“In fashion terms, the backlash argument became: Women’s liberation has denied women the ‘right’ to feminine dressing; the professional work outfits of the ’70s shackled the female spirit. ‘A lot of women took the tailored look too far and it became unattractive,’ designer Bob Mackie says. ‘Probably, psychologically, it hurt femininity. You see a lot of it in New York, trotting down Wall Street.’” — Susan Faludi, Backlash, “Chapter 7—Dressing the Dolls: The Fashion Backlash.”
Marisa Meltzer (freelance writer based in New York): I read Backlash right around when it first came out, as a high school sophomore eager to be part of the feminist conversation. But I also thoroughly enjoyed my mother’s copies of Vogue, Bazaar, and Allure that came every month. All of which is a way to say that my feminism and my fashion sense have always been key parts of my personality. But rereading this chapter on fashion, I had forgotten how much it wasn’t exactly coming from a place of love. Susan Faludi really hates the designer Christian Lacroix! And the fashion industry in general. And she sort of just hates clothes, too—at one point she rails against lingerie.
It all feels so dated! And not just because she quotes a magazine called Working Women (would have loved to read that! RIP!) and longs for the halcyon days of “dress for success” sections of department stores. The whole idea of what constituted power dressing was rapidly changing right around the time the book came out. Grunge happened, the long underwear shirt made of multi-ply cashmere happened, Prada and the luxe nylon handbag happened. Obviously there will always be codes for power dressing, some subtle and some not, but the idea of empowerment coming because designers wanted to dress women in coordinated pantsuits isn’t even part of the fashion (or feminist) conversation anymore.
Assuming Faludi could get over her overall joylessness when covering fashion, I would love to hear her take on everything that has happened since: the cult of individuality and street style, Man Repeller, festival fashion, US Weekly’s “Who Wore It Better” column, $42,000 alligator backpacks from The Row and $580 Fendi bag charms meant to look like monsters, Victoria’s Secret’s Pink line, Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton on the covers of Vogue, the Goop newsletter, and fast fashion.
Michelle, do you even own a suit? Should we talk about what we’re wearing right now? Do you think Susan Faludi shops at H&M?
Michelle Dean (senior writer at Gawker): I used to be a corporate lawyer, so I do own a suit or three! And now you’ve made me feel a little joyless for it, Marisa. Which is half a joke. But also it means I’m apprehensive. I can see the datedness you complain of, I’m just not sure that it makes the kind of analysis Faludi makes of fashion here — an economic one which treats fashion as a business — the wrong one.
The whole time I was reading the chapter I kept thinking that I never see clothing talked about in this way anymore; instead we treat fashion as a pure matter of aesthetics, divorced from commerce. And that approach has had its unfortunate reductions, too. It should not be out of bounds to talk about why certain styles are being pushed on us and what the underlying economics are for fashion businesses, but somehow it feels that way.
On a spectrum of fashionista to a skeptic like Faludi, I fall closer to the latter, I guess.
Sasha Weiss (literary editor of Newyorker.com): I’m somewhat with you, Michelle: One of my favorite scenes in this chapter is when Faludi attends 1988 Market Week in L.A., and observes female fashion directors of big retail outlets attempt to sell frilly, ribboned, girlish clothes to exasperated buyers. They themselves are, of course, wearing suits. One man, Bob Mallard, who started off his career as a “garment manufacturer in the East Bronx” (read: street smart, with origins in the working class), looks on grimly and declares that “Women still want suits.”
I love the way that, throughout the book, Faludi so convincingly enumerates the economic roots of the backlash. When you read her account of periods in American life when women entered the work force in large numbers, and the crisis of masculinity that this created each time, you feel that her reading is spot on, inevitable, that she’s seeing things with amazing lucidity. You feel you have been given a pair of backlash goggles and can see the levers and pulleys, guided by fear and emotion, that manipulate the sometimes-abstract-feeling movements of the economy.
The problem for me in this chapter is that her reading of the fashion backlash, unlike the rest of the book, feels so narrow and selective. When I think of late-’80s fashion, I think of the profanity and eclecticism and wild omnisexuality of Jean Paul Gaultier, who put men in skirts and tulle hats, and women in ropey undergarments paired with giant, misshappen suit jackets. I think of the entrance onto the world’s fashion scene of the brilliant Japanese misfit Rei Kawakubo—her label is Comme des Garçons, which means “like boys”—who put moth holes in lace, and humps of fabric in cotton dresses (after her very first collection, the fashion press said that watching her show was like attending a funeral after a nuclear attack). I think of Madonna (who Faludi does mention briefly, and approvingly, in this chapter), with her muscular body, her leather-clad glamour, the sense that she’s utterly in control of her sexuality. The corsets that Faludi deplores as symbols of bondage on Madonna are projections of a dominant, funny, outrageous power.
