Skinny Bitches and Fashion-Forward Men

Parisian Patriarchs and Fairy Godfathers

Across the spectrum of our readings, I was struck by how prominently men figure as producers, both in the material and metaphoric sense (as producers of clothes, ad campaigns, femininity etc). There is an interesting and somewhat disheartening cultural process that takes place when men enter a traditionally feminized space and industrialize or professionalize it e.g. when men enter the realm of cooking, they elevate it from the daily domestic practice into the culinary arts—they become a master chef, while a woman is still just a cook, whose utilitarian work is for homely sustenance, not art. Similarly, when a man enters the world of fashion and design, he can become a couturier, while women are seamstresses and pattern-makers.

When men co-opt this sphere of feminine labor, the daily practices are reconfigured into art and the men are heralded as geniuses—a heady and lofty position as artist and innovator, not bogged down by the lowly concerns of thread. It reminds me a bit of Bordo’s gendered mind/body dichotomy where men are positioned as encompassing a pure, enlightened sprit and intellect, while women are weighed down by the burden of their fleshy, material bodies. Anyway, this theme of male creative domination is recurrent in the readings. In Allen’s article, the couturier is constructed as this seductive svengali-like figure, “Clothing design is featured as a male activity, evidenced by the subtitle of the fashion show program which reads: ‘Joseph Andre’s gifts to glamorous womanhood'” (128).

In the Hepburn article, Givenchy is the exquisite and masterful couturier who molds his muse Audrey into his fashion ideal, “…Givenchy fashions function as an important, recognizable component of her identity as a star personality. Hepburn and Givenchy would be inseparably linked,” and “Hepburn’s relationship to Givenchy was not constructed publicly as a crass commercial endorsement designed to profit the star, but a class- and sex-stereotyped venture based on mutual appreciation and platonic friendship. He was marked as a the genius. She was his muse.” Isn’t it hard enough when the emissaries of patriarchal power dominate institutions of law, medicine, and education? Now they’re armed with fashion and taste-making cultural capital in our own arena…sigh…

In the same vein, in many Cinderella narratives (especially when the makeover involves crossing class lines) the transformation is enacted by a fairy godfather figure, typically an older male with money and a high social standing, or at least a man with flawless taste and expertise in the fields of fashion, class, and decorum. Pretty Woman, The Princess Diaries, My Fair Lady, and The Devil Wears Prada, hell even Now Voyager are just a few examples of the fairy godfather trope—it can be a Pygmalion figure with money and time on his hands to entertain himself (My Fair Lady), or a stylish gay man instructing a hapless girl on the codes of femininity (Prada), but in all these cases the man is figured as an artist, with a living subject that he molds in his own image, transforming street urchins into princesses. In all of these transformations, the men do not actually engage in the nitty gritty aspects of makeovers—they needn’t concern themselves with the pragmatics of plucking eyebrows and manicures (just as a couturier doesn’t have to worry about trivialities like hems and seams); that’s for an unseen staff of women to deal with. The fairy godfather enacts that grand scheme and takes credit for the transformation.

For Whom the Belle Dresses?

Back to men again, since that’s the theme of my post; Herzog’s article ends with the question for whom do women dress?:

If we were to thoroughly probe the answers to this question, we might find that the arguments as to whether they dress for men, other women, or themselves would break down around lines of gender, social class, and sexual preference, for this is a case in which actual experience may be at odds with commonsense notions of heterosexual attraction…The interesting question we are left with is whether or not the male look then merges with the critical "shopper’s eye..."

This takes us back to our first week’s reading where the authors argue over the varying levels of autonomy and volition in beauty practices—do we look good for ourselves? For our female friends (and competitors)? or for men and our potential lovers? When it comes to culturally mandated beauty rituals, things get complex, but I actually think the query of how and for whom do women dress is simple. Yes, I’m generalizing, but I’d say in most cases women save their more high-fashion, bleeding edge, innovative ensembles for their female friends who can recognize the runway referents and appreciate the panache in putting it together. Observe a couple watching Sex and the City, and the girl will swoon over one of Carrie’s quirky uptown/downtown eclectic outfits, while the boy will have a look like “WTF."

