clothes/fashion

This seems like a good time to reiterate a simple truth: It can be art/fashion/satire/cutting edge etc. and… and and and it can be offensive, trivializing, and triggering.

Eight readers sent in links to an ad for a hair salon called Fluid. The salon, which has a history of using “shocking” ads (like this one after the Gulf oil spill), is attracting criticism for an ad featuring a woman being offered jewelry by a man; she appears to have a black eye.  Six more sent in a link to a Glee star, Heather Morris, in a photoshoot by Tyler Shields, also with a black eye.

Responding to the criticism, Fluid said it was being “cutting-edge,” “satirical,” “high fashion,” and “editorial,” and “artistic.”  It doesn’t matter what you call it, what tradition it references, or whether you’re trying to get a reaction; your product is still part of a wider cultural context.  Accordingly, you may get called out for being insensitive to other people’s pain. In which case, probably best not to call the critics hypocrites and suggest that there are bigger problems in the world than the trivialization of domestic violence.  Or go right ahead, I guess.

Thanks to Eric S., Kristina V., YetAnotherGirl, Dave S., Caitlin R., @CreativeTweets, Meghan H., Dave S., Judith B., Olivia G., Alexis W., Theresa W., and an anonymous reader for the tips!

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

This video, made as part of a marketing campaign for a new shopping center in East London, is a fun overview of a century of some trends in clothing, music, and dance styles, all in 100 seconds. Enjoy!

Via The Hairpin.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

I am a Londoner. A proud East Londoner, hailing from the working class. And this past week has been one of the most difficult I’ve encountered since I moved to the US nearly ten years ago.  This weekend my hometown was attacked by rioters, just minutes away from my family’s homes and businesses, my high school and a million childhood and teenage memories.  I don’t think I can do justice describing the feeling of watching this unfold from so far away.  Needless to say, I wouldn’t wish the experience on anyone.  Thankfully, it would appear that most of the violence has subsided. In its place: a myriad of social commentaries on why this happened.  Not only from journalists, but from the everyman benefitting from the very same social media that helped rioters coordinate.  Indeed, many sociologists have aired their ideas on Facebook, blogs and even op-eds.

But perhaps in our rush to explain and apportion blame perhaps we all missed asking some important questions.  Why did we assume that the rioters are poor?  How do we really know the class background of the rioters?  Why did the media depict the rioters as underprivileged? And why did we accept this depiction unquestioningly?

The sociologist in me fantasizes of a post-riot 10 question survey to be distributed to all rioters immediately after completion of law breaking activities with questions including: what is your average household income, what is your and your parent’s highest level of education, what is your occupation, on a scale of one to ten just how angry with the government are you at this moment, ten being really jolly pissed off?

Short of such a research tool, how did we come up with generalizations of a group of people we really know little about, except for the fact that they all rioted?

As someone who has lived in both nations, I feel class is certainly a nuanced thing in Britain, much more so than in the US. But even with the subtleties of the British system you cannot simply see class.  And for the most part, all the information we initially had about rioters is what we saw on TV and in still photographs.

We just cannot tell.  If you thought you could tell, you’d be guessing, and you’d be basing your decision on ideas you have about the poor.  Some might point to history; past rioters have tended to be from the working classes. But this only offers us the ability to make a prediction. But, most commentaries did not acknowledge that they were predicting who was involved.  Some might argue that those wearing hoodies are poor, as the wearing of hoodies has become synonymous in the British press with certain low-income groups.  But people of all class groups own hoodies.  We also cannot surmise simply from a picture that the rioters were from the area they attacked and attempt to extrapolate social class from that location.  Indeed, early police reports indicate that in some cases there was organized travelling to targeted areas and in my home borough of Waltham Forest, initial records show that more than half of those arrested did not live there.  So how do we ascertain the social class of the rioters?  Their behavior?

Did we see violence, looting and vandalism and assume that this could only be the work of poor people, and passively accepted the media’s categorization of the perpetrators as such?  Or are we so blinded by our ideological beliefs, romanticizing the riots to be exactly what Marx warned us of that we bought this generalization? Or do we want so desperately to blame governmental cuts against the poor that we ignore the lack of solid evidence as to who these rioters really are?  Or did we simply map on our understanding of other riots, and assume that all rioters are the same?  I don’t have the answer to these questions, but think it is worth considering why we made the assumptions we did about the rioters when we had little to no data.

