I confess: I love shoes. specially when they're high. Until they wore out, my go-to faves were a pair of black leather ankle boots with dangerously high heels. They were actually pretty comfortable, but even if they weren't, I still would have worn them cause they looked so damn good.
I'm also a feminist.
I bring this up because I often ponder the tension between feminism and fashion -- the way fashion is often framed as a silly vanity and often driven by our need to please men, rather than ourselves. The trope popped into my noggin again this weekend, after I read a piece in Sunday's New York Times that seemed to imply that women could be accomplished or fashionable, but rarely both.
The story cast a bemused eye on the new stylistas of Silicon Valley who were "bucking convention not only by being women in a male-dominated industry, but also by unabashedly embracing fashion." (One interviewee was the 29-year-old founder of a travel start-up who, the reporter noted, was wearing a pair of hot pink Christian Louboutins. At which point I wondered: If you can actually afford to buy Louboutins, why wouldn't you?)
Anyway, it got me to thinking: Are fashion and feminism ever compatible? Can you maintain professional cred in serious stilettos? And why, when you dress to impress, is there the assumption that who you are aiming to please is the patriarchy?
For some food for thought, I turned to a couple of smart women who are both rather stylish in their own right. The first is an expert on gender politics, Shira Tarrant, a California State University, Long Beach Women's Studies professor whose new book Fashion Talks: Undressing the Power of Style uses fashion to deconstruct the politics of race, class, gender and sexuality. When I asked if fashionistas could be taken seriously as feminists, her answer was "absolutely":
And feminists can be taken seriously as fashionistas. Feminists have a bad rap when it comes to fashion. We're accused of being frumpy, unattractively braless and inexcusably hirsute. But the fact is that feminism has always paid attention to the politics of style, and many feminists are incredibly fashionable.
Still, she says, when it comes to fashion as a lens to understanding -- and changing -- gender politics, consider the context:
We live in a patriarchal, capitalist culture. We can never completely separate our fashion choices from the social structures we live in. But that doesn't mean we're always victims of our culture, either. Fashion can be self-objectifying. At the same time, fashion can push back against a culture that keeps insisting that women hypersexualize ourselves. Fashion can be used to subvert the status quo, but the question is whether we can ever fully achieve this -- especially without more sweeping economic and political change.
We're always grappling with this tension between self-expression and self-objectification. The question is, how do we remove the gendered penalties of self-expression? Our culture still encourages women to be attractive and pleasing to men. Fashion isn't exempt from that. At the same time, fashion can be used to subvert these expectations. We can use fashion as a form of pop culture pushback.
Pushback? Fantastic! My second source, my colleague Charlotta Kratz, a lecturer in the communication department at Santa Clara University, would agree.
Through my clothes I tell people that I'm not completely what they may assume given my age or profession. For long periods of time I challenged notions of status through how I dressed. I had a pair of denim overalls that I wore in professional settings. As a recent immigrant with an accent, I used to soften my being different by dressing plainly in jeans and t-shirts. I found that when I wore my Scandinavian designer clothes, mostly black, my California students found it harder to understand me.
I don't think I dress for men. I think I dress to attract people who will "get" me. Some of those will be men with a possible sexual interest in me. I don't mind that. I like men and I like innocent everyday flirting. But, some of those people will be other heterosexual women, like my colleagues or students. For them my clothes will be signals of different kinds.
Kratz points out that we communicate through our fashion choices -- clothes, hair, bags, cars -- to become someone in social settings:
Not washing our cars is a statement. Sporting hairstyles that are carefully created to look as if we never comb our hair says something about us, too. Whoever says "I don't care about how I look" takes a lot of pride, and puts lots of effort into that particular style.
And that's it, isn't it? Fashion is simply the signals we send, the way we use artifacts like clothes and shoes to represent ourselves. As Shannon wrote back when we were in the throes of writing our book (and, ironically, clad most days in scrubs) for most of us, it's pure self-expression: Clothes, she wrote, "say something to the world about who we are. Or who we want to be perceived to be."
In other words, it's a choice: one that I think is more than compatible with feminism. We dress to please ourselves, to show the world who we are. Which leads back to that frame that won't go away, that fashion is simply a tool of the patriarchy. As for me, if pleasing men were my goal, I have failed miserably, at least with one man in my life who after decades of marriage still can't understand why I need more than three pair of shoes -- sneakers, flip flops or the moral equivalent, and dress shoes -- or why I never leave the house without lipstick.
