Dress as Metaphor British Female Fashion and Social Change in the 20th Century. Katarzyna Kociolek
The last chapter examines the frequently overlooked conflation of politics and fashion. It argues that contrary to popularly held beliefs, for centuries dress and fashion have played an important political function, assisting the creation of lavish public displays of both power and elite identities. As we shall see, nowhere is the importance of appropriate attire so firmly regulated and so severely guarded as in the public realm of politics. Yet, due to the marginalisation of fashion as a trivial female pursuit, the political role of clothing has received little scholarly ←16 | 17→attention. While the dress styles of individual female politicians are occasionally debated on in the popular press, the topic of the political role of fashion is rarely undertaken by either theorists of fashion or political scientists. The British political scene, which is permeated with sartorially expressed class and gender distinctions, seems to be a particularly interesting example of the link between the world of fashion and the realm of politics. All the more so, as the contemporary ceremonial clothing worn by British political figures has stayed the same for centuries. The robes that in the past connoted privileged masculine identity of politicians have continued to be used despite the fact that in the 20th century the formerly marginalised groups of the working class made their entry into the British political institutions, and these included both men and women among their ranks. Based on the autobiography of one of the prominent female politicians, Betty Boothroyd, the chapter, discloses the seamless connections between sartorial practices and the expression of political identity. As the analysis comprises both textual and the pictorial references to dress in the autobiography, it offers a comprehensive study of the first and so far only female Speaker of the House of Commons attitude to fashion. As is argued in the chapter, the close examination of both the content and the appended photographs in Boothroyd’s autobiography proves that she treated fashion with utmost seriousness, being fully aware of the importance of public display and not infrequently commenting on the theatrical aspects of the political scene.
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In order to interpret the metaphorical meaning of clothing, it is necessary to examine theories that consider fashion to be a form of a language as well as to discuss how and what fashion and clothing can potentially communicate. The current analysis of a communicative role of fashion is based on semiotic theories of culture and clothing developed among others by Umberto Eco, Malcolm Bernard, Fred Davies, and Colin Campbell.
That clothing exceeds its primary utilitarian function of offering protection becomes evident on closer examination of sartorial practices across cultures and historical periods. The ideas of what types of clothes are appropriate, and hence viewed as providing sufficient protection from either inclement weather or from the gaze of others (i.e. allow to preserve modesty), vary from culture to culture and have been changing from one century or even decade to another (Bernard 137). As noted by Bernard, “People will always require some protection from the elements and they will usually need to be properly (modestly) dressed; what they wear to achieve these requirements will change from culture to culture, and it is these differences that are meaningful and hence communicative” (137).
Based on the “semiotic” or “structuralist” approach, “communication through or by means of fashion and clothing […] is a social interaction that produces or constitutes the individual as a member (or not) of a culture” (139). Through connotations, which according to Barthes are “associations or feelings” dependant on one’s cultural background, items of clothing communicate the wearer’s “cultural values and beliefs” (139). These in turn are influenced by the individual’s “age, nationality, class, gender” (139). Although Bernard observes that meanings produced by clothing are by no means clear and uniform, what the wearers communicate by clothing is their membership in and identification with the set of values of a given group. This observation seems particularly useful when examining the meaning of female clothes in public discourse, since it permits insight into the wearers’ sense of belonging to a group of women in general and the group of female public figures in particular. If assumed that clothing is a metaphor (as it is argued in Chapter 2) or that any expression which includes a metaphor is a metaphorical expression, one may easily note that when communicating through fashion and clothing, individuals can downplay membership in some groups while highlighting their belonging to others (e.g. In Chapters 4 and 6 specific examples of sartorially suppressed femininity are examined). While Bernard ←19 | 20→points to the shortcomings of the semiotic approach, stressing its inability to arrive at clear conclusion as to what is communicated through fashion, this criticism seems less valid for the study of sartorial practices in the public realm of politics. Unlike other sartorial practices, dressing for the public gaze appears to be far less accidental, spontaneous and subjective, and is on the whole more tightly linked with other forms of communication (verbal and non-verbal) that the political figure uses. In fact, as is often testified by such sources as autobiographies, dress is carefully selected and attentively accessorised in order to complement the verbal message constituting a coherent communication process to achieve a specific political objective. It is the sphere of politics that the question of belonging to a specific group seems of considerable importance, especially when lobbying for legislative change (e.g. suffragettes, feminists) or securing an important political role (e.g. Thatcher, Boothroyd). When examining such forms of communication through fashion, the application of what Bernard terms “ideological connotation” model, “in which meanings are constructed by members of cultural groups” (141) may be complemented by “the sender-receiver model,” where the sender/the wearer is deliberately projecting meanings, by means of the metaphorical language of fashion.
Fred Davis’s “Do Clothes Speak? What Makes Them Fashion?” aims to fill the analytical void in scholarship on fashion theory by seeking to answer the question about the meaning of fashion, which he views as embedded in the communication process. According to Davis, the meaning of fashion is related to how “the images, thoughts, sentiments, and sensibilities (are) communicated by new and old fashion and the symbolic means by which this is done” (149). Because fashion is a form of a code, which in linguistic terms would be regarded a “quasi-code” of “low semanticity” (149), Davis notes that semiotics offers the possibility of investigating its meanings. According to Davis, even though fashion as a code is different to a language, for in fashion the relationship between the signifier and the signified is less precise than in a spoken or written language (155), clothes communicate meanings through design elements. Through “associative linkages,” qualities of garments such as angularity-curvilinear, dark-light colour, connote femininity-masculinity, formality-informality. While it is hard to disagree with Davis, who advises caution when “ascribing meanings to most clothing” (150) and following Sapir (1931) observes that the exact meaning of various qualities of clothing such as cut, fabric, colour is difficult to determine, fashion used in the public realm of politics seems less ambiguous, fitting neatly the three major characteristics of the clothing-fashion code proposed by Davis, namely: “context-dependency, high social variability in the signifier-signified relationship, undercoding” (150–152).
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While according to Davis, “different combinations of apparel with their attendant qualities are capable of registering sufficiently consistent meanings for wearers and their viewers” (154) and people are generally competent “readers” of “styles of clothing,” it is in the public sphere of politics that this communicative function of fashion becomes not only most noticeable but also most important. Cross-cultural and historical variations of styles and fashions adopted for political purposes, easily prove fashion’s context-dependency. For example, while the suffragettes in the early 20th century willingly wore styles that connoted commonly held beliefs about normative femininity, their followers, second-wave feminists,