Between Fashion And Feminism

Often condemned as a form of oppression, fashion could and did allow women to express modern gender identities and promote feminist ideas. Einav Rabinovitch-Fox examines how clothes empowered women, and particularly women barred from positions of influence due to race or class. Moving from 1890s shirtwaists through the miniskirts and unisex styles of the 1970s, Rabinovitch-Fox shows how the rise of mass media culture made fashion a vehicle for women to assert claims over their bodies, femininity, and social roles. She also highlights how trends in women’s sartorial practices expressed ideas of independence and equality. As women employed new clothing styles, they expanded feminist activism beyond formal organizations and movements and reclaimed fashion as a realm of pleasure, power, and feminist consciousness. A fascinating account of clothing as an everyday feminist practice, Dressed for Freedom brings fashion into discussions of American feminism during the long twentieth century.

Challenges feminist beliefs that the fashion and beauty industry objectifies women, contending that elite women are out of touch with most women in the U.S. while arguing that fashion is more an expression of creativity and identity than a means of attracting men.

Inspired by a rapidly changing fashion landscape, Fashion: New Feminist Essays offers historical and contemporary studies that reveal the relationships between fashion with gender, sexuality, race, and age. Fashion is a rich terrain for feminist scholars in the twenty-first century. Explicit engagements with feminist and queer politics, critical interventions by industry outsiders across digital platforms, diversifying images of stylish bodies, and ongoing discussions of the ethics and sustainability of fashion production: all of these point to an urgent need to reappraise the relationship of fashion to feminism and other justice-seeking movements. The essays in this collection take up fashion as a feminist critical tool that uniquely holds together the lived and represented body with larger cultural structures. Contributors unearth surprising new lines of connection between gender, sexuality, race, age, and religion in their relationship to capitalism, both historically and in the present. Bringing together established and emerging scholars, and perspectives from gender studies, history, sociology, philosophy, and literary studies, Fashion: New Feminist Essays traces the far-reaching impact of this most feminized of forms, underscoring the significance of fashion studies for understanding the politics of culture. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Australian Feminist Studies journal.

Notorious as much for its fashion as for its music, the 1960s and 1970s produced provocative fashion trends that reflected the rising wave of gender politics and the sexual revolution. In an era when gender stereotypes were questioned and dismantled, and when the feminist and gay rights movements were gaining momentum and a voice, the fashion industry responded in kind. Designers from Paris to Hollywood imagined a future of equality and androgyny. The unisex movement affected all ages, with adult fashions trickling down to school-aged children and clothing for infants. Between 1965 and 1975, girls and women began wearing pants to school; boys enjoyed a brief "peacock revolution," sporting bold colors and patterns; and legal battles were fought over hair style and length. However, with the advent of Diane Von Furstenberg's wrap dress and the launch of Victoria's Secret, by the mid-1980s, unisex styles were nearly completely abandoned. Jo B. Paoletti traces the trajectory of unisex fashion against the backdrop of the popular issues of the day—from contraception access to girls' participation in sports. Combing mass-market catalogs, newspaper and magazine articles, cartoons, and trade publications for signs of the fashion debates, Paoletti provides a multigenerational study of the "white space" between (or beyond) masculine and feminine.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Women in Clothes is a book unlike any other. It is essentially a conversation among hundreds of women of all nationalities—famous, anonymous, religious, secular, married, single, young, old—on the subject of clothing, and how the garments we put on every day define and shape our lives. It began with a survey. The editors composed a list of more than fifty questions designed to prompt women to think more deeply about their personal style. Writers, activists, and artists including Cindy Sherman, Kim Gordon, Kalpona Akter, Sarah Nicole Prickett, Tavi Gevinson, Miranda July, Roxane Gay, Lena Dunham, and Molly Ringwald answered these questions with photographs, interviews, personal testimonies, and illustrations. Even our most basic clothing choices can give us confidence, show the connection between our appearance and our habits of mind, express our values and our politics, bond us with our friends, or function as armor or disguise. They are the tools we use to reinvent ourselves and to transform how others see us. Women in Clothes embraces the complexity of women’s style decisions, revealing the sometimes funny, sometimes strange, always thoughtful impulses that influence our daily ritual of getting dressed.

