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!