topic: How clothing affects women

Deviant Dress Author(s): Elizabeth Wilson Source: Feminist Review, No. 35 (Summer, 1990), pp. 67-74 Published by: Palgrave Macmillan Journals Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1395401 Accessed: 23-10-2018 02:57 UTC

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DEVIANT DRESS

Elizabeth Wilson

In the late 1980s it has increasingly seemed that lesbians experience a freedom and a pleasure in dress that is denied, if not to heterosexual women in general, at least to heterosexual feminists. The dyke event of the year in London in the winter of 1986/7 was a glamour ball, 'Come Dancing' at which women once seen in boots, denim and leather appeared in frocks, high heels, lipstick and decolletage - items they would not have even thought of wearing in the seventies. Now, everything's changed. Tickets were like gold dust.

The feminist debates of the eighties have placed representation at the core of feminist concerns. These debates have included not only the role of pornography, advertising and other branches of the popular media in constructing women - or femininity - culturally, but have also made us aware of the extent to which we create individual identities by putting together our own self-representations. Clothes play a key part in our acts of self-presentation, whether we like it - or recognize it - or not.

In this article I want to do three things: relate the fashions of the lesbian subculture to mainstream fashion; discuss their convergence in the 1960s and since; and suggest ways in which specifically lesbian styles may challenge what are still 'taken-for-granted' assumptions for some feminists.

Feminists and fashion

It has long been a standard figure of speech to refer to the way in which individuals of both sexes take a 'pride in their appearance'. The word 'appearance', so taken for granted as a part of the vocabulary of grooming and fashion, actually acknowledges the performance element

Feminist Review No 35, Summer 1990

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68 Feminist Review

in dress. In our hairstyles, our choice of clothes and our use (or not) of cosmetics we create an 'appearance' for public and private consumption; an image whose relationship with some implied 'reality' beneath it is not so straightforward as it might seem. Many feminists do assume that there is a 'real self beneath the artifice of fashion and that the feminist's

duty is simply to allow this 'real self' to 'come out'. No such distinction between artifice and nature, however, can long

be maintained. For everyone, indeed, culture enjoins that we construct an 'appearance' of some kind, preferably consistent with our social role. It is really only the mad, or those naked, crumpled figures in photo- graphs of concentration camps, that have abandoned or been forced to abandon the attempt and with it, in a horrible way, their very humanity. Even a baby is tagged and assigned an outfit which grants its gendered entry to the human race immediately it is born. The Western stereotype of the 'naked savage' was always a myth; there has never been a culture without adornment, without some modification of the raw material of the body.

Clothing naturalizes gender in the sense that we feel that it is 'natural' for girls to wear pink, just as it is 'natural' for them to be less aggressive than boys. How, though, can the lesbian or gay male gender by naturalized, when it is a challenge to the very notion of a 'natural' sexuality neatly matched to biological sex?

Many women (and men) assume that what is meant by 'fashion' is haute couture, that is the original high-cost creations designed in Paris, Tokyo and Milan for at most a few thousand women world-wide. This then becomes a second reason for radicals to reject it. Yet although 'high fashion' is generated to a large extent through the work of haute couture designers, it is disseminated through every level of reproduction and expense, to appear at length in the high street and the down-market mail-order catalogues. All Western dress is fashionable in the sense that it is 'in fashion' - it operates in terms of style cycles, rapid change and innovation.

The dress of men as well as women in the West is determined by fashion, although the 'average man in the street' (if such a person exists) might never think of himself as a fashion peacock. Male dress is still more conservative than women's dress and styles change much more slowly; but they do change. Indeed, men are increasingly being included in fashion. The fashionable body of today for both sexes is also increasingly a masculine body: muscle vests for both sexes reveal actual muscles, put there by weight training. In this context, femininity is more obviously a 'masquerade' than ever: Madonna sleaze (denim skirts with lace frills, heavy, 'fifties' lipstick in deepest crimson) creates a different appearance from the Marilyn Monroe image of the 1950s.

The feminist belief that a right-on woman can somehow escape fashion altogether is therefore a myth, and it is also a myth that women are uniformly oppressed by a totalitarian dictatorship of fashion. As Kaja Silverman has expressed it:

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Deviant Dress 69

The male subject, like the female subject, has no visual status apart from dress and/or adornment ... Clothing and other kinds of ornamentation make the human body culturally visible ... clothing draws the body so that it can be culturally seen, and articulates it as a meaningful form ...

