Concepts of the construction and expression of identities continue to be utilised by sociologists, anthropologists and historians alike. Scholars of late medieval communities, whether they were peasant villagers or gentry networks, have appropriated the concept in their work. The importance of articulating one's identity during life and formulating an identity for the afterlife cannot be denied, particularly for those whose income permitted some form of commemoration. As with many visual artefacts, the livery collar could be appropriated to represent a variety of identities, associations and networks, some of which overlapped. For example, the item played no small part in the expression of the collective identity of its recipients; it was also a symbol of the king and royal dignity. In order to fully comprehend the collar's role in constructing identities, it is advantageous to view the item as a cultural rather than an exclusively political or economic entity. Regarding the collar in this manner is particularly appropriate when one considers that historians have in recent times been encouraged to view social groups themselves as cultures, focusing on the agency of individuals in addition to institutions. It is therefore necessary to examine the cultural identities of groups, and the use of visual and material culture in the form of the livery collar, to formulate these identities, whether they were implicit or explicit.

If one of the principal intentions of depicting a collar on a memorial was to associate with like-minded individuals whose monuments also featured the artefact, then the patron's agency was required to make the decision: one would expect that the choice would have been made by the individual commemorated, their family or executors. It is therefore also necessary to examine the process of commissioning church monuments to ascertain whether the stimulus for depicting a collar on a monument came primarily from the patron or the workshop.

Semiotics

Aspects of semiotics theory can help provide a framework for understanding the ways in which a collar was employed. Originally developed as a linguistic model by Saussure, who appropriated a structuralist methodology to analyse the use of signs in language, the study was elaborated to encompass images, gestures, sounds and objects: ‘a sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else.’