clothes/fashion

One of my former students, Janel B., sent me to this post called “Don’t Sleep on Africa” on the fashionable Livejournal community called black cigarette, and thereby introducing me to the South African photographer Nontsikelelo Veleko and her amazing portraits of Johannesburg stylish street denizens.

The entire post at black cigarette begins with this brief intervention into the problematically differential distribution of “style:”

Stockholm. Paris. London. New York. Helsinki. Milan. Tokyo.

These seem to be to go-to places when it comes to “street-style” and what’s hot in general on most fashion blogs, but I just wanted to share some of the street-style you’ll find on the African continent…. South African street style is rarely sleek and chic – it’s irreverent, vibrant and daring. It mixes patterns and textures, with echoes of mid 70s style (and just a splash of “geek chic”).

(Consider too the fact that Feedshion, which collects “the best street fashion photos from all the greatest street style blogs for your viewing pleasure,” happens to feature only street style blogs from the usual suspects and none from South America or Africa.)

The photo-heavy post is a wonderful contrast to those editorials in American and European fashion magazines whose visual vocabularies for “Africa” are unbelievably narrow and alienating (Galliano, I’m looking at you and your “tribal” fetish figure shoes). The continued refusal to see the African other as coeval (that is, contemporaneous) with the so-called modern observer, most obviously manifested in the classification of “tribal chic,” betrays the still-haunting presence of colonial aesthetics in Western art and design.

I wish I could repost all the photographs, but I will settle for a handful from Veleko.

Edited to add additional links supplied by Sociological Images and Racialicious, by way of the LJ community Debunking White.

Gorgeous photos from South African photographer Nontsikelelo Veleko.

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Based outside of Chicago, Mimi Thi Nguyen scours thrift and vintage stores with reckless abandon. She writes about neoliberalism and humanitarianism from a transnational feminist analytic, which includes the “management” of refugee crises but also beauty as a civilizing project.  She blogs at Threadbared.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Larry Harnisch of The Daily Mirror sent in this ad, which appeared in the Los Angeles Times on September 5, 1969:

Text from the top of the ad:

Does S&A really stand for Sex Appeal?

…and how! Our shoes are so sexy we only allow mature thinking adults to buy them…or young adults accompanied by a parent. When you wear S&A shoes, people will stare at your legs who were never never aware that you had any before.

It’s a great example of how quickly fashion standards can change. Today I’m pretty sure most, if not all, of these shoes would be considered old-fashioned and wouldn’t be marketed as sexy. Our ideas of what constitutes a “sexy” woman’s shoe today includes a higher, thinner heel, meaning they’re also in general less stable, harder to walk in, and worse for your feet than shoes with a chunky heel like these.

In an earlier post I discussed how men, these days, are less likely than women to enroll and graduate from college.  One theory for why involves an anti-intellectualism that is specifically male.  That is, many men learn that to be a real man means rejecting prissy intellectual pursuits.  Thinking is for chicks (and fags).

This commercial for Wrangler, aimed at men specifically, asserts this exactly:

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Citizen Parables and Dmitriy T.M. alerted us to this month’s French Vogue.  According to Jezebel, it features exactly zero black models.  It does, however, contain several images of Dutch model Lara Stone painted so as to look black.

The photos are being condemned as contemporary blackface.  I’d like to open it up to discussion:

1.  Is painting a white model so as to look black the same thing (in some important and significant way) as the derogatory minstrelsy with which blackface (with white mouths and red lips) is associated?  Is the intent (dehumanization) the same?  Is the effect the same?   Why or why not?  If not, could it be that we are as inured to racism now as they were then?

2.  Is the real (or part of the) problem the lack of actual black models?  That is, if there were black models in the magazine, would we read these images differently?

3.  If we saw models of different races being painted various colors, would the white model painted black cease to be significant?  Or, because of history, should this always (for the foreseeable future) be off limits?

4.  Is this “edgy” (and, therefore, fashion forward) exactly because it references historical blackface?  In that case, should fashion play with such topics?  Can people in the fashion industry do so responsibly?  And, if so, what would that look like?

More examples and discussion of contemporary “blackface” here, here, here, here, and here.  Also, Bugs Bunny.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

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.

Though EVERYONE knows that models are very skinny and that this is bad for the self-esteem and health of women, I was just shocked at how deathly thin the models were at the most recent Paris Fashion Week.

Ashley Mears has a really excellent and sophisticated article in the journal Ethnography, based on her experiences as a model, called Discipline of the Catwalk.  She describes how models are subject to (from the abstract) “…a disciplining labor process in which female bodily capital is transformed into a cultural commodity.” More, because market demand is based on constantly changing fashions in women’s “looks,” women have little to no control over their own value in the market.  Mears writes:

This labor process typifies the politics of gender, in which women exercise power over themselves insofar as they internalize and pursue the glamour of their regime.

Given that some things about our bodies are simply not under our control (e.g., height, skin and eye color, etc), thinness may be appealing as it is one thing that models can control.  And, apparently, being very, very skinny is still very, very in.

These women are modeling Lindsey Lohan’s fashion line only incidentally.  It’s just the particular post I happened to see over at Jezebel.

See also a previous post on how celebrity superstar women have been getting skinnier over time.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

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.

Sometimes you see an image or video that is pretty subtle and complicated, and it takes some mental wrangling to figure out what it’s conveying and what cultural ideas it’s drawing on or contradicting.

And then there are things like this, sent in by Joshua B.:

1. Normalization of heterosexual male gaze (until the very end)

2. Girls getting naked

3. While washing a car ‘n stuff

4. And they come in various ethnic flavors

That’s pretty much it.

About the man at the end, reader Victoria says,

I think it’s still the male gaze – just adding gay men to the mix at the end. The “Or, if you prefer” (or whatever they say) seems to clearly speak to the men in the audience.

I agree.

Ben O. sent us this vintage airline commercial for Braniff International.  In it, a “stewardess” models new uniforms to stripper music and narration.  What struck Ben was the final uniform and commentary.  The commercial ends with the assertion that Braniff International “believes that even an airline hostess should look like a girl.” Sexism aside, Ben argues, and I agree, that what she is wearing is hardly feminine at all given today’s standards. The commercial, then, nicely demonstrates how norms for gendered appearance shift and change.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Lynn drew our attention to the American Apparel webpages for men’s and women’s clothes.  She notes a distinct difference:

On the Women’s clothing pages, the girls are modelling THEMSELVES in addition to the clothes.  You see a butt purposefully sticking out here, a shirt pulled up to there, a head thrown back in a coquettish manner, a back arched this way and that.

On the Men’s pages, the men are essentially just “standing there”, letting the clothes speak for themselves.

I’ve included screen shots of all of the models in the slide show, so you can judge for yourself (sorry for the funky formatting; there were more images of women than men).

The men:

The women:

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.