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Fashion and the Emotional Lives of Women
Feb. 22nd, 2006 04:14 pmI think one of the reasons I love fashion is the blend of idea and identity. I have long been a fan of the NYTimes fashion critic Cathy Horyn. She got her start in Detriot. She didn't know a thing about fashion, but agreed to become the fashion editor because it guaranteed two trips annually to New York.
Her review of Milan's fashion week is the kind of thought piece I really appreciate when approaching fashion. Not a consideration of what's hot and not, but more a sense of what does this ephemera say about our lives:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/22/fashion/shows/22FASH.html
Here's the opening paragraph:
Tom Ford, in his salad days at Gucci, once said his female ideal was someone who looked like she "would pour hot wax over her lover before straddling him." It was a memorable line, and its forced note of aggression — the woman on top — tingled with a suspicion that he, like many designers, was interested only in selling an image; he didn't actually know anything about women.
The cold contemporary truth is that women don't need the respect or love of men. They lead lives of exceptional dignity and exceptional aloneness....
Later she asks:
Why aren't more designers sensitive to emotional lives of women? And how come female designers are often guilty of perpetuating the same clichés? I looked at Consuelo Castiglioni's collection for Marni, with its bedroom-lace skirts, woolly gray tights and blousy jersey tops, and I thought, perhaps cruelly: These are clothes for hobbyists. They brought to mind Joan Didion's famous censure about feminists deciding, in lieu of a revolution, to become "gifted potters." Why can't female designers create fashion commensurate with the largeness and complexity of their lives?
Her review hit a nerve in me, the angry-poignant one, as did the Jil Sander collection, which I think is very well summed up by the phrase "quiet dignity." It is also, from the distance of thumbnails on the computer monitor, a little dull. Yes, these are clothes "real women" would wear, but what does that say about our lives, that we are so bounded by line and the absence of color?
It is in some ways a relief to the frivolity of past collections. The weird New Look nostalgia trip that has clogged runways for the past few seasons. Fashion need not be frivolous to be feminine, the Sander collection seems to say, but at the same time I can't help but ask why it suddenly lacks passion, vigour, and color. (And why so many lives lack the same.)
I am familiar with that Didion essay on feminism, appearing in her collection The White Album. It makes a lot of the same criticisms I arrived at 30 years later. Didion and I are seperated by the boomer generation. I don't think either of us understand what all the fuss is about.
For me there is a sense that women are only just beginning to understand how different their lives will be from those of their mothers or grandmothers. What sacrifices will have to be made (our generation knows we can't have it all, even as we saw our mothers destroy themselves to try to achieve it) along with a sense of disengagement...
I can't write about this coherently today; except to say I wish someone could write as critically and urgently about feminism today as Didion did in her essay 30 years ago. Something has happened. Something has been lost, despite the gains. There is something sad about women's lives, and we are still a long way from having achieved equality.
Her review of Milan's fashion week is the kind of thought piece I really appreciate when approaching fashion. Not a consideration of what's hot and not, but more a sense of what does this ephemera say about our lives:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/22/fashion/shows/22FASH.html
Here's the opening paragraph:
Tom Ford, in his salad days at Gucci, once said his female ideal was someone who looked like she "would pour hot wax over her lover before straddling him." It was a memorable line, and its forced note of aggression — the woman on top — tingled with a suspicion that he, like many designers, was interested only in selling an image; he didn't actually know anything about women.
The cold contemporary truth is that women don't need the respect or love of men. They lead lives of exceptional dignity and exceptional aloneness....
Later she asks:
Why aren't more designers sensitive to emotional lives of women? And how come female designers are often guilty of perpetuating the same clichés? I looked at Consuelo Castiglioni's collection for Marni, with its bedroom-lace skirts, woolly gray tights and blousy jersey tops, and I thought, perhaps cruelly: These are clothes for hobbyists. They brought to mind Joan Didion's famous censure about feminists deciding, in lieu of a revolution, to become "gifted potters." Why can't female designers create fashion commensurate with the largeness and complexity of their lives?
Her review hit a nerve in me, the angry-poignant one, as did the Jil Sander collection, which I think is very well summed up by the phrase "quiet dignity." It is also, from the distance of thumbnails on the computer monitor, a little dull. Yes, these are clothes "real women" would wear, but what does that say about our lives, that we are so bounded by line and the absence of color?
It is in some ways a relief to the frivolity of past collections. The weird New Look nostalgia trip that has clogged runways for the past few seasons. Fashion need not be frivolous to be feminine, the Sander collection seems to say, but at the same time I can't help but ask why it suddenly lacks passion, vigour, and color. (And why so many lives lack the same.)
I am familiar with that Didion essay on feminism, appearing in her collection The White Album. It makes a lot of the same criticisms I arrived at 30 years later. Didion and I are seperated by the boomer generation. I don't think either of us understand what all the fuss is about.
For me there is a sense that women are only just beginning to understand how different their lives will be from those of their mothers or grandmothers. What sacrifices will have to be made (our generation knows we can't have it all, even as we saw our mothers destroy themselves to try to achieve it) along with a sense of disengagement...
I can't write about this coherently today; except to say I wish someone could write as critically and urgently about feminism today as Didion did in her essay 30 years ago. Something has happened. Something has been lost, despite the gains. There is something sad about women's lives, and we are still a long way from having achieved equality.