Even if my sympathies were not fully on the side of extravagant sartorial display, I would feel impelled to stress as strongly as possible that clothing is a necessary condition of subjectivity - that in articulating the body, it simultaneously articulates the psyche. (Silverman, 1986: pp. 145,147)

The representation of gender has been an especially important feature of Western dress since the eighteenth century (see Wilson, 1985). Gender differences are part of bodily representations in all cultures, and this was true in the West as well, but what was particularly marked in Western dress since the late eighteenth century was an intensification of masculinity in the styles that men wore. Under the influence of Beau Brummell and other dandies around 1800, men gave up powdered hair, cosmetics, high heels and brightly coloured silks and satins. Henceforth, sobriety of style was the hallmark of the elegant man. Soon, manliness itself came to be associated with sober dress, and by the end of the nineteenth century flamboyant clothing for men was coded as irredeemably effeminate, and associated with homosexuality. Oscar Wilde's interest in dress reform and aesthetic dress was, in the eyes of society at the time, not the least unsavoury aspect of his reputation as it deteriorated in the 1890s from the merely provocative to the absolutely sinister (see Ellman, 1988).

In the nineteenth century, too, any rejection by a woman of traditional feminine attire was apt to attract ridicule. The 'mannish woman' was a phobia of bourgeois Victorian society, and many were the Punch caricatures of this unlovely creature. By the early twentieth century male dress for women was clearly associated, at least in France, with lesbianism. Upper-class lesbians, such as 'Missy', woman lover of the writer Colette, wore 'drag' as a badge of sexual identity, despite the rigours of the law, which apparently forbade this. (Squier, 1984; Benstock 1987). (French women bicyclists, on the other hand, wore 'rational dress' - breeches - for cycling, more frequently than English women.) By the Radclyffe Hall period of the 1920s, masculine garb was a clear indication in a woman of a preference for her own sex. Yet mainstream fashion was also extremely boyish - the 'garqonne' look was one of the major fashions of the twenties.

Mainstream fashion certainly continuously changes its own defi- nitions of masculinity and femininity and plays with gender all the time. This must inevitably influence the way in which lesbians and male homosexuals can and will represent themselves and inscribe their deviant sexual identity on their bodies.

The first half of the twentieth century witnessed the development of sports and casual wear - largely for the leisured and the elite of Europe

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70 Feminist Review

and the United States in the 1930s, but in the 1950s for the young, at least, of all classes; it witnessed the Second World War, when women joined the armed forces, were able to enjoy wearing uniform, and in many cases lived in female communities. The evolution of fashion in the war years was not divorced from the social upheaval taking place.

Before the outbreak of war in 1939, Paris had turned away from the narrow, sloping-shouldered, sinuous styles of the thirties and was introducing wide, built-up shoulders and pinched-in waists in 1938. Although this prefigured Christian Dior's 'New Look', which was to burst upon the world in 1947, the big shoulders and tighter waists were equally compatible with the military look of the war years. In the United States the uniforms of the armed forces were designed specifically to appeal to women and to give a smart appearance; they provided a glamorously modified military look. In the United States and Britain, shortages and restrictions dictated that skirts were skimpy. (See Wilson, 1985; Wilson and Taylor, 1989; and Ewing, 1974) Wartime fashions, therefore, combined an echo of pre-war Paris with militarism and austerity to produce a style that was slightly masculine yet also, at its best, both sexy and elegant.

Lesbians and fashion

When we come to butch and femme modes of dress in the 1950s, we are therefore not confronting exactly the same phenomenon as Radclyffe Hall in the twenties and thirties. In the first place, the ideology of the 'third sex' seems to fade. Secondly, butch and femme appears to have been a working-class rather than an upper-middle-class way of life in the 1950s and early 1960s. Thirdly, mainstream fashion styles were more various and relaxed and, in order to look truly different, a lesbian had to go to greater lengths to distance herself from them. Before the war, for example, even the most masculine lesbians, such as Radclyffe Hall, wore trousers only on informal occasions - as did daring heterosexual society women; by the fifties 'slacks' were widely worn; in 1969 they were permitted in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.

