Refashioning the local: Black masculinity, class and clothing

The latest issue of the South African feminist journal Agenda has published my article on masculinity and clothing as signifiers of race/class identity. One of the questions that motivated the study was to explore why poor black men spend so much money on clothes. Though reductive, my argument is that despite their socioeconomic status, young men in the townships seek to produce powerful self-images through expensive, designer clothing. Their clothing and the discourses they value and perpetuate around clothing (such as masculine individualism) are derived from a model of masculinity found in the magazines they read. The upper-class masculinity in Gentleman's Quarterly provides an imaginary of masculinity which participants deployed to resignify their class aspirations. The abstract can be found here:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10130950.2011.630578