The role of Westernisation in Xhosa women's beauty ideals, everyday dress practices and acculturation strategies

Abstract

Westernisation has been proven to play a role in the everyday practices of different cultural groups around the world. The role of Westernisation is especially evident in how people dress by adopting Western clothing and fashion. Over time, Westernisation has culturally influenced groups of people on a material and non-material level as the ideas of Western society have spilt over into what is considered beautiful and into modern dress practices, for example. Through a cultural perspective, this study aimed to explore and describe the role of Westernisation, specifically in Xhosa women’s beauty ideals, their everyday dress practices, and the acculturation strategies they adopt related to dress. Acculturation refers to the different possible outcomes when two cultural groups encounter each other through physical contact or remotely (remote acculturation) through social media and other remote social platforms (Ferguson & Bornstein, 2012).

The Xhosa people are one of the prominent cultural groups in South Africa. They have rich traditional dress practices, which are a form of material culture used to symbolise and express their non-material culture: their beliefs, ideologies, and way of life. These Xhosa dress practices are often reserved for special occasions and are no longer prevalent in everyday life. This prompted the question of Westernisation's role in this cultural group’s current non-material (beauty ideals through beauty standards) and material culture (dress practices). Women were the focus of this study because of the historically greater influence that dress has on female consumers. This study looked at their beauty ideals and whether they translated into some of their dress practices. It also focused on the acculturation strategies (outcomes) they adopted in their everyday dress practices. Literature has stipulated that there are four possible acculturation strategies: integration, assimilation, separation, and marginalisation and this study explored which of these outcomes were adopted by Xhosa women in their dress practices.

A survey research design was followed for this study, using a quantitative approach. This study was explorative and used descriptive and inferential statistics to analyse the data collected through an online questionnaire generated through Qualtrics using adapted and self-created scales. A total of 295 Xhosa women who lived or grew up in the Eastern Cape, Western Cape, or Gauteng provinces in South Africa and between the ages of 18 and 55 years old completed the questionnaire. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse data relating to beauty ideals and dress practices, and inferential statistics were used to analyse data relating to acculturation strategies. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and cluster analysis were used in the latter.

The study focused on body size, body shape, skin tone and hair texture as aspects of beauty standards and found that Xhosa women only preferred body size as an aspect of Westernised beauty standards. For the other three explored aspects of beauty standards, they preferred the features related to Xhosa beauty standards. The findings showed that Xhosa women’s body modifications reflected their beauty standard preferences. Their body enclosures reflected more Westernised dress practices, and their use of attachments to the body reflected an almost neutral practice between Westernised and Xhosa dress practices, with a slight inclination towards Xhosa accessories. In addition, the findings showed that, unlike the traditional acculturation theory of four acculturation outcomes, this group of Xhosa women formed three acculturation strategy groups. For these Xhosa women, the acculturation strategies were not mutually exclusive, showing that acculturation strategies will not always form clean-cut groups; instead, they can be a merge or combination of the different acculturation strategies.

The findings revealed that Xhosa women have a desire to wear clothing that combines their culture with Westernised culture. Xhosa women have moved away from the desire to regularly wear their traditional attire as it is. This means that to preserve Xhosa dress practices in the everyday, more modernised versions of the Xhosa aesthetics in clothing are needed., This also highlights the need to archive the traditional Xhosa attire in the form of pictures and actual clothing pieces that make up the traditional Xhosa women’s attire. These can be displayed on mannequins in museums in the Eastern Cape, where most Xhosa people reside, as archives for future generations and inspiration for future designers with an interest in cultural preservation. This study suggests that there may be elements of the Xhosa aesthetic in future clothing, but it will not be the traditional version.