Over at Footpath Zeitgeist, where Mel cooly dissects the ‘meaning’ of certain hipster fashion trends, she has a post about whether certain fashion items can or should be called silly or labelled ‘bad taste’. By dismissing some fashion as inherently stupid, Mel says:
We’re not only creating arbitrary categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste; we’re also creating a bogeyman of ‘bad taste’ — saying that it doesn’t follow the same embodied, pragmatic and affective processes that ‘good taste’ does. That it can only be observed with farcical incredulity and that people with ‘bad taste’ are fundamentally retarded in some way because they aren’t ashamed of the way they look.
Indeed. But, yesterday I went shopping in Claremont and I saw:
1. A young woman wearing a short, tight, blue jumpsuit. Imagine a boilersuit, only a very short-shorted version, and painted on. Then with an orange cardy atop.
2. Another young woman wearing a strapless white terry towelling dress. The top was elastic, and the bottom was in the style of those little scoop-sided athletic shorts that were popular in the 70s and seem to have made a bit of a resurgence. It only just covered her bottom, and I don’t know how she would have sat down in it.
A quick surf around the Net reveals these outfits could both be called ‘playsuits‘. I leave any analysis of the implications of grown women dressing in playsuits to you.
My local shops are in Claremont (WA’s Serial Killingerest Suburb!) which for my readers outside of WA, is a very wealthy, white and fairly conservative area. The shops aren’t just Coles and a good fruit ‘n’ veg store, there’s Alannah Hill, Morrison, OneTeaspoon and various other high-endish (but not too high end, that’s Subiaco’s shopping strip) labels and shops.
It’s no really a ‘hipster’ hangout — more like a rich little white girl with Daddy’s credit card area. And even as I type that, I realise that the look most often embodied in Claremont is redolent of Marisa from the OC. Lots of short skirts and expensive tops put together in a vaguely surferish way, accessorised with dead straight hair and or very long tanned legs. The hipsters tend to hang out in the City or in Leederville/Mt Lawley.
Anyway, even as I tried not to stare with incredulity at these two young women I just couldn’t help but think ‘why’? Why a short tight blue jumpsuit? Why a terry towelling athletic-style dress with red piping? And the answer is: I don’t know.
Dogpossum wrote something a while ago (that I can’t find at her site) about the idea that women ‘owe’ it to us (society?) to look good. As I saw both girls I thought "Those girls are so attractive, why are they wearing such rubbish clothes?" Do they owe it to me to wear clothes I approve of? Of course not. Yet there’s such a heavy emphasis on what young women wear: from the fashion industry to advertising and TV to discussions we have with our friends to blogs about fashion and so on. It seems impossible not to evaluate what other women are wearing, particularly if they’re also young and pretty. (See: patriarchy.)
On the one hand you could say it’s all rather trivial stuff. And on the other, the amount of time and energy humans, esp. women, devote to ‘what they wear’ is an indication of the deep importance of how we represent ourselves to others. Plus that whole patriarchy thing again, which dictates women’s need to be ‘decorative’ in a way that doesn’t apply to men.
Which leads me in a roundabout way to discussions in the blogosphere about what women wear and why: from the burqa to high-heels, any discussion of women’s clothing — of what women look like — is bound up in discourses about sexuality and what women’s ‘place’ is in society, looking and being looked at, and so forth. This is what theorists mean when they say ‘over-determined’.
And of course it’s frustrating as a feminist to spend so much time discussing whether push-up bras and high heels, or burqas and ‘modesty-wear’ are in any way feminist, or not, because all clothing has multiple meanings and frankly, most of us have numerous reasons for choosing the clothes we wear. And it tends to devolve into calling out other women for not dressing the way ‘we’ think is appropriate. Yes ‘we’ can agree that ultra-high heels are painful and reduce mobility and therefore aren’t good, and that burqas are restricting and anonymising and erase women’s looks, and so are also not good: but beyond simple things the world of clothing and fashion and gender is complicated. And it is worth discussing: but not in a way that damns people who don’t dress in Approved Feminist Uniform. Or, conversely, who don’t conform to mainstream fashions.
