THE POWER OF WEARING WHITE
More than just a fashion choice, white is the colour of peace, power and protest, writes Lisa Armstrong
‘Fashion is part of the daily air and it changes all the time, with all the events. You can even see the approaching of a revolution in clothes. You can see and feel everything in clothes.” I’m nominating this quote as peak Diana Vreeland. What we wear is almost always, in one way or another political, without us noticing. Do we broadly follow the “rules”, or fall in with them?
Most of us don’t have to take sartorial risks to the extent that those brave Iranian women posting pictures of themselves wearing white this month have. In defiance of Iran’s all-black rule, they’re a reminder of the ways in which the tiniest gestures can become a mass movement. How cool, in every sense, to be able to borrow, even temporarily, some of the privileges of Iranian men, who are permitted to enjoy wearing white whenever they fancy.
Arguably clothes haven’t flexed this degree of rebellious muscle since punk. Watching the pantsuit (as Americans insist on calling it, despite supposedly being great marketeers) transmute into a female rallying symbol last year beats tracking the stratospheric ascent of handbag prices.
And what about feminist slogan T-shirts or pussy power pink beanies? Whether we aim to look affluent, deliberately grunge down, settle for a classic fudge of expensive under-statement or subscribe to any of the above without realising — these things become habitual. And they’re often rooted in attitudes to wealth and class that took form when we were younger.
It’s not just women. From reclaiming pink or grappling with the dilemma of whether or not the tie has become Too Tory to dissecting UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s gradual adoption of his smart M&S suit (capitulation to capitalism or a sign of late-onset maturity?) men have entered the sartorial maelstrom of politics with a small c.
As for white — it’s quite a strange synchronicity that it’s also very fashionable on the catwalks, don’t you think? Then again, white is wonderfully ambiguous. Brides, druids, devout Muslim men on Fridays, Hindu brides, Buddhist mourners, Kundalini yogis, Zoroastrianist priests, many observant Jews on the high days of Passover and Selichot, and the first wave of suffragettes all wear or wore white. It symbolises goodness, but also passive resistance (Gandhi, the Damas de Blanco or Ladies in White, a group founded in 2003 by the wives and other female relatives of jailed dissidents protest their the imprisonments by wearing white on Sundays).
It’s the colour of peace, power and surrender. In most societies, it’s also quite look-at-me. There is no way the poster of John Travolta’s
Saturday Night Fever would be seared forever into our consciousness if Travolta, who originally pushed for black, had had his way. Author Tom Wolfe wears white, always. He claims that rather than an affectation, this began because where he came from in Virginia, gentlemen always wore white in the summer and when he first arrived in New York, he couldn’t afford to buy other suits. Ditto Leslie Kenton, the US-born beauty guru who made her home in New Zealand, where she died last year. She said her 50-year passion for white seeded when she was broke and bought the simplest clothes she could find, which she constantly tossed in the washing machine. “White not only inspires me,” she wrote on her lesliekenton.com blog, “It is so simple to wear and it calms my overly intense nature.”
It’s striking how even in 2017, white has overtones of purity despite the gargantuan cleaning bills, bleaching agents and general high maintenance. The trick is to go for sustainable, washable fabrics — and, unless you’re aiming for an ashram vibe, to break your outfit up with black, tan, navy or khaki accessories. Gold can look blingy.
Even then, the effect may not be quite what you intended. White does strange things. Marilyn Monroe’s outrageous breeze-jacking in
The Seven Year Itch looks oddly angelic, thanks to the halo of white pleats billowing around her. Others have tried to exploit white’s innocent qualities only to find their outfit became transparent under flashlights (Princess Diana’s cotton nursery teacher skirt) or makes them look like a moderately competent midwife (Gwyneth Paltrow at the Oscars) when they were aiming for Hollywood glamour.
Hillary Clinton got with the white programme in the final months of her campaign. Ultimately it didn’t too her much good. Perhaps Melania’s tan simply sets white off better in the eyes of many voters. That’s the trouble with using clothes to political ends — sometimes they take on views of their own.