Faludi writes about fashion as if women were totally subservient to its dictates (and as if its dictates were unified), but, of course, most women—precisely because they are judged so much by their appearance—know how to manipulate, subvert, and use clothes. To some extent, they’re tools, like hammers. I want to quote one of my favorite contemporary fashion writers, Judith Thurman, who I think beautifully gets at the complexity of how useful clothes are in mediating between outside expectation and inner life (here she’s writing about the photographs of Richard Avedon, but what she says is more widely applicable to fashion and its relationship to self): the art of dress represents “The tension between exposure and concealment, resistance and submission, manipulation and authenticity, the social and the primal selves.” Fashion is not a vehicle for a starkly programmatic message; it’s a realm of play and layering and paradox, for a working out of social problems rather than a mirror of them.
What bothers me, fundamentally, about Faludi’s reading is how unpsychological it seems. But it also raises an important question for me. Throughout the book, Faludi is extremely dismissive of certain ideas that came to be part of the third wave, of the idea, for instance, that clothing that evokes bondage could make women who have achieved a certain amount of power feel sexy. She dismisses this as a marketing ploy that manipulates women. “Victorian culture peddled ‘femininity’ as what ‘a true woman’ wants.” She writes, “In the marketing strategy of contemporary culture, it’s what a ‘liberated’ woman craves, too. Just as Reagan appropriated populism to sell a political program that favored the rich, politicians, and the mass media, and advertising adopted feminist rhetoric to market policies that hurt women or to peddle the same old sexist products or to conceal antifeminist views.” It’s pretty damning, and convincing (and familiar). But it pushes against our more inclusive feminism, which tells me that if I feel like wearing high heels and a skirt, and I acknowledge the pleasure I take in being looked at, that is in no way in conflict with my feminism.
I don’t know why, but I felt unsettled by Faludi’s argument—maybe because she is so formidable! It did make me question my rigor-levels in my thinking about the pleasures that fashion and dress, looking and being looked at, give me. How do you both feel about this question?
And another question: What ever happened to suits? Looking at some images of subtly colored, beautifully cut Donna Karan suits from the ’80s sort of made me miss them.
on May 4, 1985 for
the presentation of what
would later become
her Power Suit.
(Mario Suriani / AP)
MM: The ’90s were a great time for suits. I’m thinking of Jodie Foster in pale Armani at the 1992 Oscars, or the subtle deconstruction of Véronique Branquinho, Margiela, and the Belgians, or the sleek lines of Helmut Lang. The suit evolved to become less about just trying to outfit a woman in men’s definition of office attire, and, in turn, less about the male narrative and traditional connotations of power.
Faludi’s fashion backlash hinges on the idea that women are being dictated to from above, this vision of Diana Vreeland declaring that dresses are the new pants and we’re all expected to follow suit. Fashion and its influencers have become so much more diffuse since the book came out. It’s no longer about Vreeland (or Anna Wintour or Jenna Lyons) telling us what to wear when we can discover it ourselves. At best, we can go on Tumblr and see streetstyle pics from Mexico City or shop exclusively at an Etsy store that caters to our finely honed steampunk aesthetic. And at its worst, it’s the fact that everyone is telling us what to wear these days, from starlets in tabloids to Italian fashion bloggers.
Maybe what I’m really talking about is the triumph of style over fashion. Wayne Koestenbaum, a writer I love, said that “if fashion is the network of choices available at any historical moment, then style is an individual’s system of navigating fashion’s turbulence. Style is the boat that cuts through the waters of fashion. Even if it sinks.”
So am I being unrigorous, as you fear, Sasha, or am I guilty of being too easy on the fashion world? I’m not sure. I will say that fashion is versatile—you can parse it in so many ways. Faludi is looking at it through the lens of gender and economics; Koestenbaum has looked at it through art; Valerie Steele, another wonderful fashion thinker, has said she looks at it through sexuality. I probably think about it most often in terms of status and class.
And pleasure! Finding the perfect gray sweatshirt or wearing a fuchsia silk cocktail dress are both things that have made me quite happy in the last year and didn’t cause much internal conflict, aside from a few ever-present thoughts about sizing and body politics and how I spend way too much money on clothes. I’m so steeped in third-wave feminist politics, which are laissez-faire on the topic of personal choice. Choose to wear a sexy black dress and take pleasure in it. Or pair it with Converse instead of heels. Or wear something else entirely. Please yourself.
MD: On this question of rigor I would agree with Marisa, that you can parse fashion in many ways, there’s no need to find the One True Path. This conversation is more or less an example of that for me. Both of you are more knowledgeable about the high end of it than I am; you’re both reciting names and styles I have no context for, personally. I somehow never ended up reading fashion magazines the right way. Although I’ve some idea of the difference between Gaultier and, I don’t know, Chanel, it doesn’t push beyond a few associations with fabrics and angles.
My lack of knowledge leaves me feeling lead-footed when we are discussing self-expression. Which I bring up because I feel like there’s a whole swath of experience with fashion that these knowledgeable, high-end discussions also tend to cut out. For some women choice of clothing is an unconstrained, even liberating experience, but it isn’t that way for everyone. So Sasha’s right, I think, in that Faludi’s perspective in the book is limited to a certain kind of backlash. But I guess I don’t think that the problem with that limit is that said kind of backlash doesn’t exist.