As I write this, on Friday 12^th August, long after many of the commentaries have been published and opinions have been shared, news outlets are beginning to report the demographic information of the rioters who have appeared in court. (Go here and click on “Get the data”; sorry for the broken link earlier!)

Among those rioters who fit the stereotype  — alienated, poor youth — are those who do not fit this type at all. They have already been the subject of several headlines: teachers, an Olympic ambassador, a graphic designer, college graduates and a “millionaire’s daughter.”  The very fact that these “unusual suspects” have been singled out by the press demonstrates the power of this prejudice; we are shocked when it isn’t poor people rioting.  But why? Is it because deep down we believe that the poor are capable of violence, but the rich aren’t? Or is it because this riot is more complex than simply the rage of downtrodden people?

At this point, we are far from really knowing the class backgrounds of the rioters, especially since many people have not, and probably will not, be caught for their actions. We are still without reliable data to draw conclusions, just as we were earlier in the week when so many of us rushed to attribute this rioting to disenfranchised youth. I am not arguing that class won’t be an important factor in our understandings of these riots, and it may well be that these riots were mostly poor people. But my point is we cannot say with certainty at this moment in time that this is the case. And as an East End girl, I ask: what does it say about us, especially sociologists, that we were so willing to believe this about the poor without any solid data?

UPDATE: Kat provided a link to some data that wasn’t available when the post was being written. The Guardian mapped the home addresses of those arrested in the riots; the results indicate that they appear to have been disproportionately, though not solely, from areas that are poor — and getting poorer. Of those arrested, for instance, 41% came from the top 10% of areas when ranked by levels of deprivation.

Faye Allard is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Montclair State University.  When not busy winning teaching awards, she is working on a book about the African American gender gap in high school educational achievement, called “Mind the Gap.”

Editor’s Note: Christie W.,  Michel E., Andrew S., and an anonymous reader asked us to write about the recent discussion of Thylane Loubry Blondeau.  We’re pleased to feature a guest blogger doing just that.

There is no shortage of sexualized images of girls in American culture.  Shows like TLC’s Toddlers and Tiaras frequently contain over-the-top sexualized portrayals of girls.  Images like these are undeniably sexualized.

However, these images of Thylane Loubry Blondeau, a 10-year-old French model making headlines this week, are creating controversy instead of condemnation.  Some argue that, unlike the child beauty queens, the photographs of Blondeau are art.  There is an interesting class effect here; unlike the hypersexualized girls on shows like Toddlers and Tiaras, the photos of Blondeau are high fashion, therefore high class, and therefore acceptable.

I’m no prude.  I think that children are – and have a right to be – sexual beings.  However, there is a difference between sexuality (feeling sexual) and sexualization (being seen as sexy). I (and many other like-minded feminists) believe that girls should be sexual; but, sexualization (and its concomitant focus on appearance instead of desire) is bad because it denies girls’ sexual subjectivity in favor of sexual objectification.

There is ample psychological research to support this notion that sexualization is bad.  An American Psychological Association Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls reported in 2007 that sexualization is linked with negative consequences such as disordered eating, low self-esteem, and deficits in cognitive and physical functioning.  These links have been identified in both girls and women – some as young as Blondeau.

Sexualized images like these are troublesome at the societal level as well.  They encourage others to view young girls as objects of sexiness.  Additionally, these images are hugely problematic for girls and women with body image issues.  The fashion industry already promotes the thin ideal.  These pictures of Blondeau push the envelope by explicitly promoting the prepubescent thin ideal, a body type that is wholly unattainable for women.  The normalization of beautifying a 10-year-old’s body type can have potentially disastrous consequences for women’s body image.

It is dangerous to assume that “high fashion” sexualization is “art” and therefore less of an issue than lower class sexualization.  I do not take the paternalistic view that girls should be “protected” against sexualization. Instead, we should work with girls (and boys) to discourage sexualization and to encourage strength, intelligence, and sexual agency.

Images from tvtropes, Jezebel, and Snob.

Sarah McKenney is a doctoral candidate in developmental psychology at the University of Texas at Austin where she studies gender development and the sexualization of girls.

