POWER DRESSING
Everyone knows clothes can be powerful communication tools, but can they help change the world? Clare Press tracks the history of the sisterhood’s most effective feminist fashion statements.
Everyone knows clothes can be powerful communication tools, but can they help change the world?
They all wore black. Emma Watson, who brought Marai Larasi, the anti-violence-against-women campaigner; Susan Sarandon and social justice warrior Rosa Clemente; Michelle Williams with Tarana Burke, who founded Me Too a decade before it became a hashtag; Meryl Streep, Amy Poehler and Laura Dern with their union leader plus-ones Ai-jen Poo, Saru Jayaraman and Mónica Ramírez. On the 2018 Golden Globes red carpet almost every guest embraced the dress code proposed by Time’s Up.
“This is a moment of solidarity, not a fashion moment,” Eva Longoria (a founding member of the campaign, who paired up with another, Reese Witherspoon, for the evening) told the New York Times. But using dress as a symbol, specifically, the ideas associated with donning black for an event that ordinarily rewards sartorial flamboyance, was one of fashion significance. Women in Hollywood expect to be quizzed about their outfits, so far from being the silent protest some dismissed it as in the run-up, wearing black to the Globes was an entry point for a conversation about why.
Time’s Up challenges the culture of workplace sexual assault, harassment and discrimination everywhere. Under its aegis, more than 300 women who work in film, TV and theatre (including actors, agents, producers and lawyers) collectively launched a legal defence fund for women working in any field – “from film sets to farm fields to board rooms alike” – who’ve experienced it. The black dresses were a true fashion statement, a sartorial message that read: this will no longer be tolerated.
Sexual violence is a power issue, often exacerbated by economic injustice. To be a feminist today is to understand how issues are linked, how worlds intertwine and affect one another. Fashion, for example, is a feminist issue not simply because it’s mostly women who wear it, and women who can be constrained or liberated by it, but because it’s overwhelmingly women who sew it too, many earning poverty wages in the global south.
“One of the biggest criticisms against feminism has been that it’s not inclusive enough, that it’s aimed only at a narrow class of women,” comments Dr Amanda Foreman, the British author and historian behind the documentary series The Ascent of Woman. “What’s exciting about Time’s Up is that it’s very deliberately designed to include lowincome women as well as middle-class women and celebrities. We talk about intersectionality endlessly, but it’s rarely followed up with any workable plan to deal with it.”
While she’s no fan of red carpet culture – “‘it’s a Hollywood version of Crufts, frankly”, referring to the English dog competition – she agrees that the dress code got people talking, and reminds us that it’s worked before. “In the 18th-century court of George III, for example, if you were a Tory supporter, you wore blue and orange; if you were Whig, you wore blue and buff [pale brown]. People have long used fashion as a way of stating their political aims and their solidarity with ideals.”
The British suffragettes knew the power of style. In the early 1900s, when their opponents insinuated that they were only protesting because they couldn’t get a man to look at them (pathetic tactics that have persisted to this day), many took Emmeline Pankhurst’s advice. She, who founded the militant Women’s Social and Political Union with her daughters Christabel and Sylvia, said: “Suffragettes should not be dowdy!” Pankhurst recommended shopping at Selfridges, but supporters were also encouraged to make their own snazzy outfits and to don pins and banners in the movement’s colours: purple, white and green.
Predating the suffragettes by five decades, Amelia Bloomer and her friends were campaigning for ‘women’s dress reform’ in America. “Let men be compelled to wear our dress for a while and we should soon hear them advocating a change,” said Bloomer, who lent her name to a style of cuffed pantaloons. Bloomer wore hers to ride her bike.
Soon bifurcated skirts would be adopted by active women who refused to remain grounded. But it was women’s tailored trousers, when they finally strode into fashion in the 1930s and 40s, that really shook up the old binary dress norms. Pants stood for “freedom and freedom of movement”, says Foreman, “which represents one of the fundamental changes to women’s lives in the 20th century”.
The next great wardrobe revolution came with the 1960s mini-skirt, described by Mary Quant as “a way of rebelling”. It came to be seen as a symbol of the liberated woman, coinciding as it did with access to the contraceptive pill (first introduced in Australia in 1961).
Australian feminist icon Anne Summers agrees that sartorial symbols can indeed be powerful. Last year, after the Women’s Marches, she proclaimed the pink knitted pussy hat to be “as potent an international symbol of protest and resistance” as Che Guevara T-shirts, “or the early emblem of the women’s liberation movement: the clenched fist inside the symbol for women”.
Today, fashion is one of the ways we can put our values to practical work, by shopping according to our ethics and supporting fair trade, sustainable production, slow fashion and the artisanal.
For thousands of years, women’s silence has been encouraged or enforced, to varying degrees, all over the world, whether by unspeakable violence, intimidation or some silly guff about ‘the fairer sex’ being too delicate to … well, take your pick: vote, own property, decide her own fate, run for office, fight wars, go to university.
“PEOPLE HAVE LONG USED FASHION AS A WAY OF STATING THEIR SOLIDARITY WITH IDEALS”