This is all anecdotal but the evidence is there. Personally, I save my more avant-garde looks for my girlfriends and would reserve more sensual/feminine outfits for men (yeah yeah yeah I’m participating in my own marginalization, whatever….). For example, I have this neon yellow bomber-jacket that I adore—it’s fabulously ostentatious in an intentionally 80s redux kinda way, but I would never wear it on a date, since the guy likely wouldn’t “get” it and appreciate the irony and recuperated cool of it (in fact I wore it to a group dinner and the guy that I was involved with at the time and trying to beguile made fun of it). Of course there are exceptions: my metrosexual ex “got” clothes, but I’m talking broadstrokes here.

Another real world example of gendered fashion choices: This weekend at The Cheese I sat a young couple. My small talk on the way to the table usually involves complimenting a girl’s outfit, so I honed in on her risky-but-cool Ikat print harem pants—a bold and particularly hard trend to pull off. I told her, “You are rocking those harem pants” and she beamed and turned triumphantly to her boyfriend and said “See I told you!” Apparently I’d stepped right into the middle of an ongoing debate where she defended her voluminous pants, and he derided them, making MC Hammer jokes. I took her side (it's best to not antagonize girls) and said that they’re very on-trend and she looks good, but I also acknowledged the bf and said “but you probably like her in skinnies or leggings huh?” He replied, “I prefer no pants at all.” I pretended to laugh and walked away.

The point of this story is that women who are fashionably inclined tend to be more experimental, even if that includes desexualized fashions (empire waists, babydoll dresses, highwaisted pants etc.) whereas men appreciate and respond to silhouettes that show the body and accentuate femininity and fabric, like the textiles that Herzog mentions while quoting Dyer who “relates certain types of sensual tactile materials such as silk, satin, velvet, fur, feathers, chiffon, and tafetta to luxuriousness and commercial sex—the iconography of the brothel and the strip-tease show” (156). If you think I’m being reductive, ask around.

Waifs vs. T & A

And speaking of male preference, I just want to close with a look at the longstanding epochal divergence between the types of femininity valued by hetero males versus the fashion world. Studlar references the battle for cultural eminence waged between Mammary Madness and Audrey-as-counter-model, and importantly, she notes that heterosexual preference did not seem to embrace the gamine look so readily, “In real life, it was said that many American men did care—very much. Suffering from ‘Dior phobia,’ they vociferously protested the appearance of the flat look in their wives and girlfriends who followed fashion.” Audrey was counterpoised against Marilyn, but this model/countermodel opposition continued through the decades with polarities like Twiggy versus Raquel Welch, and Kate Moss versus Pamela Anderson. We continually see the cultural schism of sexual preference versus fashionable haute couture ideals.

Put crassly, it’s the difference between who women want to be and who men want to do. I think the rare instance where these two contradictory impulses became aligned was in the late 80s early 90s in the era of the Amazonian super model. The likes of Naomi, Cindy, Christy and Tyra represented the rare united moment of runway and street, of female aspiration and male sexual desire—curvier and more womanly that any models we’d see today (who are generally prepubescent, androgynous 16-year-olds) they could transition from an editorial fashion layout, to Sports Illustrated, and back. That liminal ability probably won’t be seen again, given the waifish standard that continues to reign and is coextensive but diametrically opposed to the male ideal of impossible, surgically enhanced proportions. Put an issue of Vogue next to an issue of Maxim and you can see the dichotomy clearly. Sexualized femininity and high-fashion femininity seem to be in contention, but importantly for us real girls, they both construct idealized and impossible standards of womanhood that are bound to create deficiencies; if you can’t fit into a designer sample size, or conversely if you can’t fill out a D-cup, women are made to feel a lack…and now I’m depressed, so I should probably go shopping, except that I signed a note to myself that swore off shopping for the rest of the semester….sigh….