fashion

This month’s guest column is by Dr. Sheila Moeschen, an academic, writer, and Public Communications Consultant. For more of her writing, visit: www.citizendame.com. She currently resides in Boston.

The first time I saw the Gap ad for the skinny black pant starring the iconic Audrey Hepburn I was on a treadmill at the gym. The irony of the moment was not lost on my not-so-skinny thighs and me as we plodded along the motorized sidewalk to nowhere.   Released in the fall of 2006, the ad uses footage from her 1957 film Funny Face and shows Hepburn, decked out in a black turtleneck and black, form fitting chinos, rehearsing a modern dance number.  As the badass riffs of AC/DC’s “Back in Black” play, Hepburn kicks, minces, and twirls lithely across the screen.  For Gap, it marked the re-launch of their skinny pants, for the rest of us it announced a new era of fashion: skinny fashion.  The pants flattering Hepburn’s adorable, minx-like figure represented an unreachable brass ring to those of us carrying curves and the baggage of sugar binges gone by.  The notion of catering to a (excuse the pun) narrow population of individuals seemed additionally ludicrous. What woman in her right mind, I wondered, would subject herself to the same kind of physical, fashion bondage suffered by her corseted or foot-bound ancestors? Who would deliberately participate in the tyranny of skinny fashion?

The answer: a lot of women. Four years later the skinny fashion trend remains firmly entrenched in the racks of couture boutiques and mainstream outlets alike.  Gap’s skinny pant gave way to skinny jeans, which birthed skinny lyrca denim, known as “jeggings,” which helped to bring back stretchy, cotton leggings, the kind sported by late-80s teen sensations Debbie Gibson and Tiffany.  Though designers have created skinny clothing lines for men and women, it is women’s figures that manufacturers have in their crosshairs.  Correction, make that women’s and babies’ figures, as Gap recently released a line of skinny denim for its Baby Gap stores. It seems clear that skinny fashion constitutes another way manufacturers participate in colonizing women’s bodies.  By transforming a wardrobe staple—denim—to an unrealistic and even sadistic silhouette, designers systematically shift consumer perspective to the skinny line as both desirable and normal.

What is less clear is the way this fashion trend shapes ideas about more than just standards of idealized female physicality.  Feminist theatre historian Elizabeth Wilson writes about the ways in which fashion takes on political and ideological significance.  “Fashion,” Wilson states, “links the biological body to the social being, and public to private. This makes it uneasy territory, since it forces us to recognize that the human body is more than a biological entity. It is an organism in culture, a cultural artifact even, and its own boundaries are unclear.”

The popularity of skinny fashion belies another story about the current enculturation of the female body.  It is a narrative that speaks to women’s continued restriction and constraints during a historical period where women have made abundant economic, political, and social gains. Skinny fashion highlights the intersection of the biological and the cultural bodies as Wilson points out, ultimately presenting a depiction of women in crisis: they are asked to support a culture of thinness and health; they are sexually empowered but also subjects of sexual double standards; they wield tremendous power and influence on the world stage and yet must answer to charges about being “too feminine” or “not feminine enough.”  It is no wonder that women take some form of misplaced comfort in fashion that leaves nothing to the imagination, that puts the body in a clear delineation of terms: attractive or not attractive, fit or unfit, Hepburn-esque or everyone else.

Taking a break from somber topics of health and medicine, I wanted to share a fun experience — I participated in my first “Clothing Exchange” party last month, hosted by the fabulous women of Exurb Magazine.

It was a chance to make new friends, catch up with old ones, clean out my closet, update my wardrobe, and help less fortunate women. The hosts provided drinks and appetizers, all of us brought clean, ‘gently-used’ clothing, and we got to know each other while we picked through the offerings. At the end, our hosts took all that was left over (and there was a lot!) to a local women’s shelter.

It’s always fashionable to reduce, reuse, recycle…and reinforce other women’s acts of courage!

[Those interested in hosting may want to check out these guidelines for a children’s clothing exchange and modify as you wish.]

There’s lots of cross-dressing buzz in the mainstream media and in the blogosphere.  Here’s a semi-biased sample for your consideration:

Oct. 17: CNN covers Morehouse College’s dress code which “cracks down on cross-dressing.”

Nov. 6: NYT article asks “Can a Boy Wear a Skirt to School?” and describes U.S. high schools whose dress codes range from enforcing ‘traditional’ norms to allowing for students to more freely express their sex, gender and sexuality through their appearance. Is this a case of those with social/political power being ‘out of touch’ with changing times?

Dress code conflicts often reflect a generational divide, with students coming of age in a culture that is more accepting of ambiguity and difference than that of the adults who make the rules.

Nov. 7: Sociologist Shari Dworkin’s post on the Sexuality & Society blog adds a more nuanced analysis of Morehouse’s policy and encourages a complex approach to understanding gender-based dress codes.

Nov. 18: My guest-post on the Sexuality & Society blog takes on some of the questions left unasked and unanswered in that Nov. 6 NYT article about high school dress codes and considers Dworkin’s arguments.

What are the overt and covert goals of school dress codes? Are these dress codes developed to ensure that students meet norms of professionalism, or do these serve as tools for schools to enforce heteronormativity and stigmatize transgenderism? Are schools citing safety concerns, warning parents about how to protect youth from harm, or do these intend to distract us from the ways in which dress codes serve to reinforce heterosexist norms? How well can we predict the unintended consequences of dress codes – both the more ‘traditional’ and more ‘progressive’ policies?

