Quit Calling Armpit Hair a Trend
Why I’m sick of the fashion industry policing our bodies
and reclaiming our once-subversive behaviors
“As… subculture begins to strike its own eminently marketable pose, as its vocabulary (both visual and verbal) becomes more familiar, so the referential context to which it can be most conveniently assigned is made increasingly apparent. Eventually, the mods, the punks, the glitter rockers can be incorporated, brought back into line, located on the preferred ‘map of problematic social reality’ at the point where boys in lipstick are just ‘kids dressing up,” where girls in rubber dresses are ‘daughters just like yours.’”
—Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979)
In the midst of what any heteronormative cis male would consider a temper tantrum, I was recently advised by several feminist fashionistas that trends aren’t just determined by old white guys sitting around in sky rises like I imagined they were, picking out only the ugliest clothes for the plus size section and marking up the cost of full coverage bras. In fact, the fashionistas felt that trickle up trending was a huge factor in how trend casters predict the latest and greatest in fashion and beauty.
Maybe they were right, I thought. Maybe my anger over constantly shopping for pants that always end up too short was rooted in a general disinterest for the fashion industry as a whole — a place where “plus size models” look like regular ass people, people of color are hardly cast as participants unless their skin color fits the occasion, androgeny is usually a role played by cisgendered white girls, and ready-to-wear “gym clothes” can cost just as much as haute couture.
Shortly after I’d curbed my temper someone posted an article to my Facebook wall: “Dyeing your armpits is the next big thing in beauty.”
Is it? I asked myself, just to make sure. Although my armpit hair isn’t (currently) dyed, I’ve been rocking the “I don’t shave anything” look for several years now, completely uncaring of beauty trends — I’m a trans to neutral assigned female at birth who likes the fact that body hair makes me feel more gender neutral.
However, I did several years hairless as instructed by my cousin that “Boys like it.” But outside of my own body hair rediscovery, the last time I checked, body hair didn’t really have anything to do with beauty until advertisers realized they could create body ‘problems’ in order to sell products.
But — maybe I was still missing something. Maybe the fashion industry really has taken some strides to protect the women to whom it sells and the trends it promotes. Independent designers have been especially forthcoming in the process of expanding the reach of a gentrified, heteronormalized market (see ButchBaby, for example, a clothing line that makes maternity wear for butch women).
So what happens when those independent styles get jacked from the communities that fostered them and swept into the mainstream trend pool? Rihanna single-handedly destroyed the ghetto goth movement in one paparazzi-fueled outing. Miley made smoke culture cool after studding a person-sized bong in kandi from her fans (kandi which was, albeit, much more interesting on its own than in her hot glue sculpture). And who can forget Lana Del Rey’s most recent venture into middle-class-ism for her music video Tropico?
I’m not saying that just because a celebrity picks a style up that means us ‘sorry people’ have to abandon it. I’m just wondering if we should really be buying into the idea of trends at all, considering the overall lack of originality when it comes to discovering them and the ways those appropriated looks exploit the people who created them. How often do we really know the source of a look? How often will fashion industrialize and beautify trends that are so clearly borne from communities of minorities for the sake of style? How often will white girls gel down their baby hairs and call it “ghetto fabulous” before we stop watching the runway?
It’s a pretty sad plight when the LA Times casts a poll to their readers about how “successful” they think dyed armpit hair will be in the future of fashion. Trend casters of the world are really so vapid they’re finally giving us permission to have body hair again, as long as we buy a $9 box of facial bleach and a $10 box of dye to make our hair a little less “hair”-y.
I understand that the benefits of “alternative” trends can be seen throughout history. First released in the mid-1940s, the bikini taught everyone that showing a little more skin at the beach wasn’t such a bad thing (and that women could simultaneously be more naked without also growing horns and turning into succubi). Flappers are the original anarcho-feminists, fringe and all. But for a subsection of counter-culture, fashion is a luxury not everyone can afford, guaranteeing the abandonment of those who can’t keep up at the cash register after a trend is hijacked and commercialized.
And while not everyone can keep up with the cost of trends and fashion/being fashionable in general, no person nor gender is safe from being included in the allocation of trends — we all know the flower beard/dyed beard thing doesn’t fall far from the fashionable body hair tree.
So now, we’re told to accept people only if their evolutionarily-developed coping mechanism—body hair—comes perfectly groomed and in an abnormal color. But girls with body hair won’t change beauty standards if they're only accepted into the mainstream when people are given permission to accept them.
Bottom line, these alternative fashion trends that are continually “praised” into the new standard aren’t actually doing anything to combat the patriarchy. Trends simply enforce the idea that anything is ok (even body hair) as long as the men upstairs can add their own beautified spin and make a buck or two along the way.
Follow Culture Club on Medium, Facebook and Twitter.
Sign up for Culture Club’s Newsletter.
