Fashion and Feminism

by Amie Leigh Zimmer

Philosophers and feminists have always agreed on one thing: fashion is not a topic that merits serious philosophical consideration. Karen Hanson argues that this unexpected alliance between feminism and philosophy results from fashion’s association with ephemerality, instability, and change: all of which run counter to a philosophical quest for eternal and unchanging truths. The world of appearances thus becomes the world of mere appearances, and concern for this world becomes commensurate with a lack of concern or care for the serious: to say that something is of “depth” is to say that it exceeds this world of appearances. But the reality of appearance-based forms of discrimination (including natural hair debates and the “grooming gap”) calls for a renewed look at both the history and future of feminism’s relationship to this world: fashion.        

As a global capitalist system, fashion is an exploitative empire which artificially manufactures and sells desire. Fabric is cut, shaped, and sold; when one ‘season’ ends and another begins, fabric is re-cut, re-shaped, and re-sold, ad infinitum. Its industry is exploitative: profiting from the oppressive labor structures of capitalism and the profound alienation of the laboring garment industry workers who cannot themselves afford to purchase the clothing that they make. Marx lays out the dialectic of production and consumption with specific reference to clothing: “A product, a garment,” he says, “becomes a real product, a real garment only in being worn, becoming worn out, being consumed.” Through wear, clothing “disintegrates and negates itself, stimulating more production.” Prophesying the nature of fast fashion inchoate in early stage industrialization, Marx writes how the very reliance on quickly deteriorating materials is necessarily built into fashion’s production. When Marx talks of the “murderous, meaningless caprices of fashion,” this is a description he takes quite literally. Since both “work and income are reliant on fashion’s fancies,” he writes, the fashion industry participates in the hiring and firing of workers at whim in order to accommodate a free market of ever-changing desires.

Even those who consider themselves outside of fashion’s lure are nonetheless cloaked by its dictates: designs are quickly and cheaply reproduced, “trickling down” from high-fashion into low, as Hazel Clark and Cheryl Buckley show. This fashionable trickle-down effect has blurred the history of fashion as a program for the continued maintenance of class. Georg Simmel wrote that the classed nature of fashion is not incidental, but central to its formal structure. Not only are fashions always classed for Simmel, but the appropriation of “high fashion” by lower socio-economic classes drives the cyclical nature of the re-creation of continuous re-individuation by means of the upper class.

Fashion is equally associated with the feminine as a kind of being for whom fashion’s own instability purportedly matters a great deal, and consequently, the feminine has come to name a kind of being who lacks seriousness. So a dismissal of the system of fashion as a site of philosophical and political analysis means that the feminine endures as a superficial creature excluded from philosophy’s depths. Even in its theorization as a system by Marx, the actual material make-up of fashion is feminized, while its labor is masculinized. Its very production was steeped in imperialism and slavery, and it continues to exploit women.

Not fashion, but dress, became a specifically feminist issue for first-wave feminists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Dress was central to her politics which sought to liberate women from strictures both physical and sociological, both damning and suffocating in their own ways. The petticoat limited and hindered actual physical mobility and supported the subordinating structures of gendered economic and political oppression and domination which sustained resistance to the suffrage movement. The lack of pockets on women’s clothing, Gilman writes, only reinstates a connection of women to frivolity and ephemerality; the pocketless woman becomes dependent on the pocketed man to carry her world around for her. And frankly, pockets still reflect sexist design. The motivations for the dress reform movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were quite literally self-evident: bodices, corsetry, and heavily layered undergarments were being recognized as having deleterious health effects, altering women’s spines and bodily comportments, compressing and damaging their internal organs, compromising their very abilities to move and function with any ease in the world. Medical professionals and dress reformers alike advocated a turn from aesthetics to “health,” promoting a concern for aesthetics as being “bad” for one’s well-being, which in turn perpetuates a distinction between the beautiful and the good that parallels the evaluation of the beautiful with the inconsequential.

The relationship of second-wave feminism to dress was quite different. Even in the heyday of social constructivism which fundamentally rejected the metaphysical conception of essences that so dominated the history of philosophy and views of human nature, appearances were still a source of mistrust. Feminist interventions in discussions of fashion have most often been from the vantage point of the defensive critic: how can a “feminine” woman support feminist ideals when her very habitus is the performative embodiment and reification of male desire, oppression, and the resulting normative ideals of beauty which continue both to subject and to subjugate? The presumption here is that femininity is counter to a feminist politics which would seek the de-objectification of the ‘female’ body away and apart from the male gaze. Following Iris Marion Young, femininity is taken for granted in this context as “a set of normatively disciplined expectations imposed on female bodies by male-dominated society.” But this debate, too, obscures an entire history of femme critique within queer studies, or at least sets up femme-ness as an uncritical acceptance and embrace of normative femininity. Beverly Skeggs has shown that this conception of normative femininity (as delicate, consumptive, and worst of all, as fashionable) has been a marker of white middle class heterosexual women since the 18^th century, but not of working class women or women of color. And yet it is this presentation of the feminine body which is “judged on the basis of excess and devalued but also, paradoxically, given authority to shame and judge.”

