I stumbled across an older clip from a French fashion documentary released in the eighties. I can’t speak a word of French (well, not in polite company), and so I do not know what the narrator says about women’s fashion relative to the history of France. I do think that fashion offers an exciting visual codex of fluctuating philosophies at play in society.
Fashion defines itself as more than mere clothing by its capacity to reflect current ideological statements and social musings. A survey of the street uncovers an interplay a competing ideas, the general articulated through the individual, and styles worn by women put them on display. I think the close association of fashion with femininity reveals something about the role women are expected to play in culture. Hippy or high street, we model the values of our communities in dress and decorum. Hysteria over hemlines makes sense if we understand that we’re not talking about legs, but challenges to the socio-religious order underpinning sexual modesty. For all its fussings with fabric, women’s fashion exhibits our desires, our repressions, our aspirations in naked detail.
further reading
A History of the Breast by Marilyn Yalom
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, as Freud said, but even he’d admit that a breast is never just a breast. Breasts mean maternity and sexuality, evoke a wholesome naturalness to wanton seduction, and symbolize the weakness of flesh-and-blood women but the fearlessness in statues of ideals (e.g. one exposed breast of Truth or Justice). Yalom goes through centuries of mis/representation of the breast in this thought-provoking academic work. Her discussion includes theory, but also a political history of topics like breast-feeding and lingerie. Yalom also wrote The History of the Wife, another fascinating title; unfortunately, it’s not nearly so good
A Cultural History of Fashion in the Twentieth Century: From the Catwalk and Sidewalk by Bonnie English
I have not read this book, but I want to badly. English chronicles what she calls “the democratization of fashion,” a process spanning from the early years of factory-made clothes, the rise and (arguably) fall of major design houses, and the inception of “street fashion.” If fashion is an art, it must function as all arts– as validation of dominant mores and as protest against them, as intellectual statement and aesthetic rambling. English applies the same critical thinking one would toward artistic or political movements to the history of fashion.
Plus, I have a cousin named Bonnie and I always loved this name.
