Fashion and Women

Often times people hear the word feminist and they picture drab clothing, no lipstick, effortless women. This is not true anymore. Today's feminists might not even be aware that they are an active feminist at all, and probably love dressing up great as much as any woman who wears heels and lipstick. Here's an interesting article by Lisa Armstrong from The Sunday Times. She brings up the age old question, doesn't dressing good and wearing those heels make us woman feel empowered, and "give great pleasure"? Is it quite possible that fashion is still the one thing woman hold over men? Read her article and see how you feel.

Fashion is still a feminist issue

Did Miuccia Prada really say after last week’s show in Milan that she was a former feminist? I lent in closer.

Yes, that’s what she’d said all right. “Feminism?” she sighed, “it doesn’t really exist anymore does it?”

The British journalists listening to her exchanged knowing smiles and later agreed that, even more than an upwardly mobile set of sales figures next quarter, perhaps what Miuccia Prada really needs to lift her spirits is a copy of Natasha Walter’s latest bookLiving Dolls: The Return of Sexism. Not that it makes particularly uplifting reading for those who haven’t abandoned the feminist cause. But at least it’s addressing the case.

How depressing it must be to live in Berlusconi’s Italy. Four-ply cashmere and sex scandals on tap but no decent debate about women’s roles in society. The land that gave us the Renaissance and Visconti is now engaged in a dialogue about women’s sexuality that begins and ends with Donatella Versace’s and Pucci’s slashed-to-the-thigh, plunging-to-the-navel aesthetics.

Arguably the Donatella Look has been one of Italy’s most successful cultural exports in recent years. It’s all over Britain and America — marginally less so in France — and flourishing in Australia and South America. Let’s not blame Donatella though. We lapped it up.

Fashion magazines embraced a mode of (un)dressing they dubbed porno-chic.

Laced with irony and layers of contradiction (some conscious, others less so) the once shocking porno-chic filtered down — minus, naturally, the irony.

Porn-star hair extensions, porn-star lips, porn-star white-tipped nails, sex shop bondage shoes, fetish underwear, T-shirts for teens with Porn Star emblazoned across them, halternecks for tots, bum-revealing jeans and lashings of black-studded leather. “When did women start dressing like prostitutes?” a well-known theatre producer asked me at a Bafta dinner recently. I licked my lipgloss coated lips uneasily. It’s gloopy and tacky — but I’m addicted.

So it looks as though, in 2010, even lipgloss is political again. OnWomen’s Hour the other week, Jane Garvey asked whether it’s possible to wear lipstick and be a feminist. Not that old canard, I thought. Don’t people realise that sometimes what seems oppressive — high heels, corsets — can also, for reasons of status and (self) control, give great pleasure?

Can’t they see that fashion and beauty are two industries in which women operate on an equal (or possibly superior) level to men? Just look at Helena Rubinstein. Or Elizabeth Arden, Estée Lauder, Coco Chanel and, more recently, Donna Karan, Diane von Furstenberg and, for that matter, Donatella. On the other hand, women on the lowest rungs of the fashion ladder — in the sweatshops — might not feel so empowered by their labour. Or perhaps they do — knowing that they could have even more exploitative jobs, in the sex industry for instance.

But Garvey has a point. Clothes and cosmetics can still unsettle — just look at the kerfuffle over Katie Price’s decision to lard her two-year-old daughter’s face in blusher, lipstick and false eyelashes.

Everything we consume — no matter how right-on — brings with it another set of dilemmas. The anti-fashion dungarees of Seventies feminists were mighty impractical when it came to going to the loo (plus the androgynous aspect drove some men wild). As for the thrift shop coats and trilbies — weren’t they part of a mainstream drift towards vintage, most famously defined by Annie Hall? Even when we kick against the fashion system, we end up adopting a fashionable boot.

The power to unsettle is good by the way. Part of fashion’s job is to challenge society’s norms. Sometimes it does this in the only way it knows — pendulum swings that last one season. It’s hard to say whether Prada’s latest demure, almost prim (and all the more erotic for it), collection will stick. Marc Jacobs pulled off a similar trick the week before in New York and the fashion editors, for the most part, swooned. Grown-up, covered-up clothes at last. Only Luke Leitch, my esteemed colleague, demurred. Didn’t I think, he asked, that all those folds of fabric might, actually, be anti-feminist, or at least anti-female, or at least anti the female body? I haven’t decided, but at least fashion is asking some interesting questions.