Today: I read a new NYT article online — in the Fashion & Style section — that asserts, “It’s All a Blur to Them” and goes on to describe today’s “urban” 20-somethings who,

are revising standard notions of gender-appropriate dressing, tweaking codes, upending conventions and making hash of ancient norms.

So, what are we to think? In early November, we read about a female high-school senior who was forbidden to wear a tux in her yearbook photo. A couple of weeks later, we read about the growing trend of unisex lines in the fashion world. Does this mix of media coverage reflect that the U.S. remains an ideologically conflicted patchwork of ‘blue’ and ‘red’ Americans? Or, if the generational-change argument holds true, then are we on our way to becoming a society that truly embraces ‘gender fluidity’?

It’s always a treat to get quoted in a mainstream newspaper article that takes a critical look at U.S. norms and values. Fellow GWP editor, Shira Tarrant, and I were recently interviewed about trends in female Halloween costumes:

Talking with this reporter reminded me of a campaign launched on my university’s campus a few years ago by the student club Feminism Is. They created posters with the slogan “We’re not a trick or a treat!” to raise awareness at California Lutheran University about the importance of the messages being sent by the hyper-sexual costumes that had become popular among U.S. female college students. With too many Americans still unclear about the relevance of sexism in our daily lives, it’s vital that we mentor and teens/young adults who create feminist events and collaborate with reporters who are willing to ask questions like — Is dressing up “like a slut” for Halloween “harmless fun” or “demeaning”?  Kudos to writer Rhiannon Potkey and other journalists who are fighting the good fight!

Linda Hirshman’s guest post over at Broadsheet yesterday, “Getting Nudged into the Chapel,” is summarized thusly by Salon: “There’s something in all of us that craves the trappings of a classic wedding — even intellectuals who rail against the institution’s traditions.” Well, color me intellectual, but I had a BLAST dressing up as a 1950s-era bride, white gloves, veil, and and all. I figured, if I’m going to be the bride, why not camp it up and play it as a role?

Weddings are theater, we figured (our guests were invited to dress in 1950s garb and many of them took us up on it) so why not have some fun. The soundtrack was mambo (and klezmer) and we pretended — sort of — that we were at a Catskills resort, you know, the ones where Latin bands like Tito Puentes’ taught the summering Jews how to dance. Since Marco and I are Latin-Jewish fusion and all.

But here’s the thing: though I went into it “playing” the bride, I utterly became one. And it was the veil that did it. I became a bride not in the retro pregnant-in-kitchen kind of way (though I must say, at 39 and undergoing fertility treatments, I certainly wouldn’t complain about the pregnant part–and regarding the kitchen, I’ll always be an active labor force participant by necessity and choice). Rather, the veil helped me become a bride in the physically-spiritually-transformed-special-and-set-apart kind of way. My groom, who donned a white linen suit in order to feel his own kind of special, was in costume too.

Sometimes a veil is just a veil. And sometimes it’s not. What about you, dear GWP readers? Did the marrieds among you don it or ditch it? I’d be interested to hear.

(Hey–Shira–someone’s gotta write about brides, feminism, and fashion for your new book. Any takers?)

NOTE: The comments didn’t transfer for some reason when we switched to WordPress. But you can find them still here.

Shira Tarrant, editor of the fabulous Men Speak Out, is at it again with a call for essays for a new academic anthology, this time on feminism and fashion, tentatively titled Feminism, Fashion and Flair: Confronting Hegemony with Style. Here’s the description:

Fashion is a powerful way we express our politics, personalities, and preferences for who and how we love. Yet fashion can also repress freedom and sexual expression. Fashion encourages profound creativity, rebellion, and defiant self-definition while simultaneously controlling and disciplining the body. Fashion signals resistance to sexual morés and it can also promote a problematic consumer culture. Fashion creates collective identity, but also constrains individual voice. In other words, fashion contains the paradoxical potential for pleasure and subjugation, expression and conformity.

This book explores the productive tensions generated by fashion and style. We are interested in essays that take up questions of gender with special attention to race, class, sexuality, age, and ethnicity. This collection blends theory and pop culture analysis in exciting ways, focusing on contemporary trends and controversies.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
Theories of agency, style, and the presentation of self
Performing identity: race, class, gender and sexuality through style
Consumerist pleasure and anxiety
Fashion production in the context of global capital and trade
Bois, grrls, trannies and styles of queerness
Hardcore, metro, punk, and khakis: constructing masculinities through fashion
Body art and ethnic appropriations
Debates in plastic surgery and re-fashioning the body
Class identity and decorating domestic space
Feminist fashion: debates over style and politics
The ethics of green production and marketing
Everyday pornography and fashion fetish
Virtual style and online identities
Material culture and craft in a postmodern world
Slumming and radical chic: tensions of authenticity and irony
Vintage and thrift fashion: nostalgia and class signifiers
DIY Style: fashion off the corporate grid

Deadline for abstracts is August 15, 2008.

Format for abstracts: Word document, double-spaced, between 300 and 500 words. Include contact information and short bio.

Send to: FashionBook1@yahoo.com

Shira Tarrant
Assistant Professor
Women’s Studies Department
California State University, Long Beach

and

Marjorie Jolles
Assistant Professor
Women’s & Gender Studies Program
Roosevelt University

Yes, it’s true. I’m decking out in costume as a 1950s bride at my wedding–which is now 4 weeks away. I figure, if I’m going to be a bride, why not play the role? Though I’m not wearing white–it’s blue. And today my cousin Jen and I are going crinoline shopping. If anyone has ideas about where to find an inexpensive one, I’d totally appreciate the tip!