BA2 CLASS READING - FASHION IN SOCIETY -FEMINISM AND FASHION GROUP SEMINAR PRESENTATION - this reading is extracts (...) from the set text.

FEMINISM AND FASHION. ELIZABETH WILSON. 1985.

two different ways of understanding culture emerged within feminism. The first of these was a wholehearted condemnation of every aspect of culture that reproduced sexist ideas and images of women and femininity, all of which came to seem in some sense "violent" and "pornographic"; the other, by contrast, was a populist liberalism which argued that it would be elitist to criticise any popular pastime which the majority of women enjoyed, whether it were reading pulp romances or dressing in smart clothes ...

Underlying these two approaches were hidden discourses rooted in the history of culture. On the one hand there was the continuing effect of the nineteenth-century cult of the natural sciences ... yet simultaneously feminists were influenced by the beliefs of nineteenth-century liberalism and its twentieth-century reinterpretations ... These two views are mutually inconsistent ... They possibly reflect a deeper division, which, it has been suggested, underlies many current political debates - a division between on the one hand, those committed to "cultures of identity" and the achievement of true self and expression. On the other hand, those who ... insist on the central value of the city, its unpredictabity, the fluidity of its codes and subversive play with them. (Chalmers 1983).


This division between the "authentic" and the "modernist" can be applied to many of the fashions and especially to contemporary countercultural fashions. The hippie, for example, would be "authentic", the punk ... "modernist"... The division suggests two radically divergent ways of seeing the world - and fashion ... Is fashionable dress part of the oppression of women, or is it  form of adult play?...

An unresolved tension between "authenticity" and "modernism" haunts contemporary feminism. The recurring theme of women's relationship to nature, of women's utopias, and of the vision of a wholly other world in which "women's values" hold sway suggests a longing for a more "authentic" world, closely bound to "nature", in which we will find our true selves. Engagement in the political battle... and the belief in the social construction of the gendered self represent the "modernist" approach ...

This unresolved tension marks a number of feminists debates, for example the debate about heterosexual love, the controversies over pornography and romantic fiction, and the debate about dress and feminist attitudes to personal adornment ...

In the sphere of literature, whiles some feminists have argued that pornography constitutes actual violence toward women, others have asserted our right to look, and, indeed to be turned on by it. In discussions about pulp fiction there is a similar dispute between the moralists who denounce it as promoting false values and as being a form of ideological subordination of women, and the hedonists who emphasise its fantasy and erotic potential.

Similarly with dress: the thesis is that fashion is oppressive, the antithesis that we find it pleasurable; again no synthesis is possible. In all these arguments the alternatives posed are between moralism and hedonism; either doing your own thing is okay, or else it convicts you of false consciousness. Either the products of popular culture are supports of a monolithic male ideology, or they are there to be enjoyed and justified.

A slightly different version of these arguments acknowledges that desires for the "unworthier" artefacts of the consumer society have been somehow implanted in us, and that we must try to resolve the resulting guilt by steering some moderate middle way. To care about dress and our appearance is oppressive, this argument goes, and our love of clothes is a form of false consciousness - yet, since we do love them we are locked in a contradiction ...

The idea of free choice has contributed significantly to contemporary feminism... Yet "free choice" is really a myth, and is inconsistent with the belief, to which all feminists pay at least lip service, that human beings are "socially constructed". The concept of social construction is based on the view that at birth a baby has the potential to develop in a variety of ways, limited to some extent by genetic heritage, but equally, or more importantly, dependent on the environmental influences that shape its experience... Many of the most important aspects of this development occur in early childhood. By the time we become adults, therefore, our capacity to choose freely is greatly restricted by the way in which our personality had developed.' (Wilson in Welters and Lillethun, 2011, pp.323-327).

REFERENCE

Wilson, E. in Welters, L. and Lillethun, A. (eds.) (2011) The fashion reader. 2nd end. Oxford: Berg.