For example, I’m still mildly confused by the way both of you are talking about suits, as though they are “over” in some essential way, when most of the women I knew prior to this career path wore them all the time. While professional cultures have changed in many parts of America to become more casual, that isn’t true everywhere. I could not have walked into court with a sole eye to style and self-expression. My choices were not between grey sweatshirts and fuschia dresses. And maybe that’s awful, maybe that’s not how things should be. (I’ve often joked that one reason I left the law was that I could no longer handle how it demanded that I dress.)
But for me the process of choosing what I wore each day involved some frustration with what was put before me by mid-level retailers. I mean, your Banana Republics, your business end of J.Crew. They did sometimes have a habit of putting out slightly unwearable things, like skirts that were unbearably short, in the name of “fashion” and letting me feel “feminine” when I had never before thought of “feminine” and “professional” as opposed in the way they always seem to be in this debate. I am aware I probably looked dumpy the whole time (maybe I still do!). But I am made so uneasy by the way focusing on the self-expressive, laissez-faire approach to choice ignores the way fashion does sort and select us.
And you know, I do not think my experience is unusual. In fact, thinking about it, I am reminded of a passage in the Tressie McMillan Cottom piece “The Logic of Stupid Poor People.” In it, she writes of a very mediated approach to fashion and self-presentation:
I cannot know exactly how often my presentation of acceptable has helped me but I have enough feedback to know it is not inconsequential. One manager at the apartment complex where I worked while in college told me, repeatedly, that she knew I was “Okay” because my little Nissan was clean. That I had worn a Jones of New York suit to the interview really sealed the deal. She could call the suit by name because she asked me about the label in the interview. Another hiring manager at my first professional job looked me up and down in the waiting room, cataloging my outfit, and later told me that she had decided I was too classy to be on the call center floor. I was hired as a trainer instead. The difference meant no shift work, greater prestige, better pay and a baseline salary for all my future employment.
I’m sure that if we asked her (she’s in this book club elsewhere I think!), Cottom might tell us she also liked these outfits she wore. But they were worn as part of this “presentation of acceptable,” and that does tell us that something less than total freedom of choice is going on, I think.
SW: That Tressie McMillan Cottom piece is brilliant and articulates clearly the mutability of clothes. That essay starts with an anecdote about her mother putting on a camel-colored cape, knee-high boots, and pearl earrings to escort a neighbor of theirs to a social services agency, so that her mother could advocate on her behalf. She succeeded. “It took half a day,” Cottom writes, “but something about my mother’s performance of respectable black person—her Queen’s English, her Mahogany outfit, her straight bob and pearl earrings—got done what the elderly lady next door had not been able to get done in over a year…It was unfair, but, as Vivian also always said, ‘life isn’t fair little girl.’”
In this story, a woman who doesn’t have a lot of money obeys the dictates of a society that admires the accoutrements of luxury. Luxury signals knowingness and access to power; the signal, like a secret handshake, eases her way into the corridors of power. This is the crux of Cottom’s essay, a performance of wealth can actually put a person on the path to economic stability: If you wear the right brand of suit to the job interview, it may increase your likelihood of getting the job. This is the perversity and also the magic of fashion: It’s a disguise, and using it, you can smuggle yourself into sealed worlds. Often, this requires conformity to norms that are classist and misogynistic; on the other hand, it can be used to defy norms or bodily stricture. Clothing can allow you to live between genders; it can make you look braver than you are; it can allow you to blend into an environment, so you can become a spy. An essay I was reading recently by Haley Mlotek in the New Inquiry’s fashion issue put it well: “Clothing speaks of more than just availability or comfort—every item speaks of a choice, however small, to align yourself with a certain identity, culture, community. There is no opting out of getting dressed.”
I think most women—from all class backgrounds—know intuitively that clothing is a language that you have to learn to speak if you need to enter unfamiliar territory. I don’t want to duck the important point you’re making, Michelle, that talking about pleasure and choice when it comes to clothing ignores the fact that for most women, the moment of deciding what to wear out into the world is not a moment of complete, fulfilling self-expression. But I guess Faludi’s idea that what women really want is practical cotton underwear to wear underneath their sturdy wool pantsuit, and that the hyper-feminine fashions being foisted on them by Lacroix and others confuse and depress them, makes clothing seem more frivolous than it is.
It’s a problem that others in the Backlash Book Club have been pointing out: Faludi sometimes writes about women as if they are baffled and victimized by the stentorian voices of the press, and, in this chapter, the fashion establishment. I think she underestimated how savvy many people are about the costumes they must deploy in their ongoing performances of self.
Lots of ways to read along and join in: Post your own Backlash response on Medium, tweet at @readmatter with #BacklashBookClub, or comment on MSNBC.com. We’ll be featuring some of your posts and tweets as we go.
Read more of the Backlash Book Club, featuring Sasha Weiss, Marisa Meltzer, Michelle Dean, and others.
Illustrations by Hannah K. Lee