Young nonetheless asks whether it is possible for women to “recover” our clothes. She asks whether or not woman’s relationship to fashion and to dress is doomed to the fate that post-structuralist feminists like Sandra Bartky have outlined for us. This is the view that the pleasure woman does or does not receive through her own self-image is always already filtered through the approving or disapproving gaze of the imaginary heterosexual male figure: the view that says that the female gaze is nothing but an internalized male gaze, and that woman herself is nothing but an object objectifying herself. Reluctant to give up claims to a particularly gendered form of subjectivity, Young suggests that the reduction of clothing to its role in reproducing women’s oppression under patriarchal capitalism risks giving a reductive and homogenized account of social relations both within patriarchy and within capitalism. Young’s analysis calls not for a feminine aesthetics which would only reify the very thing her feminist politics aims to dismantle, but a feminist aesthetics which calls into question the very ways that femininity continues to be weaponized against women. The slut walks challenged the way that normative femininity became a justification for sexual violation, and third-wave feminists rallied around the idea that clothing does not in itself warrant or invite unwanted sexual attention and violation, captured by the slogan ‘My Dress is Not a Yes.’ A feminist politics must always engage with normative femininity as a meaningful site of analysis and intervention, lest we relegate it through continued silence to the meaningless and the frivolous, the decorative and the inconsequential, and in this context, the violable.

As part of the body’s legibility as visible or invisible, clothing is a part of a complex system that cannot be reduced to its mere participation in fashion. Women’s clothed bodies are “taken to make visible something politically significant about them, in a way that men’s are not,” Mary Edwards writes. The pantsuit, for instance, revived as a symbol of feminist success in the 2016 U.S. Election Cycle, inhibits the possibility of sexualized shame so central to many other modes of feminine dress. (By the way, that Hillary pantsuit? No pockets).

Clothing has become so naturalized onto different bodies that it comes to stand in not only for persons but for perceived actions which themselves justify racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and xenophobic violence. This is especially clear to see in the role clothing has played in racialization: the way that hoodies have come to stand in not only for black bodies, but black bodies seen as ‘about’ to act criminally. This logic of anti-black racism constituted Trayvon Martin’s body such that it appeared to George Zimmerman as ‘about’ to enact a crime, just as it had in the Rodney King case. The proliferation of  “hoodie bans” and other bans on forms and modes of dress gains purchase on this logic that garments provoke, incite, and justify acts of racism as well as sexual violation.

Western liberal democracy (and the notion of “freedom” in particular) is bound up with women’s sexual freedom as expressed by what they are or are not permitted to wear, as Kelly Oliver argues. The United States’ concern to liberate “women of cover” (George W. Bush’s term) … “reassure[s] us about women’s sexual freedom in the West, on the one hand, and… legitimate[s] constraints on women’s sexual agency here and there on the other.” This war rhetoric promotes the pernicious view  that Muslim women “need saving.” Writing on the 2004 French law banning conspicuous religious symbols, Alia Al-Saji argues that the positioning of the ban on veiling in public settings in the name of gender equality created a false binary between anti-sexist and anti-racists efforts. Christine Delphy criticized the law and its forced binary. The rhetoric surrounding the debate of Bill 21 in Quebec this past year was similar in its invocation of secularism as a value which necessarily entails the denial of religious expression through symbols of dress. The passing of the bill, like its counterparts, unequivocally targets non-Christian women, and wields its support in the name of gender equality and freedom from oppression. In the French context, the rhetoric of this debate effectively erased the history of French colonialism in Algeria, in part captured by Frantz Fanon in “Algeria Unveiled.”

In her own recent contribution to this series, Falguni Sheth shows how the chastisement of women of color politicians enacts a neocolonialism which can in part be traced to a history of similar tactics of colonists to police dress. As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it: “Next time someone tells Bronx girls to take off their hoops, they can just say they’re dressing like a Congresswoman.”

This erasure of racial and colonial histories is only part of what constitutes the moral and epistemic harms of culturally appropriative dress which continue to perpetuate harmful tropes and stereotypes: the case of Urban Outfitters v. the Navajo Nation is only one instance. Perhaps this forgetting of history also helps to make sense of the discomfort and the felt sense of wrongness when non-Muslim women wear hijab as a form of feminist “solidarity.” Both actions appropriate a conception of dress as mere covering, diminishing its participation in its larger economy of self and communal sense-making. The case of Larycia Hawkins is especially complicated for the ways that her evangelical institution weaponized itself against her.

Clothing has historically collapsed the distinction between sex and gender expression. This collapse has accounted for the naturalization of feminine bodies as female bodies, and of female bodies as bodies that ought to be feminine bodies. The philosophical distrust of appearances underlies Talia Mae Bettcher’s contention that those who commit violence against trans persons do so in the name of having been ‘deceived’ by appearances in their effort to disclose the real, as many trans persons are then forced to disclose their genital status as a means of ‘sex verification.’ Misaligning thus becomes tantamount to lying, and the implication of this expectation of ‘matching’ is that “correctly aligned cases” offer a “disclosure of genital status on a regular basis through gender presentation.” “This is ironic, of course,” she writes, since one of the main functions of attire is to conceal the sexed regions of the body.” Gayle Salamon questions the vital role of gender norming in clothing as it played out in the shooting of Latisha King in 2008, and how the media’s portrayal of her “transgressive” clothing functioned both to erase her trans identity and to use it as justification for her murderer’s actions. Salamon writes: “in suggesting that Latisha’s gender expression provoked Brandon McInerney to violence, they [the legal team] suggested in essence that by expressing her gender identity, Latisha authored her own murder.”

Both fashion as a system, and dress understood as a bodily practice, are ripe for feminist critiques and interventions. Clothing, both literally and symbolically, is this in-between space between form and content, structure and body. Joanne Entwistle develops this conception of dress as situated bodily practice: as the fulcrum between subject and structure. Dress is a gateway to our world and a serious access point for negotiating what the relationship between self and world will, quite literally, look like. Philosophy is not exempt from fashion’s forces: we too succumb to trends and fashions within our own discipline. What is trending, or what is fashionable to write about, often points to the most timely issues. Not only should philosophy begin to engage with fashion, but precisely because of its shifting nature, it should endeavor to keep up.

Amie Leigh Zimmer is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. She is currently writing a dissertation on fashion and dress in the history of philosophy and social and political philosophy.