How feminism influenced fashion
Feminism in fashion is not “women removed the corsets,” and the main feminist was not Coco Chanel at all, as is commonly believed. Journalist Elena Stafieva talks about what prepared the revolution in the fashion of the late 80s and what has changed since then. And also about why modern designers want to make women sexy, and they go to the stores with their husbands.
It is unlikely that so many myths are associated with anything else as with feminism, at least of the well-known sociocultural phenomena. In our mass consciousness, feminism is a completely ridiculous set of something like not shaving the hair on your legs, paying for yourself in a restaurant and indignantly pushing away a man’s hand giving a coat or opening a door for you. In the masculine mind, something like “ugly heifers are furious” is usually added to this, because everything is beautiful, of course, to nothing, and everyone is paying attention to them. Meanwhile, feminism gave men no less freedom than women, and this is convincingly demonstrated by the Mad Men series, where, at the dawn of feminism, all men are unhappy because they have to be macho and conform to the stereotypes of the traditional and, therefore, sexist culture. It was feminism that freed them from this, allowed to be primarily people with weaknesses, problems and frustrations, and not cool guys, starting the day exclusively with whiskey. In fact, it is to feminism that we owe to the main achievement of modern Western civilization — the absolutely legitimate opportunity to be as ridiculous as idiots and enjoy life.
The transformation of a woman from a passive object, sexual and social, into an active actor is the essence of feminism.
Ideas about how feminism influenced fashion, also went not far. Usually, the first thing to do here are corsets, from which women were allegedly freed by Coco Chanel. But, first, it was not Chanel who did it, but Paul Poiret, and secondly, someone who was, and Poiret was as far as possible from all feminism, believing the woman to be an exceptionally elegant trinket that needs to be decorated. The figure of Chanel here, however, makes sense, because it was she who was the first to radically simplify the women's suit and add men's things to it. All this had not only practical meaning - in simple (and especially in men's) things it became banal to move around easier - but also symbolic: the woman from the decoration object began to turn into a subject with her own requests. And it is this — the transformation of a woman from a passive object, sexual and social, into an active actor — that is the essence of feminism.
But putting on men's clothes is far from feminism. The real feminist revolution in fashion took place much later than Chanel and even later Saint Laurent, who also loved all this light perversivity of games in the male / female. It occurs exactly at that time, as the victory of feminism in society - at the very end of the 80s-beginning of the 90s. And it is connected with the emergence of fundamentally new designers - deconstructivists Yoji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo, the "Antwerp Six", the minimalists Gilles Zander and Helmut Lang. Beginning at different times, but by the beginning of the 90s, who reached the peak of their popularity, they radically changed the idea not only of what fashionable clothes are, but also of what beauty is in principle. To break things up into their component parts and put them together in the most bizarre way to remove any inertia of perception, as Japanese deconstructionists did; shift all proportions, bring the individual parts to the grotesque, mix the street and couture, as the Belgians did, or, on the contrary, deliberately simplify everything to the basic frame, remove any artworks and decorations, any decor, as the German minimalists did. All this would have been impossible without Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt and other feminist context in which sexual freedom was formulated not only as a rejection of passivity, but also as other ways of expressing sexuality.
All this is based on radically new ideas about the female body and its beauty. Beautiful - this is not the classic "high breasts - thin waist - round hips." Beautiful is in the modern world a much more complex concept, including a variety of offsets. Suddenly it turned out that not all women want to tighten their waists and hug their breasts, that many feel much more comfortable - and therefore more confident, and therefore - sexier - in simple (or, on the contrary, over complicated) things that leave the space between the bust and the outside world , speaking not so much glamorous decor as armor, separating and protecting. And in this case it is much easier for a woman to be not an object, but a subject, that is, to decide not only where, how and with whom, but also in what. Clothing has become a way to demonstrate the complexity of the self, and not the size of its bust. The key to creating any image was the word sophisticated, ideally defining a complex and refined intellectual taste. Being modern has become much more important than being just beautiful. Moreover, without modernity in all its manifestations it has already become impossible to be fashionable.
Beauty requires not so much glossy pictures, but all sorts of imperfections, because they are unique
Here you could write about the fact that women stopped dressing for men and began to dress for themselves, but do not slip into such a banality. No modern phenomenon is described by such a simple formula. Beauty and attractiveness for the opposite sex is a rather complex thing and often far from the stereotypes of mass culture. And understanding this is precisely one of the main gains of feminism. Beauty requires not only (and even not so much) glossy pictures, but all sorts of imperfections, because they are unique, and any uniqueness prevents and distracts, that is, sharpens the perception and all five senses. It just came into vogue at the dawn of the 90s. Of course, designers who say that the goal of fashion is to dress women for men and make them sexy in the most traditionalist sense of the word, has not gone anywhere. We will always have, relatively speaking, our Roberto Cavalli and his dresses - like girls, who are sure that this is exactly what is sexy. But what the stars of the intellectual fashion of the 90s did had the most serious consequences. And the current surge in fashion for men's items, for free volumes, for every kind of heritage and street fashion, for Phoebe Faylo and Stella McCartney are circles that are still diverging from the stones that were thrown then. Well, the fact that in Russia, as in any traditionalist society, in any store you can surely hear: “I don’t buy anything without my husband! Only if he likes it!” - so it is no wonder. Feminism in Russia, much like Christianity, has not yet been preached.