SUIT YOURSELF

Next year you will be wearing the pants. Well, that’s what designers are hoping. But is it anything new, and does it make a useful statement? By Alison Veness. Illustration by Amelie Hegardt.

Next year you will be wearing the pants. Well, that’s what designers are hoping. But is it anything new, and does it make a useful statement?

So the style proposition is nothing new, but it has historical and cultural significance. Women wearing masculine suits has at times inferred: “We are on the march, so men and boys, you betta watch out, we’re marchin’.” Yeah, that feels good. The tailored trousersuit, inspired by hundreds of years of civilisation and some Savile Row goodness, is back with a vengeance for spring/summer ‘19. Vengeance is punishment inflicted in retaliation for an injury or offense – retribution. With a vengeance. Yep, because we are mad, as in mad, angry, feisty. Culturally, there is only so much inequality, double standards, lies and bad behaviour a woman can stomach. Christine Blasey Ford, we saluted you for taking the stand and telling the truth. And to all the women who stand up and say something that no-one wants to hear or believe, we say thank you. Now we need to keep smashing it out of the park.

Designers are doing their bit. Yes, we will take the slogan T-shirt from two seasons ago and now we will add a masculine suit, because we can. Sheep in wolves’ clothing? No, just wolves. Out for blood. Always. Mwhahahaha. Because quite frankly we are sick of misconduct towards women. And we like a strong suit. What trumps the suit? A woman in it. Hillary Rodham Clinton was the first First Lady to be painted wearing a black pants-suit, by Simmie Knox (another first – the first African-American artist to receive a presidential portrait commission) for her official White House portrait, unveiled in 2004. The designer of which is unknown. That was only 14 years ago. Crazy. Rebellious. At the time she said: “It is a somewhat daunting experience to have your portrait hung in the White House. It is something that really does, more than any other act … puts your place in history in this building for all the ages and all the people who come through here to see and reflect upon.” Her outfit says confident, chic, sleek and polished. No nonsense, no frills. Get the job done compassionately. It was gutsy.

Theresa May, for all the comparisons with the last female UK Prime Minister, does wear trousers. But her style has been softer, until she rocked out to ABBA in what was possibly a Daniel Blake-tailored pants-suit.

We have been working away at the boys’ club for a long time, since way back in the 1800s, when Elizabeth Smith Miller became one of the first suffragettes fighting for women to win the right to vote in America. Then there were the activists pre-World War I; then came the movies and the pioneering androgynous stars such as Katharine Hepburn, who looked terrific in a pair of pants and a simple shirt. Those suits. Hepburn stood out from status quo, which at the time was all bias-cut dresses, furs and strands of pearls. Marlene Dietrich championed change and the perception of what was expected of a female movie star in Hollywood. Daring. It was anti-establishment, of course, for any actress to walk into a studio meeting wearing pants circa 1932, or jeans. Demarcation, brother.

There is a strong intellectual, artistic pedigree of women – philosophers, writers, and artists – who have dared to blur the gender lines. Coco Chanel gave us the first fabulous/practical legit sportswear: she in turn had borrowed from her boyfriend Boy Capel’s wardrobe – there is a photograph, circa 1913, of Chanel outside her Deauville boutique, wearing a belted jacket and wide pants. She has been credited for introducing a boyish simplicity into French fashion. An avant-garde whisper of coming freedom.

Colette, the writer of such extraordinary novels as La Vagabonde (1910), which at its heart is about women in a male-dominated society, wore men’s suits, subversively challenging the preordained rules of female self-expression. The famous sepia photograph of Colette sitting on a simple wooden chair, her leg crossed on her knee, rakishly smoking a cigarette, is epochal. A postcard of this image has been on my desk since I first discovered it in my teens. It was George Sand who inspired Colette. Subversive. Intelligent. She took a masculine nom de plume and wore men’s clothes to gain access to men-only situations in Paris. (I loved wearing my dad’s clothes. They were just great, especially his cream linen suit that was worn for cricket matches, and ties too.)

There is a long list of women who have espoused change and challenged fashion and femininity, in random order a few who stand out include: Virginia Woolf; KD Lang; Tilda Swinton – she did play Orlando; the Gainsbourgs, any of that family; Bianca Jagger; Joni Mitchell; Catherine Deneuve; Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy; Tash Sultana; Courtney Barnett. Tomboys. Boss ladies. “Cos I slay all day.” Thank you, Beyoncé.

So we are going to be blokes, the Thin White Duke, really – would he have called it that now? As it’s all about the super-skinny tailored Celine spring/summer ’19, Hedi Slimane’s Celine, once you get past the schlock-horror of where he has moved the Philophile Céline dial. Put men in men’s clothes and say they are unisex, put women in micro-

short dresses alongside these but don’t label them as unisex. Interesting. Anyway, we think Mr Bowie would have liked it; he did like to keep people on their gender mettle. So the new Celine is like a Saint Laurent rerun with a hefty side of Dior Homme, but we did love Slimane’s Dior Homme and, boy, did women and men love those suits.

It’s all not all about narrow. Spring/summer ’19 suiting also has the swagger and shade of the 1980s, those American-football wide shoulders, the exaggerated X shape, for 2018 X-factor women. The 1980s was that last style decade when women really motored into the workplace in more of a masculine uniform en masse and talked careers, challenged men for positions of power and said a baby would have to wait. Not any more: now we just do both if superhumanly possible.

In all her career, 65 years as monarch, Queen Elizabeth has been spotted wearing trousers only a handful of times, including in New Zealand in the 1970s; leaving hospital in 2003; and on holiday in Scotland to celebrate her 80th birthday in 2006.

And so, girls will be boys, because at times it’s all about fooling misogynists. Make them a little bit uneasy. Play them at their own game. The gender pay gap is starting to crack and crumble. Pay is transparent now at the BBC in the UK and will be soon here at the ABC.

Why should we be any different? We too are titans and captains. Clever smart, pants or dress. So dearest designers, we will wear your spring/summer ’19 suits rooted in male mythology, that are no longer shocking for any of us, but are just cool, ice-cool, parity cool? A feminist statement? Maybe not so much anymore, maybe a gender-fluid empowering statement for a young generation of people who really don’t like to label either way, or even at all. And so for the coming season Martin Margiela, Louis Vuitton, Alexander McQueen, Givenchy, Stella McCartney, Valentino, Balenciaga, Haider Ackermann and Gucci all offered great suits for a woman or man, many had both genders on the runway that were not instantly distinguishable by dress code, gender private. ’Tis the way forward.

In the 1947 book On Human Finery, Quentin Bell, the nephew of Virginia Woolf, wrote: “Fashionable exposure begins by shocking the vulgar, but it ends by establishing itself as a custom and thus ceasing to shock; its failure is implicit in its success. But so long as there is a development of the mode the quality of outrage is maintained.”

In 2018, after many decades of outrages, changes are still happening, women and men can dress equally. Acceptance. Diversity. Peace.