by gender identity when applied in
today’s cultural environment. In order to understand the signs and signifiers of a social gender
identity in the department store world, one must define gender identity.

Unconscious thoughts and norms enter the mind when faced with personal feelings of what
gender is by definition (Nealon and Giroux 180). The mind has a specific ideal in regards to
what is female and what is male, which is due to signs and signifiers that permeate our material
culture (180). Gender Studies are in a new age because of the significant advancements in our
cultural discourse, but the department store division has not always evolved with these cultural
advancements due to the separation of fashion by gender still prevalent in the current cultural
shopping environment (180). Gender is no longer held to only biological standards of
identification, due to the emerging studies in sociology on gender and society (181).

In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler – the premier authority on gender studies in current cultural
theory and discourse (180) – explains the significance of gender roles and how they are
established. “As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive
cultural means by which 'sexed nature' or 'a natural sex' is produced and established as
'prediscursive,' prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.” (Butler 6).
Her gender theories are based on the reality that gender is preformed (Butler 6). Butler argues