clothes/fashion

Victoria A. sent along this ad for Cafe Press:

Okay, okay, I know it’s just Cafe Press and anyone can make anything on Cafe Press and, heck, these undies probably come in both variations… but even so!

I mean really! Can we just think a second before we make an ad that includes a pair of men’s underwear that say “Loved by…” and a pair of women’s that say “Property of…”? I mean, can we just NOT do that when women actually are the legal property of men in some places and were at one point in history in many?

It’s not a joke. Women who, by virtue of being owned by someone, could not own property themselves; could not vote or enter into contracts; women whose children were taken away if they separated; who, when raped, deserved no compensation because she belonged to a man who, not incidentally, DID deserve compensation because his property had been tarnished. Can we, like, just not make this ad quite this way? Please?

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.

For this past Christmas my niece received The Three Musketeers “Barbie” and “Ken.” The series really pushes the idea that girls and women can be physical dynamos… and yet.  I photo’d their boxes because of the thought bubble in the corner of each.

The boxes:

Barbie’s thought: “This riding outfit is the cutest!”

Ken’s thought: “I want to be an inventor!”

I’m just sayin’, is all.  We’re not making this stuff up.

Thanks to my sister, Holly, for noticing and pushing the boxes into my hands, saying “you will love this!”  Indeed.

NEW (Mar. ’10)! Katie P. found these boy and girl onesies for sale.  The boy version reads “I’m Super” and the girl version… “Super Cute”:

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.

Katrin sent along one ad from a campaign by Louis Vuitton.  The campaign centers around the fantasy that young, beautiful women with porcelain (white) skin are hand-crafting their products.  A two-page spread:Text:

The Young Woman and the Tiny Folds.

In everything from Louis Vuitton, there are elements that cannot be fully explained.  What secret little gestures do our craftsmen discreetly pass on?  How do we blend innate skill and inherent prowess?  Or how can five tiny folds lengthen the life of a wallet?  Let’s allow these mysteries to hang in the air.  Time will provide the answers.

Another example is titled “The Seamstress With Linen Thread and Beeswax.”

But, of course, “Hardly any Vuitton bags or wallets are handmade.”  Or so says Carol Matlack at Business Week.  She continues:

While reporting an article on Vuitton in 2004, I visited one of its factories in the village of Ducey near Mont St. Michel. There I saw rows of workers seated at sewing machines, stitching together machine-cut pieces of canvas and leather. The partially finished bags were rolled from one workstation to the next on metal carts.

It was no sweatshop. The building was modern and airy, with windows overlooking the Normandy countryside. But the work being done there didn’t resemble in any way the painstaking handiwork shown in Vuitton’s ads. Indeed, the factory managers – who had been recruited from companies making such things as mobile phones and yogurt containers — talked proudly about the strides they had made in automating every step of the process. Just about the only Vuitton products still made by hand, they told me, were custom-made items produced at its historic atelier in the Paris suburb of Asnières.

UPDATE (May ’10)! Katrin and Anjan G. messaged us to let us know that the U.K. Advertising Standards Agency has decided that these ads violate truth in advertising.  They’ve been disallowed.

For other examples of marketing that mythologizes its manufacturing processes, see these posts on Goldfish crackers (mommies and daddies make them!) and Ecko Jeans (sweatshops are full of hot women in bikinis!).

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.

Tilly R. sent in the clip below of Bill Maher attempting to illustrate the oppressiveness of the burqa by staging a fake fashion show in which every model comes out in an identical burqa. You only need to watch the first couple models to get the idea (starts at about .20 sec.):

The comedy is tasteless, at best. And it brings out two interesting assumptions: that measures of women’s liberation include (1) the right to show skin and/or your body’s shape and (2) the choice to express your individuality through your clothes.

It is with a focus on the latter that I introduce a website submitted by K.L. The website, Zarina, sells burqas. While most of the burqas we see in Western media are blue or black, this website sells burqas of all stripes.

A blue, embroidered burqa:

A “hot pink” burqa:

A saddle brown burqa:

A Turkish flag burqa:

An Afghan flag burqa:

An American flag burqa:

A camouflage burqa:

I have no idea if this website is legitimate (though it seems to be) and I have no idea whether women in (which) different burqa-requiring/encouraging societies can actually choose to wear these. I really have no idea.

But I do think it prompts us to interrogate our own assumptions about what women’s liberation looks like and if being able to choose your own style really is a good measure of it.