I recently argued that the blog, Born This Way, falsely suggested may give the impression that dressing or acting in ways consistent with the other sex when you are a child is a True Sign that you are gay.  This is obviously not the case, as almost all of us can find a photo from our childhood in which we’re breaking gender norms; it also conflates gender performance and sexual orientation (leaving out “lipstick lesbians” and “butch” gay men) and it locks the GLBTQ movement into a biological argument for acceptance, an argument I believe is short-sighted.

The idea that wearing a dress or seeming girly is a sign that one is gay is also completely ahistorical. If wearing a dress as a child means boys are gay, then there should have been essentially no straight men for much of American history.  Until the 1920s, infants and small children, whether male or female, were dressed and looked alike, often in long hair and dresses (source: Jo Paoletti).  Behold, American President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945):

Roosevelt may or may not have been gay then, but this outfit and hairdo certainly cannot be read to suggest that he was, at least not anymore than it can for young people and adults today.

Idea and photo borrowed from Family Inequality.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

A couple of months back, Lisa posted about a push-up bikini top sold by Abercrombie Kids, a store that targets kids ages 7-14. It led to a lively discussion, here and elsewhere, about the sexualization of young girls as well as socialization into beauty standards from a young age; eventually Abercrombie pulled the product from their website.

Leontine G. sent in a link to an image of a dress from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website that puts that debate into some historical context. While you might expect this to be a woman’s formal ball gown, they believe it was actually for a young girl:

From the description (which seems to focus on the U.S. and Europe, though this isn’t specified):

Until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, children were dressed as miniature adults, with girls being put into corseted bodices from about three years of age, graduating to adult dress when they reached twelve or thirteen.

…

When a boy reached four years of age, he was…dressed in a replica of a man’s three-piece suit, consisting of coat, waistcoat, and breeches reaching to the knee…Girls were dressed in the adult style of clothing from about the age of two. They would wear a tight-fitting boned bodice laced at the back, with a long full skirt over a petticoat; at twelve they would change to fashionable dress, with the bodice being replaced by stays (a corset) over which was worn a robe, petticoat, and stomacher.

This portrait of Daniel Crommelin Verplanck, painted by John Singleton Copley in 1771, shows the then 9-year-old boy in adult-style clothing:

Starting in the late 1770s, new, looser clothing styles for children became popular, along with new ideas about childhood innocence and the necessity of separating children from the cares of the adult world. The Met provides a link to the 1796 painting The Sackville Children, by John Hoppner, as an example of the new style:

As the Met’s discussion of the formal child’s dress explains, adult fashions eventually followed the trend in children’s clothing, leading to looser, less constricting clothing with fewer layers.

As Leontine notes, it’s an “interesting reminder that from an historical perspective, our society is the anomaly in *not* dressing children the same way we dress ourselves.”

While the last fifty years have been characterized by increasing freedoms for women, this has not been true for men to the same degree.  Women have entered masculine arenas throughout society, from where they work to what they wear, but men have not been freed to pursue feminine interests.  Men still face teasing, ridicule, stigma, or even violence for daring to do “girly” things.  Being a dancer or an elementary school teacher comes with raised eyebrows, askew glances, and questions as to one’s sexual orientation; enjoying “chick flicks” or preferring Cosmos to Coronas likely attracts teasing; and wearing a dress or high heels is essentially tolerated only on Halloween.

So girly things are still a no man’s land.

Unless.

Unless a very high status man — a man whose masculinity is undeniable, a leader among men — explores that land and plants a man flag.  If a man is so manly as to have begun to define manliness itself, then that man can change the very definition, thereby de-feminizing, and therefore de-stigmatizing an activity.  What once would have been cause for ridicule suddenly becomes unremarkable, i.e., man-approved.

Marco Roso, of DIS Magazine, sent me an example of such a transformation: the alice band.  Known to Americans as headbands,” an alice band is a loop or horseshoe-shaped hair accessory designed to push hair back away from the face.  It is a distinctly feminine accessory.  Or at least it was.  European footballers have begun wearing them to keep their hair back while playing.  While  a man lower on the masculine social hierarchy may have been teased relentlessly for donning such a girl-associated item, these high-status, wildly-admired men seem to be changing the social construction of the alice band.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

I took this snapshot at a mall in Glendale, CA. I want only to point out the size of the mannequins decorating this store for “Large Size” women.  I am not going to belabor this point.  Just.  Ugh.  This is what we are being told is “so fat we have to have a special store for you.”

See also the bewildering look of “Plus Size” at Frederick’s of Hollywood.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.