All that said, I still love Go Fug Yourself, and I reserve the right to mock people who I think dress weird, I’m just not going to pretend there’s anything feminist or intellectual about it.
(Of course I have neglected to mention what I was wearing when I went down to the shops: beigey linen shorts that come below the knee and a Indian-style tunic top with a pair of havianas, accessorised with a coles green shopping bag. I was looking particularly scruffy — even for me, and anyone who knows me in the flesh can tell you I’m a bit of a scruff. It’s hard to raise much enthusiasm for dressing up when you work from home, it’s hot, and the only people who see you are a dog and the lady at the corner shop.)
Cross-posted at Moment to Moment.
“…going down to Freo to take some photos as requested by Christine Keeler at LP…”
*squeals of delight*
Oh, and Kate you be careful hanging around Claremont. Some people don’t come back.
Playsuits, eh? I clicked on that link and was immediately zapped back to 1991.
Playsuits, eh?
At risk of heaping scorn upon myself for not following the party line, that playsuit thing Beth Orton is wearing in last weeks condemn post is HIDEOUS.
Great body, crap outfit.
Sorry ppls.
What is it with teh condom leggings? Have I missed something?
Mark my words, it will end in pigtails and rollerskates.
What gobsmacked me about that photo of B. Orton was that individually and, as it were, not on B. Orton, I thought the playsuit so-so, the hat silly, and the stocking thingies bizarre. But once she’d put them together and put them on, for some freakish alchemical reason she looked (I thought) (and still do think) fabulous. Maybe it’s just because she is tall, slender, pretty and hawt, and would look good in a wheat bag.
I don’t really mind (well I do a bit) people who look like they just picked up whatever was on the floor and threw it on without looking in the mirror, or those that looked as if they grabbed the various items originally on a benzo fueled run-thru grab raid in target.
It’s the ones that clearly have spent large dollars and some time putting the look together that I bemuse about.
I am doing serious longitudinal research and I am yet to find anyone who looks ok in pants that end below the calf but above the ankle.
What PC said. Beth Orton looks awesome in that photo, it could well be because she’d look awesome in anything but I think her outfit works.
Not to be disagreeable, but I’ve never really got into the whole politics of fashion thing. I figure people will wear what they want to and I don’t really think it’s my place to whack an interpretation on that. I know my fashion tastes vary markedly.
I have to say though, I’m in Vienna at the moment and there’s some great Winter fashion going down. In Innsbruck it’s all snowboard jackets and jeans, here in the big smoke the guys and gals are looking very snazzy with their winter coats, scarves, and boots. I wish I had the time to go have a look around the fashion district.
Why not? Fashion is all about sending messages. If you don’t respond you’re missing out on the fun of it.
Ah Bismarck, are you my soulmate? Someone finally gets it!
Ah Megami (my goddess?), but are you looking for soulmates or supplicants?
I think people who wear weird clothes know that their dressing is weird, and they go all out to impress, or rather enjoy the fact that people are looking at them. It’s the “I am me” syndrome. I guess you can call them counter hegemony
I am one of those poor souls who regularly wears pants that end between the calf and the ankle, FXH, because when it comes to buying shorts to wear in summer, I find one is presented with two options: SHORT and calfish-length. And really, SHORT is fine for long-legged young thangs, but I’ve never been long-legged and even though I’m not very old I think the cut-off for young thangs is probably 23, which is okay by me.
Frankly, I think being well-dressed in the Australian summer is spectacularly difficult. I love the resurgence of dresses and frocks at the moment, but I also am disgustingly pale and I like to wear clothing that covers as much as my burnable, melanoma-prone Northern European skin as possible. Without boiling to death. It’s hard to find clothes that look nice and give one adequate sun-protection. Oh, and that don’t cost the earth.
kate - the only place acceptable for shorts is on the beach in heatwave weather or behind locked doors at home. When no family members can see them.
