A Clean Sharp Image

Don Cherry’s Suits as Sartorial Statements

Authors

  • Julia Petrov Royal Alberta Museum

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17742/IMAGE.FCM.9.2.5

Abstract

Canadian sports commentator Don Cherry is notorious for his outspoken opinions and flamboyant style, both attracting popular attention. This article examines his attention-grabbing on-air style as an extension of both his values for the game of hockey and his view of himself as a working-class boy made good. I argue that Cherry deliberately uses his suits to embody his social and personal values. Drawing on fashion studies approaches, I show that while not exactly fashionable in terms of trendiness, Cherry’s suits are examples of the ability of clothing to be indexical of working-class personality transformed.

Author Biography

Julia Petrov, Royal Alberta Museum

Julia Petrov is Curator of Western Canadian History at the Royal Alberta Museum. Her research interests include the tensions between liveliness and deathliness in museum displays of fashion, the representation of dress in texts and images in the long 19th century, and gendered dress norms. She co-edited the Routledge volumes The Thing About Museums(2011) and Narrating Objects, Collecting Stories(2012) and edited a special issue of the journal Clothing Culturesin 2016. Another co-edited volume, Fashioning Horror, was published by Bloomsbury in December 2017.

Fashion Cultures and Media

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Published

2018-12-28

How to Cite

Petrov, J. (2018). A Clean Sharp Image: Don Cherry’s Suits as Sartorial Statements. Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, 9(2), 41–54. https://doi.org/10.17742/IMAGE.FCM.9.2.5

Issue

Vol. 9 No. 2 (2018): Fashion Cultures and Media – Canadian Perspectives | Cultures et médias de la mode – Perspectives canadiennes

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2018 Julia Petrov

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 Unported License.

Creative Commons License
This work by https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/imaginations is licensed under a  Creative Commons 4.0 International License although certain works referenced herein may be separately licensed, or the author has exercised their right to fair dealing under the Canadian Copyright Act.