I’d bet that most Western women feel like being able to choose her clothes is a central part of her sense of freedom. Does that translate in this context? That is, if women were required to wear burqas, but could wear any burqa they like, does this mediate how oppressive the burqa seems to you? Conversely, does the seeming freedom that comes with choosing your clothes become less convincing once you think about it in this context?  I know this is tough to think about, but I think it’s an interesting thought experiment.

For related posts asking us to think about the relative freedoms represented by the burqa and the power of the male gaze, see here, here, and here.

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.

Laura A., Brenly R., and Maurine C. all let us know about a shirt for sale at Urban Outfitters. The shirt came in two color combos: White/Charcoal and Obama/Black. Here’s an image of the Obama/Black option, via Jezebel:

There are a couple of things going on here. First, there’s the reference to Obama as a marketing ploy, which we’ve seen before, of course. But it also shows how ridiculous our racial color coding is; we continue to use colonial-era categorizations that there is a clear dividing line between groups based on color. Black and white are usually depicted as opposite colors, after all (and, of course, there’s the historic association of white with purity and black with evil). Most people don’t literally think of Black people as black or believe White people are white; people are, as far as I can tell, pretty much some shade along the off-white/tan/brown spectrum. But we continue to socially construct racial categories as though there is some meaningful, stark difference based on skin color.

So given that, if Obama’s half Black and half White, he’s gray, right? I mean, I’ve seen him on TV a lot and I’ve never noticed that, but maybe it’s the makeup.

I’m sure you will be sad to know that the Urban Outfitters website says the shirt is no longer available.

UPDATE: Reader applebrownbettywhite says,

Just wanted to let you know – I think both Jezebel and you guys interpreted UO’s color naming scheme incorrectly. “Obama” as a color refers to brown, which is the color of the buttons. You can check this assertion against the other shirt, white/charcoal, which is a lighter colored shirt with white buttons.

I’m not sure…the buttons look black to me. It doesn’t look like it has brown on it, but maybe it’s a bad photo.

I thought Samatha Critchell’s description of Michelle Obama’s light tan or “champagne” dress as “flesh colored” might get her fired.  If nothing else, I figured it’d be warning to all other journalists out there to, for gawd’s sake!, watch your racist language.

But, alas, the parade of “champagne”-colored gowns at this year’s Grammy’s had led a flood of fashion writers talking about the color “nude.”  Here are just a handful of examples from the first three pages of my google search

Los Angeles Times:

Katy Perry and her dress:

Elsewhere in the Los Angeles Times:

Beyonce and her dress:

VH1:

Keri Hilson and her dress:

Associated Content:

msnbc:

Heidi Klum and her dress:

Popsugar:

Of course (almost) no one is actually “nude”-colored, but the term still manages to naturalize whiteness insofar as white people’s skin color tends to match colors described as “nude” moreso than the skin color of non-white people (though there are always exceptions).  I’m really surprised that journalists are still managing to get this language past their editors.

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.

We talk about a lot on this blog about how things that having nothing to do with genitals are, nonetheless, gendered. Some sociologists are noting that a cluster of ideas related to intellectualism–liking school, studying hard, being smart, reading, and even caring about ideas–have become feminized. As a result, boys and men express less interest in and invest less in school, and girls and women are kicking their asses, scholastically speaking.

We previously featured an advertising campaign for Wrangler that told men to “stop thinking.” And this week Monika P. and Kat B. sent in an ad campaign for Deisel with the slogan: “be stupid.”

There’s a whole commerical (embedded below), but the general thrust is that smart people are doin’ smart stuff, but Diesel is “with stupid.” Because “stupid is the relentless pursuit of a regret free life.”  And while smart people may have “the brains,” stupid people have “the balls.” Besides, they say, “if we didn’t have stupid thoughts, we’d have no interesting thoughts at all.” Which doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense, but whatever.

And in case that doesn’t convince you, they concede that “smart has the authority,” but stupid has “one hell of a hangover.” Sign me up.

Ultimately the message is that smart people are repressed and confined, they have no fun, and nothing exciting ever happens to them.  So being smart is framed as (but isn’t) the opposite of all these things.   They leave you with the thought: “You can’t outsmart stupid.”

UPDATE! That said, Reader Kyle Munkittrick offers a compelling rebuttal at his blog, Pop Transhumanism.

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.

Jersey Shore has come to end, we’re (genuinely) sad to say. We know we had fun. But is it possible we also saw something, dare I say it, subversive about beauty, gender and sexuality? I think so.

A panel discussion on the show and “Guido culture” at Queens College yesterday (you read that right), included New York State Senator and Jezebel heroine Diane Savino, who knows from stinging cultural analysis.