In spite of the exaggerated femininity of the New Look and then of film stars such as Monroe, it was in the 1950s that youth and the youth market began to be taken seriously. The resulting casual look traded on a 'gamine' rather than an exaggeratedly feminine appearance. Ameri- can styles - jeans, westerns, rock'n'roll - were important; so was the Paris Left Bank, a look that was popularized in several Hollywood films which starred Audrey Hepburn. Her style in turn influenced Barbara Hulanicki, creator of the important Biba shops in the sixties:

Sabrina Fair [an Audrey Hepburn film] had made a huge impact on us all at college: everyone walked around in black sloppy sweaters, suede low-cut flatties and gold hoop earrings ... Audrey Hepburn and Givenchy [her Paris designer] were made for each other. His little black dress with

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Deviant Dress 71

shoestring straps in Sabrina Fair must have been imprinted on many teenagers' minds forever. (Hulanicki, 1983: 54, 61)

These fashions were not just about youth, they represented youth in rebellion against the conservatism of cultural life in the fifties - in France, the USA and Britain. Lesbian and gay subcultures could not but be influenced by this strange atmosphere of rebellion in the midst of cold war. In the repressed atmosphere of those times Princess Margaret broadcast to the nation, promising not to marry a divorce, and the official discourse concerning homosexuality was gradually moving it away from its connotations of criminality and betrayal towards concepts of neurosis and therapy. For me, a gay identity, although more than tinged with transgression - or for that very reason - offered hope. Edmund White has captured, in The Beautiful Room is Empty the way, at that time, all deviant identities were collapsed into one another, so that bohemianism, leftwing radicalism and homosexuality seemed naturally and inevitably connected. 'Things were simpler, clearer then.' Although the general view might still be that lesbians dressed like men, and/or went about in couples as a 'man' and a woman, bohemian dress offered another option:

I met Maria during my next-to-last year in prep school... I see her even now striding along in black pants and a man's white shirt ... her hair slicked back behind her ears ... a sailor's pea-coat and no make-up, although her eyebrows have been slightly plucked. She looks very scrubbed ... but also faintly glamorous: the glamour clings to her like the smell of Gitanes in wool. Is it the hard defiance in her eyes or just the slicked-back hair with its suggestion of the high-school bad girl that lends her this dangerous aura? (White, 1988: 1)

By the early sixties, when I started to frequent the Gateways lesbian club in Chelsea, the two modes, the bohemian and the traditional butch/femme, coexisted, but had a distinct class meaning. (Whether this was also the case in the United States or Europe I do not know). The more casual bohemian style was associated with the middle-class teachers, journalists and artists whom my lover and I got to know; strict butch/femme styles were working class. Or that is how it seemed. On the other hand, two of the then aspiring writers we knew maintained strictly butch roles in their relationships even if they dressed in the casual leather-jacket-and-jeans style that seemed the height of chic.

What was changing was mainstream fashion itself, and this alone made heavily butch styles look out of date as much as anything. By 1964, when the Beatles first hit the charts, even straight men were looking androgynous. Counter-cultural and deviant styles - from Teddy boys' drapes to CND duffel coats - were familiar in the fifties and sixties. 'Alternative' styles, whether intentionally or not, undermined the way in which early twentieth-century fashion in Britain expressed in a completely taken-for-granted 'unconscious' way class and gender be-

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72 Feminist Review

longing. Even the 'boyish' women's styles of the 1920s were not associated with ordinary working-class women, certainly not with older women.

After the Second World War, however, the expansion of bohemianism (and its marketing via films and other media) and the development of working-class youth styles signifying rebellion con- tributed to a different view of dress and adornment. Unlike the

movements to reform dress in the nineteenth century (see Newton, 1974), these new alternative styles had nothing to do with 'the natural' or with comfort; they expressed allegiances and social attitudes.

Bohemianism in the late fifties and androgyny in the sixties represented a rejection of the personal conservatism of the first decade after the war. For this reason, and because of its association with youth, androgyny was a highly sexualized mode of self-representation in the sixties. The androgyny of the early and mid sixties was a youthfully boyish look for both sexes. In Paris the designer Courreges developed the archetypal sixties fashions of trouser suits, miniskirts and flat boots. In London Mary Quant, who came from the bohemian 'Chelsea Set' of the fifties, built her style around the beatnik look of black stockings, 'off' colours and simple, rather childish shapes in clothing: the pinafore dress, for example. To me at the time, these up-market ready-to-wear clothes seemed wonderful: they expressed bohemianism and boyishness simultaneously. Biba, whose clothes were cheaper, but very trendy, likewise emphasized cropped hair (although very long straight hair was also the height of fashion), a flat, narrow body and a 'natural' look in make-up (although it doesn't look very natural today!). With the emergence of these styles, the lesbian could slip into the mainstream.

