Dress as Metaphor British Female Fashion and Social Change in the 20th Century. Katarzyna Kociolek
Because personal identities became more fluid, hippy fashion encouraged a disjunction between formal clothes and the middle-class, middle-aged conservatism, promoted interest in personal appearance and consumption of clothes as well as facilitated appearance of “politically correct dress centred particularly on an anti-middle-class and anti-formal rhetoric” (193).
Edwards contends that the connection between fashion and identity politics was formed following “a collapse in whatever sense of political unity” (193) that existed in the earlier decades. The diverse groups, such as feminists, gays, ethnic minorities, participating in the 1960s and 1970s social revolutions revised their attitudes towards “dress and appearance” (194). Feminists, like gay men, had to find ways of sartorially expressing their newly-forged identities. In the case of gay fashion, the new sexualised look either fully embraced the effeminate (as in drag) or it steered towards the ultra-masculine imagery. By stressing the connection between donning a look and the expression of minority identity, Edwards views fashion as a vital communication channel through which the socially underrepresented gain visibility and “media attention” (195).
While Edwards offers an overview of gay men’s styles, Lee Wright in one of his essays entitled “Objectifying Gender. The stiletto heel” proposes to examine meanings attached to the ultra-feminine item of clothing that came under the attack of feminists in the 1960s. In order to explore and explain the meaning of “stiletto” shoes, Wright traces the post-war development of high-heels, which he views as a reaction against the wartime Utility fashion on the one hand and as a response to the demands of new more feminine fashions of the 1950s on the other (200). Surprisingly, due to their unexpected popularity, the impact of “stilettos” went far beyond the realm of fashion, deeply affecting floor design and ←30 | 31→manufacturing. In the 1950s, while researchers were busily engaged in developing stilettoes that would sustain extensive daily wear, floor designers and manufacturers faced an urgent need to introduce new, more resilient flooring in such places as buses, planes, and dance halls (202). Stilettoes gained notoriety and wide media coverage also due to their detrimental effect on health. All of a sudden, as noted by Wright, the meaning of the stiletto heels shifted from the one expressing feminine attributes to the one connoting aggressive and exaggerated female sexuality.
Despite such overtly negative connotations, the popularity of stilettos continued and they became particularly appealing to the young generation of consumers who sought to sartorially separate themselves from their mothers. According to Wright, thanks to the fact that “the stiletto did not symbolise the housewife” (Wright 203), from the late 1950s onwards it “was associated with glamour, with rebellion; it represented someone who was in some way ‘modern’ and ‘up to date’, and, above all, someone who inhabited a world outside the home” (203). Such connotations allow to view stilettos as liberatory rather than repressive, observes Wright, adding that stilettoes are too hastily blamed for women’s subordination in the 1950s. While the fashion of the decade accentuated gender differences more than the styles that followed, Wright suggests that this might have been a better strategy to empower femininity than its alternative, that is the downplaying of gender differences and the adoption of male styles. In Western cultures stilettos are chiefly associated with mature femininity, but the variety of designs results in a number of conflicting meanings assigned to them.
The discourse of women’s empowerment through fashion is deeply ingrained in the “ ‘power dressing phenomenon” (Entwistle 2007, 208) that appeared in the 1980s. Unlike Wright, Joanne Entwistle, who examines the issue, argues that borrowings from the male sartorial practices allowed to construct new modes of femininity. Through their power suits, the new professionally successful women connoted independence and ambitious career prospects as well as manifested changes in the social position of women. In order to examine the meanings of power dressing, Entwistle traces the developments in female sartorial practices in the context of women’s access to paid labour. She observes that while already in the 19th century women could secure positions as clerks and secretaries, the clothes they wore to work signified their separation from the higher ranks of business hierarchy, and indicated their exclusion from the top managerial jobs. It was not until the 1970s and the 1980s that suited women gained public visibility and numerous conduct manuals offered advice on how to dress for executive, as opposed to secretarial, jobs. Although, as noted by Entwistle, dress manuals had long pre-dated the phenomenon of power dressing, the “rules of ←31 | 32→‘dress for success’ ” (2007, 210) constructed entirely novel way of being a woman. Addressing women who made inroads into traditionally male occupations, these manuals stressed the importance of “the management of appearance” (211) and offered advice on how to achieve “something previously the preserve of men, career success” (211).
Entwistle proposes associating the changes in womenswear to economic transformations that characterised the 1980s, such as the arrival of “ ‘enterprise culture’ ” (214) with its “powerful rhetoric of individualism and enterprise” (214). As self-employment gained popularity from the 1970s onwards, the successful management of a company became equated with the successful management of the self and the fulfilment of one’s ambitions. The properly managed looks started to serve the purpose of communicating women’s commitment to achieving professional success; according to Entwistle “the ‘power suit’ became a more or less reliable signal that a woman was taking her job seriously and was interested in going further” (215). Although in her analysis of the ‘power suit’, Entwistle does not explicitly refer to the concept of a metaphor, her observation that the power dress “is important because it tells us something about her, about her professionalism, her confidence, her self-esteem, her ability to do her job” (216) seems to imply that clothes metaphorically convey ideas about the self.
Some inherent qualities of power dress of the 1980s made it evoke these metaphorical meanings. Since the styles incorporated in the female power suit drew from the well-known repertoire of male sartorial practices, like the male suits, the power dresses were conservative uniforms. As a female version of a male professional dress code, these suits replaced ornamentation with top-quality tailoring and fabrics. Although power dressing manuals urged women “to avoid trousers in the boardroom at all costs since these are supposedly threatening to male power” (Entwistle 2007, 216), in fact, the masculinisation of womenswear was inevitable albeit in a more covert and subtle form. Since tailoring had been traditionally reserved for male garments, with Saville Row’s tailors’ creations becoming the emblem of as much Englishness as gentlemanliness, the arrival of fashion for female suits can be regarded as a direct inroad into this male territory and hence a form of sartorial empowerment of women. It is through the metaphorical reading of tailored suits with all their culturally English connotations that the full significance of the female power dress look can be appreciated.
The power dress was masculine in character not only thanks to adhering to the “great masculine renunciation” (Entwistle 2007, 216) principle, but also because it generally reflected a more ostensibly rational approach to clothing; the type of attitude to fashion that had been traditionally associated with manliness. For centuries affluent women had gained notoriety as frivolous consumers ←32 | 33→of fashion, while the fickle capriciousness of their characters would often be likened to fickleness and irrationality of fashion itself. In contrast, since the 19th century men’s rational minds and well-formed characters were to be reflected in their practical, unornamented suits. Unlike womenswear, formal menswear has undergone little change over the course of the last two centuries, for its chief objective has been to connote respectability, decisiveness, stability, reliability – chief characteristics of good leadership, considered essential for the running of any enterprise (being it a private company or a nation state). Not surprisingly when in the 1980s women forged leading positions in business and in politics, they needed to internalise the principles that guided the male sartorial practices. As Entwistle argues, the publication of dress for success manuals stressed the importance of more ‘scientific’ rather than emotional or aesthetic approaches to fashion when shopping for clothes, urging women “to make their clothing decisions on the basis of ‘science’ and not aesthetic or emotion” (