This book casts a critical look at the dominant position that fashion has come to occupy in contemporary society. It addresses various aspects of fashion in postmodern culture including makeup, cosmetic surgery, tattoos, ornament in dress and the blurring of gender boundaries.

At a glance, high fashion and feminism seem unlikely partners. Between the First and Second World Wars, however, these forces combined femininity and modernity to create the new, modern French woman. In this engaging study, Mary Lynn Stewart reveals the fashion industry as an integral part of women's transition into modernity. Analyzing what female columnists in fashion magazines and popular women novelists wrote about the "new silhouette," Stewart shows how bourgeois women feminized the more severe, masculine images that elite designers promoted to create a hybrid form of modern that both emancipated women and celebrated their femininity. She delves into the intricacies of marketing the new clothes and the new image to middle-class women and examines the nuts and bolts of a changing industry—including textile production, relationships between suppliers and department stores, and privacy and intellectual property issues surrounding ready-to-wear couture designs. Dressing Modern Frenchwomen draws from thousands of magazine covers, advertisements, fashion columns, and features to uncover and untangle the fascinating relationships among the fashion industry, the development of modern marketing techniques, and the evolution of the modern woman as active, mobile, and liberated.

There are many new looks in fashion; here, at last, is a new look at fashion which focuses on the perplexing relationship between women, fashion and femininity: It brings together fashion and semiotics, psychoanalysis and style, interweaving the vocabulary of fashion literature with that of cultural studies and feminist theory. Helmut Newton's flashing model is contrasted with Deborah Tuberville's models of passive resistence, Jean Paul Gaultier's Dervish Bra with Elsa Schiaparelli's Shoe Hat, the cultural terrorism of punk in the 1970s with the postmodern bedlam of fashion in the 1980s. Analysing fashion at a level of representation, concerned more with images and ideas than with cut and fit, the authors make a series of sorties into fashion photography, design and cultural history, with centre around women, their bodies, and the pleasures and pains of fashion. An examination of attitudes to fashion in the early Women's Liberation Movement is followed by an analysis of how femininity has been appropriated and re-appropriated by women in the urban styles and subcultures of the 1970s and 1980s.

A critique of the politics of dress for women in power. What is the relationship between fashion, women, and power? As never before, women in positions of political power find themselves facing the maelstroms of mass media regarding both their fashion and their right to govern. In this book, contributors offer a wide set of perspectives on women and their fashions when taking up powerful positions in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States as well as emerging women leaders in Asia. This book questions the relationship between women and dress and interrogates how this conversation informs and articulates how women are viewed when taking up public office. The book critiques the interplays between politics, power, class, race, and social expectations concerning the politics of getting dressed.

"The time for stepping up and protecting our planet is now. And this book is an easy, enjoyable place to start." -- Moby It's time to put your good intentions into action. It's time to give a shit -- about your health, your footprint, and your planet. Give a Sh*t guides you through the transition to a kinder, healthier, more conscious, and sustainable life like no book has done before. With a humorous and nonjudgmental tone, savvy eco-friendly lifestyle expert Ashlee Piper walks you through easy-but-impactful shifts anyone can make to live and be better every damn day: In your home - Room-by-room guidance and tactics for a chic, affordable, sustainable living space, no matter where or how you live In the kitchen - 20+ unfussy, quick, and delicious plant-based recipes for every life occasion, from pantry staples like White Witch Almond Milk to exciting everyday fare like Walnut Chorizo Tostadas to kick-ass desserts like Jamocha Silk Pie In your closet - Advice for building a polished, ethical wardrobe in a world of fast fashion In the mirror - Beauty and grooming tips and DIY products (from skin care to foundation to, ahem, ladytime provisions) that are safer, natural, cruelty-free, and, best of all, effective In the wild - How to maintain your values (and your moxie) at work, in your social life, and when abroad Give a Sh*t isn't a manual of restrictions -- it's a practical handbook that meets you where you are and finally harmonizes doing good with living well.