The only other exemption is for children under 12.
Kate, re skin, two words: Nicole Kidman. Patchy actor she may be, but the skin is undeniably gorgeous. If you have beautiful fair-girl skin, I think you should be out and proud about it.
I have a friend who is regularly scornful of people like me who spend time worring about clothes and wear suits and ties and such.
It doesn’t take much observation to see that his carefully constructed australian-urban-bushman-salt-of-the-earth-anti-suit, “I don’t even own a tie”, dressing upwould take substantially more conscious clothes purchasing, looking in mirror and adjusting to get that “look at me - i’m not concerned about clothes look”
There’s the significant matter of skin cancer, Dr Cat. I’ve got fair-ish skin, but not as fair as Kate’s.
If you’ve living in Brisbane or Perth, you probably should wear long pants and long sleeved cotton shirts and a hat all through summer, as someone I used to know who migrated here from Cambridge did.
I’m cool with being pale — I don’t use fake tan, and I am very careful with my skin (hats, sunscreen, long sleeves etc). Being pale does tend to make life a tad more difficult, but I’d argue that even people with darker skin need to be careful about melanoma in Australia.
Indeed; I didn’t mean that Kate should flaunt it literally, just that she should be more braggy about it. I too am genetically prone to skin cancer, and am personally v. grateful to N Kidman for her fine-porcelain good example of tanlessness.
Sadly I’m not quite as porcelain-skinned as La Kidman or La Blanchett (I’m as white as they are but not as, you know, shiny and smooth looking), but I think there’s nothing wrong with reclaiming the pale.*
I’m quite over fake-tan fascism and the insistence that not-tan equals sickly or ill.
*Not in a bad racist anti-dark skin way, more in the ‘love the skin you’ve got way’.
Ah Bismarck, you are even a cunning linguist! Well done.
Supplicants are most welcome (I actually have a soulmate, who also gets the fashion thing. Seeing as he is also the father of my child I guess he gets first dibs….)
Back to the thread - I am another ‘pale skin’ here (I like to think alabaster, but most people probably just think pasty). Living in Darwin (for only 4 more weeks thankfully) makes the fashion choices hard - you want to cover up to avoid burning, but it is so hot and humid covering up seems insane. So I am with Kate - how to cover up, keep cool, and not spend so much the family lives on instant noodles for the whole week. Answers on the back on an envelope please.
When I’m in the tropics, I find the solution is:
2 parts top-notch duty-free gin
1 part tonic
Pour over glass FULL of crushed “ice”, made with 50% lemon or lime juice, 50% water.
If you drink these at the recommended rate (calculated on body weight, atmospheric temp/humidity, tendency to freeze brain) you’ll find yourself halfway between being actually cool and inclined not to care.
fdb - I’d argue a tad more tonic is called for otherwise spot on. The quinine is need to stop tropical rot or something.
Ps, FXH, I am wearing calf-length green shorts today.
“a tad more tonic”
Humbug! That’s why the quality gin!
Okay, 50/50 if you must, but bear in mind you need to allow for rapid tropical melting.
Where’s that Satanic Lush when you need backup?
Fifty years after my racing-round-Darwin-almost-in-the-nuddy for three whiole years episode, I have had bits of my face snipped off by cunning doctors who managed to make it look pretty normal afterwards.
Just saying.
Do you think long white sox would look hawt on alabaster skinned women?
Alabaster skin, by the way, is drop dead gorgeous in dark and smokey bars.
I love symbolsim and metaphor in expression so i’ve taken the liberty of snipping a little piece from the manifesto of sorts, from our dear friends in Arterial Bloc who present us with this interesting little speil about those funky bee keeper suits.
Now if i was a fashion designer i think i would be temped to appropriate the suits as high fashion, just render the analysis defunct, but i guess the only reflects my compulsion to be contrary and provocative. (NOte how the sentence in bold is deliciously ironic with today being White Ribbon Day n’all ) :