Anyway, back to Tarrant. I asked her to describe her own particular style and what she said was this: "My sartorial style skews toward earth tones, black and grey, with a radical splash of liberation."
Done!
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What's the damn point?
There is a reason that men do not wear high heels or shoes that destroy their joints. Men are considered fine as they are, while women supposedly need to destroy their health and break their budgets to appear acceptable. High heels are akin to the old Chinese custom of binding the feet of women --- these are methods to keep women in an inferior and weakened condition. If you ever have to run from a rapist or murderer, you have a much better shot wearing tennis shoes than Louboutins.
Presumably if women would spend more time developing their minds and less time obsessed with fashion, clothing, shoes, hair and make-up, we might see more illustrious women inventors, scientists, creatives and leaders.
This piece screams "shallow, shallow, shallow". Duh, I can afford Louboutins or Jimmy Choos, but choose not to. I would rather help support charitable work than buy overpriced shoes that destroy the feet, arches and calves of women.
You know what else ruins your body? Long distance running. Does that mean that any woman who runs marathons (for whatever reason) loses her f-card or are there special exemptions, like, you can be feminist if you run for breast cancer but you can't be a feminist if you run for fun because "duh", that's so "shallow"?
If man wants women to be weak and inferior than you want women to live in constant fear and bow down to your rigid rules of what it means to be a feminist. Put it this way; thanks to my also non-feminist long distance running, I can outrun a rapist in heels 10X faster than most obese, out of shape women (who are also ruining their bodies) who are wearing tennis shoes can.
Liking fashion and being charitable are not mutually exclusive qualities. I buy one pair of designer shoes a year and donate more than the equivalent to various charities. Conversely, I know plenty of women who don't buy Louboutins who also don't donate to charity period and yes, they can afford to.
Futhermore, I guess Heddy Lemarr and Michelle Obama never got the memo that you can only be an inventor or a leader if you don't wear makeup and nice clothing and that if you show even the slightest interest in such matters, you are "obsessed".
She will never be cool.
Funny though, if I were to suggest I could convince a woman (young or old) to apply paint and masking to her eyes, lips and face, wear devices that cause her, unnaturally, to tilt onto the balls of her feet for the purpose of jutting out her rear end and increasing, by optical illusion, the given length of her legs, and employ other devices to present (by means of girding, lifting and compressing) her mammaries for display so that others may take notice of their many varied forms, you'd probably say I was crazy.
I rarely wear high heels other than when I'm "dressed to kill," because I find them hard to walk in. But if high heels are who you are and you feel comfortable in them - go for it! More power to women who wear their stilettos to the C-suite :)
Before menopause 10 years ago, I eschewed colour in favour of black, navy and beige. I loved my look then. My closet is now a riot of vibrant shades heavily skewed to pinks & purples. I love my look now too! What I wear celebrates who I am; I could care less what others think of how I dress. Sure it's nice to get compliments, but I dress for ME, my comfort and my mood. I find bright colours and unusual pieces infuse me with a sense of power. I love my look to say: ATTITUDE!
More on my style here:
http://amazingwomenrock.com/heres-to-being-a-crazy-one-a-misfit-a-rebel-and-a-round-peg-in-a-square-hole
If you're into stilettos, check out the 300+ sexilicious ones in the galleries here:
http://amazingwomenrock.com/gallery/
Fashion is all about self-expression. Be an artist: paint the masterpiece of you!
What I really need is a pair of sandals that feels like the inside of my sneakers. I'd wear sandals if they had more support. I keep my toenails painted and my feet ready to go nude. . . I just can't find any sandals that feel right.
I am faced with this dilemma, don't you see? A perfectly good (for me) pair of shoes, but not worth anything even at Goodwill, and not useful for someone who has no other shoes. Bad bad shoes, e.g. clodhoppers with stains and nicks, are fine. Bad good shoes, no. But keeping them and donating the new pair is stupid, much worse than returning the new pair and donating the money. But that makes less sense than just donating the money, which leaves me with two pair still. Sigh. I suppose I'll donate the old ones, and some money, pro-rated.
Because it is stupid and wasteful.