In the late fifties I was wearing the tight black velvet or Black Watch tartan 'drainpipe' trousers, the flat ballerina shoes and big sweaters of the art schools as an alternative form of dress. By 1966 these styles had modified into high fashion. In 1969 I even started to wear trousers to work (as a social worker). At the time this was certainly frowned on, yet two years later social workers were roaming the inner city in torn jeans, gym shoes and bra-less T-shirts.

By this time androgyny had shifted towards styles that were effeminate rather than boyish - the long hair and droopy clothes for both sexes popularized by the hippies. Whether boyish or effeminate, I could no longer easily appear as an 'obvious' lesbian. Indeed, with my long curls, I was sometimes mistaken for a gay boy.

This reworking of gender in 'unisex' style had at the time an erotic charge which is now hard to recapture. Partly this was because it was associated with general social rebellion and sexual radicalism. Partly it was because it messed up gender so much more threateningly than the scrubbed little boy look of the early Beatles and Quant. Also, androgyny was not then, as it became for the feminism of the 1970s, a denial of difference and desire.

The androgyny of the 1960s has usually been discussed in terms of

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Deviant Dress 73

feminization of men. When I look back, though, what I remember is the floridly macho look of long hair with flared trousers, boots, widebrim- med hats. These made both men and dykes look powerful, not wimpy.

Despite the influence of Christian Lacroix minicrinolines and Dallasty glamour looks, the masculinization of all fashion has continued into the 1980s. Fashion has promoted a hard, tough image for women as much as or even more than men. Girl models are muscled, grease their hair, and even on occasion wear clothes that appear to have stepped straight out of Chain Reaction - while some of the outfits seen at Chain Reaction look like the latest fashion. Miniskirts worn with thick black

tights and a leather jacket suggest freedom and even aggression rather than passive display. Punk, which gave shaved necks and spiked hair, hard make-up and urban aggro to fashion, the Japanese designers whose influence extended to heavy, muffled styles and black every- where, and the Italians who popularized masculine tailoring - together they created an eighties fashion image that was really quite lesbian, even SM. On one occasion the Tatler used a model dressed in studded

leather and a peaked cap to show off a diamond dog-collar. In the 'post-modern' 1980s counter-cultural fashions lost a good deal

of their power to shock, being rapidly assimilated into media and then high-street culture. To some extent his has always been the fate of alternative dress; but never so quickly as today. On the other hand the pastiche and parody of the post-modern sensibility has acted to deprive fashion of its 'naturalization of the arbitrary'. Today fashion styles are not taken so seriously as they once were. In 1948 the fashionable woman, of twenty or fifty, had to have a New Look outfit, almost regardless of class or income. Today the imperative of the single style in fashion has waned.

It is not necessarily easier to 'look fashionable', for now we have to decide which fashionable we want to look. Which butch, which femme, which dyke - it's so hard to look deviant these days.

Note

Elizabeth Wilson is the author of a number of books: Adorned in Dreams, Virago, 1985, Hallucinations, Radius, 1988, and, with Lou Taylor Through the Looking Glass, BBC Books, 1989. She has just finished writing a book about women in cities due to be published by Virago at the end of 1990.

References

BENSTOCK, Shari (1987) Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900-1940, London: Virago.

ELLMAN, Richard (1988) Oscar Wilde, Harmondsworth: Penguin. EWING, Elizabeth (1974) Women in Uniform, London: Batsford. HULANICKI, Barbara (1983) From A to Biba, London: Hutchinson.

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74 Feminist Review

MODLESKI, Tania (1986) editor, Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.

NEWTON, Stella Mary (1974) Health and Art and Reason: Dress Reformers of the Nineteenth Century, London: John Murray.

SILVERMANN, Kaja (1986) 'Fragments of a fashionable discourse', in MODLESKI (1986).

SQUIER, Susan Merrill, (1984) editor, Women Writers and the City: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

WHITE, Edmund (1988) The Beautiful Room is Empty, London: Picador. WILSON, Elizabeth (1985) Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, London:

Virago. WILSON, Elizabeth and TAYLOR, Lou (1989) Through the Looking Glass, London:

BBC Books.

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