Fashion’s Overt Feminist Image: Bought to You by Men
By: The Isthmus
Tags: Digital Influencers, Fashion Week, Fashion Blogger, Fashion, Bloggers

Female empowerment and fashion: two ideas that seem to go together like avocado and toast, Timon and Pumbaa, and the fact that a group of flamingoes is called a flamboyance. What? Anyway.

Past feminist fashion moments have come from suffragettes who broke through the patriarchy to wear trousers, rebels who wore miniskirts with earnest in the 1960s, and Coco Chanel who liberated women through the inauguration of the powersuit in the 1920s.

Spring 2017 Paris Fashion Week wasn’t altogether different, and seemed to focus greatly on the ideal of female empowerment, with designers creating pieces walked down the runway in a sartorial homage to women. The PFW that just closed ignited the sense of political womanhood through clothing, whether it was the shirts from Maria Grazia Chiuri at Dior that literally spelt out ‘feminist’ or the subtler message from Phoebe Philo at Celine that spoke softly yet clearly of the rebellion that is just being yourself.

Maria Grazia Chiuri’s debut collection for Dior

Other examples of sartorial feminism came from Nicolas Ghesquiere at Louis Vuitton, where an updated image of the amplified vixen was presented through skin-tight leather pants and dresses featuring cutouts strategically placed around the waist and shoulders. Pierpaolo Piccioli at Valentino drew inspiration from almost overindulgent femininity and romanticism, as candy-coloured dresses and lace floated down the runway and a particular shade of burgundy was painted on each models’ lips.

Valentino’s Spring 2017 show

Fashion is a form of freedom, an instrument in expressing yourself and a visual tool for socio-political change. Instead of a spontaneous 1980s feminist protest, the clothes shown at Paris Fashion Week were very deliberately intended to be rebellious and impactful, and made it clear that woman power is very much the at the forefront of fashion.

So why, in an industry that emblazons the word ‘feminist’ across t-shirts, is it so common to see the takedown of a woman that’s been purported by another woman?

When writing their review for Milan Fashion Week, Vogue.com editors Sally Singer, Sarah Mower, Nicole Phelps and Alessandra Codinha listed a unanimous low: that professional bloggers who are paid to wear clothing or borrow from certain designers, change clothes for different fashion shows and pose in front of very keen photographers are ‘heralding the death of style’.

Although the review in its entirety was a bit of a smackdown, there were a few particularly outrageous zingers:

‘The professional blogger bit…is horrible, but most of all, pathetic for these girls, when you watch how many times they desperately troll up and down outside shows, in traffic, risking accidents even, in the hopes of being snapped’

‘It’s not just sad for the women who preen for the cameras in borrowed clothes, it’s distressing as well’

‘It’s all pretty embarrassing — even more so when you consider what’s going on in the world (have you registered to vote yet? Don’t forget the debate on Monday!)’

There were, of course, responses from these professional bloggers that were criticised, and aside from the super strange assertion that these women are somehow walking billboards, it’s all very ridiculous. At the time that these comments were published, mega-blogger Chiara Ferragini was on the cover of Vogue Mexico, Vogue Paris had approached Aimee Song of Song of Style to run a story on her street style throughout fashion month, and ‘Street Style’ is genuinely a tab on Vogue.com’s website that features images taken by infamous street style photographer Phil Oh.

New York Fashion Week Street Style

Not to mention, Vogue relies exclusively on paid advertisements, borrows clothing for shoots and uses bloggers to create content on their website and social media platforms.

The condescension so often directed to those who work or are even interested in fashion is unbearable at the best of times, so why impose that on someone within the same industry and do so in the world’s largest fashion institution?

It’s almost like that scene from Devil Wears Prada, where Miranda coldly blasts Andy for not being able to tell the difference between two turquoise belts, and goes on to school her in front of her colleagues. Except this time, the Miranda’s in this situation aired their dirty laundry to the world, and the Andy’s are actually considered professionals, entrepreneurs and social media juggernauts.

It’s easy, too easy in this situation to surmise that the Vogue.com editors were pitting women against each other in this female-centric industry. I certainly did: these bloggers, whether they’re being paid to wear clothing or not, are driving this vehicle of self-expression and any editor who causes a dent in that are lending power straight back to those who think the whole ‘fashion’ thing is silly.

This was all until I realised it sort of embodied the attitudes of face-value feminism in an industry that operates very specifically for women, but disempowers them through lack of gender diversity and a specific lack of value for the work they do. And that there’s much bigger issues at play than someone being paid to wear clothes.

Chiara Ferragni at Milan Fashion Week

Sure, fashion is an industry in which women are empowered inherently: it serves almost completely to provide for us, and allows us to express ourselves without saying a word. But any feminism openly displayed in fashion is either literally splayed across a t-shirt that was likely made in terrible sweatshop conditions, or short-lived outrage over ridiculous photoshop jobs. Although unrealistic body standards are an issue in the industry, feminism is not just a matter of appearances or making women feel better about themselves.

Real, real feminist issues exist within the fashion industry, like the fact women make up more than 70% of the total workforce, yet less than 25% of leadership positions within top fashion companies belong to women. Or the fact that it’s considered the norm to employ gay men in these top positions because ‘they don’t usually have children at all’, and it’s therefore easier for them to maintain a high-profile career. Did anyone else’s eyes just roll so far back into their head that they almost didn’t come back?

Forgetting the obvious discrimination against these two groups, this type of attitude also reinforces the idea that females are objects of the male gaze: that clothing made by male designers frames and characterises women according to their artistic vision. This often results in the image of the hyper-sexualised woman, an object created by the male for the male. This is particularly true of Tom Ford’s time as creative director at Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and his self-named brand, where the clothing and the campaign images associated were almost aggressively sexual. Tom Ford himself believes that women are more comfortable taking advice on their appearance from men, and as a gay male designer himself, doesn’t struggle with the ‘baggage’ of hating certain parts of his body.

Tom Ford’s Gucci Campaigns

There’s also the greatly ignored fact that women who work in garment factories overseas are severely underpaid, work ridiculous hours in asinine conditions, and suffer abuse and severe mistreatment just for doing their job. These women should be on our radar, particularly in cases where they withstand 11-day hunger strikes in protest of unpaid wages, and become the target of tear gas and rubber bullets from police officers.

A Bangaldesh garment factory worker on hunger strike

Issues like these make Meryl Streep’s speech in The Devil Wears Prada seem otherwise unimportant: yes, the artistic nature of fashion is imperative to its success, but taking on socio-political issues like feminism requires more than just labeling yourself as one.

It’s a far cry from the dreamy lace and the revamped image of the vixen just shown at Paris Fashion Week, but if Dior is going to print shirts that read ‘This is what a feminist looks like’, there needs to be a good reason for it. Maria Grazia Chiuri is Dior’s first ever female creative director, and it probably says a lot about the industry that such a highly anticipated debut collection was used to spell out such a political message.

The sheer size and power of the fashion industry means it can communicate things like the best show at Paris Fashion Week, as well as produce compelling narratives about female executives who worked hard to reach the top and workers at overseas garment factories who finally have their voice be heard and get paid their worth.

The most empowering thing you can share is your point of view, and that can be translated through what you wear just as much as what you think and what you say. The intersection between feminism and fashion crosses many, many streets: we just need to take a walk down the ones that don’t seem as friendly.