[Savino] explained, “‘guido’ was never a pejorative.” It grew out of the greaser look and became a way for Italian-Americans who did not fit the standard of beauty to take pride in their own heritage and define cool for themselves.

When she was growing up, everybody listened to rock; girls were supposed to be skinny with straight blonde hair (like Marcia Brady on “The Brady Bunch”); guys wore ripped jeans, sneakers and straggly hair.

The 1977 film “Saturday Night Fever” marked a turning point. “It changed the image for all of us,” Ms. Savino said. As Tony Manero, John Travolta wore a white suit, had slicked short hair, liked disco music and was hot. “It was a way we could develop our own standard of beauty,” she added.

In the same way, Virginia Heffernan writes in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, Italian-Americans in the Northeast originally disdained their own accents until movies like “Mean Streets, Saturday Night Fever, Working Girl and, of course, Taxi Driver.” Those representations, she says, led to a “hammy” reclamation of an identity that had been mirrored back to them through Hollywood. These were second and third generation immigrants, who had mostly reached the middle class but maybe didn’t feel wholly a part of the mainstream, who telegraphed their identity through stylized symbols like Italian flags and red sauce that felt potent but no longer limited their social mobility.

That goes for the ladies too. Female beauty that took on a showily “ethnic cast” was distinct from what was already being sold. As Regina Nigro recently put it on The Awl:

We (I) laugh at bon mots like “You don’t even look Italian!” (the insult that Sammi “Sweetheart” flings at the blonde blue-eyed “grenade” …) but, ridiculous as it is, that assessment betrays a value system: Skinny blonde pale WASP princesses are deemed not attractive when measured by the JS aesthetic. And this seems curious and laughable to us.

“You don’t even look Italian!” is crazy funny but is the underlying judgment (dark hair/olive skin/Italian-looking = pretty; the inverse = not pretty) any worse than any other standard of beauty? It’s an alternative perspective, one that I suspect is so funny partly because it is so unfamiliar.

Of course, there is plenty about the Jersey Shore sexual aesthetic that is broadly familiar. The worst insult is to call a woman fat (or a “hippo”); big, exposed boobs are a baseline requirement, and the men are judged by the attractiveness of the women they acquire. (The other guys repeatedly mock The Situation about the looks of the women he brings home; Ronnie taunts him that he hasn’t brought home a girl anywhere near as pretty as Sammi).

And yet it’s oddly refreshing how much artifice itself is celebrated, with everyone participating mightily, and openly, in becoming the ideal Guido. No one is just born one, or supposed to make it look effortless. There are communal visits to tanning salons and unblinking references to fake breasts, and everyone takes hours to get ready. Vinny describes a girl admiringly: “Fake boobs, nice butt, said she was a model.”

Heffernan, writing about regional accents being reinforced by the show, uses Sammi as an example: “Every part of Sweetheart’s identity – including her skin color, which on the show is not an inborn marker of ethnicity but a badge of achievement (in the tanning bed) – is the product of intense calculation.” And Heffernan didn’t even get to Sammi’s hair extensions, which are brandished for emphasis.

No character more desperately self-produces than The Situation and his third-person pronouncements. Men are not inscluded [sic] from all this ritual artifice. In the last episode, J-Woww practically goes into heat when she sees some “juicehead gorillas” on the beach, and she lists “Human Growth Hormone” among the attractions. This, by the way, leads The Situation to mumble defensively, “Big is out and lean is in.”

That’s because on The Jersey Shore, men’s bodies are just as scrutinized as women’s, and their beauty rituals are as elaborate, expensive, and time-consuming as those of the women. Maybe even more so — in addition to blowouts, tanning sessions, and agonizing over which appliqued shirt will set them apart from the gelled masses, they spend hours at the gym, something we never see the girls do.

As much as the cast performed all this around the clock during the show’s taping, the audition tapes seen here and in the video below are even more extreme, mixing ethnic calculation with the general famewhoring savviness reality producers have become accustomed to.

Looking at this through what we know now: Sammi calls herself a “hookup slut” but aside from a few flirtations, turned out to be conventionally monogamous on the show. Vinny, in straight-up costume, claims he has to take off his pants “to really show you the magic,” but turned out to be the mildest-mannered cast member, one who unashamedly adores his doting mother. Underneath playing to the producers, though, is a more personal kind of construction, and a more particular one. And ironically, although the cast members’ self-creation was one of the most entertaining parts of the show, some underlying sense of unembarrassed authenticity, even wholesomeness, made it most worth watching.

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Irin Carmon is a reporter at Jezebel.com, from where we’re super pleased to have borrowed the post below. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, The Village Voice, and others; more information is at www.irincarmon.com.

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