Donald Trump has changed the way women dress
Let’s get one thing straight. No one’s saying glamour’s dead. Humans need an elusive quality to strive after, preferably one that’s impossible to define and relentlessly demanding. But in a year when traditional gateways to glamour – Hollywood, modelling, even, to an extent, The White House – came under angrier and more intense scrutiny than usual, fashion, whether consciously or not, looked at the standard glamour tropes and decided they no longer felt entirely fit for purpose. Heavily labelled status symbols, expensive looking grooming, high maintenance accessories, trophy jewels, torturously maintained hair one by one toppled from their fashion perches.
The antipathy became increasingly widespread as the new First Lady approached her wardrobe with a meticulous eye for a protocol that seemed stuck in the early Sixties. The more imperiously high and spindly her heels and the more rigid her outfits, the more it seemed that everyone else around her dissolved into casualness. While Melania looked icily pristine and malleable – the manifestation of everything that her husband seems to admire in a woman – Meghan, the new princess-inwaiting appeared on the stage wearing ripped jeans.
Fashion got down with the cool kids rather than the Establishment Stiffs and embraced athleisure. This was the year that the flat kicked the stiletto’s a---. Not just any old flat shoes, but ultra-luxurious flat shoes – often in white, with some kind of superfluous furry trim.
It was the year dressing down became an article of faith because heaven forbid you should look as though you were thrilled with the world, or worse still, dressing to please a man. Trouser suits, slouchy jogging pants (again, luxurious), designer trainers with studs, shiny bits or even lace, posh rucksacks from the likes of Saint Laurent and Anya Hindmarch and even bumbags were made over into modern status symbols, not just of money but of knowingness.
Colour became not simply a question of what suited your complexion but what best expressed your views. White – as worn by Hillary Clinton at President Trump’s inauguration – has been reasserted not just as the colour of purity but of Suffragette courage (and a best seller). Fuchsia, the shade that no one fashionable ever wore, has become the winter statement, partly thanks to Balenciaga, but also as a result of the stridently pink beanies that became an emblem of the women’s marches this year. Red? It used only to be “sexy”, “fiery” and yes, “glamorous”– until hundreds of demonstrators this week claimed it as a banner colour for #freeperiods – a campaign started by 18-year-old Amika George to end the stigma around menstruation and make sanitary protection free to disadvantaged girls who have to miss school once a month because they can’t afford to buy tampons.
Oh and black – Meryl and co have said they’ll wear it to the Golden Globes this year as a protest against Hollywood’s continuing sexism, to the hilarity of some and irritation of others, including Rose Mcgowan, the original Weinstein whistle-blower,
Yet while all this abnegation is going on, some traditional emblems of glamour are already staging a comeback. Sequins are the big hit of the festive season, the twinklier and more colourful the better. As Michael Halpern, the newcomer who became fashion’s new darling, largely thanks to his way with sequins, recently told The
Telegraph, “when things are a bit s-----, what’s better than some glitz?” Scores of bold, brave film noir heroines would agree. While active wear remains a uniform of choice, fashion has brought us aspirational iterations in velvet, satin and cashmere.
Clearly the business of glamour is complicated, morphing in meaning and acquiring layers of irony. The underlying question – is it OK to transform yourself into a version of the classic male fantasy glamorous vamp? – remains as topical as it was in the Seventies when (some) secondwave feminists renounced lipstick. Does it all depend on whether you’re dressing for the male gaze or your own? Perhaps so. Next year’s tweedy, midi librarian skirts – with just a peek of leg visible – are designed to appeal to the women wearing them, rather than to titillate.
Glamour can be fake and tawdry and as cheap as the sequins left on the floor after a Strictly finale. But it can be surprisingly profound – a way of thinking, behaving and ultimately being.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, glamour is an ancient amalgamation of learning and enchantment, an oddly potent combination. In its nuances, variations and complications it is a powerful force. You can tell a lot about how society feels about itself from its glamour goals. Cigarettes, air travel, leopard (as opposed to leopard-print) coats, eightmiles-to-the-gallon cars, aspic, stripper shoes – they’ve all had their glamorous moments.
In 2018, it seems that glamour is about to reinvent itself as a synthesis of old and new ideas. The pencil skirt is set to make a comeback, along with higher heels – but they’ll coexist with cosier, less constraining manifestations of glamour – and we’ll learn to decode its messages as we go along. Or we should, because to paraphrase Booth Tarkington, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The
Magnificent Ambersons, which came out in 1918, another momentous year for redefining glamour, “Some day the laws of glamour must be discovered, because they are so important.” Old glamour vs new glamour: Melania and Donald Trump, right, and Susie Bick and Nick Cave, far right