IMPRESSED BY MIK A
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Welcome to Impressed 1.5! Impressed 1.0 was situated in NYC, arguably the world’s epicenter of exciting, expressive personal style. In Impressed 1.0, I sought to understand the intricacies and joys of self-presentation for woman-identifying individuals, all while celebrating NYC’s vibrant fashion culture. As a reminder, I decided to call this personal style zine Impressed because I wanted to focus on women’s (and by that, I mean anyone who identifies as a woman) personal style and the complexity of representing oneself as a woman. What does it mean to “dress to impress”? And who exactly am I trying to impress? What kind of impression am I trying to make? Being grounded in theory, Impressed 1.5 speaks more pointedly to the relationship between personal style, fashion, and gender. This zine was produced for a class I’m taking on women and visual and media studies. Throughout this course, we’ve discussed the ways in which women are represented and represent themselves in media and art. My biggest take-away from the course is the complexity web of politics, history, race, sexuality, and cultural norms that underpin every representation of women that we consume visually. My goal in creating this zine is to emphasize, once again, that fashion and personal style are complex topics that are well-worth studying from an academic perspective. In this zine, you’ll find that traditional fashion discourse and media conveys a rigid representation of femininity and womanhood. Somewhat ironically, though, personal style is a wonderful tool that women can use to control their representation and play with their gender identity. I am passionate about personal style as a means of self-expression and have enjoyed better understanding its interplay with gender identity. I hope this zine inspires you to subvert expectations with your style, and most importantly, wear whatever you want. Please email me at mikadesh16@gmail.com with any thoughts. - Mika (April 2019)
These images and their corresponding captions, found in The Social Psychology of Clothing and Personal Adornment by Susan B. Kaiser, address the history of women’s fashion, along with the gendered discourse surrounding how women choose to clothe their bodies. Some of these captions made me laugh out loud, some made me cringe, and some were just plain irritating. The book was written in 1985, which probably explains the outdated language.
A Reflection on Personal Style + Agency I
always feel more in control of my life when I have time in the morning to pick out an outfit that I feel communicates my identity in a way that is both comfortable and visually pleasing. The clothing I choose to wear is a means by which I can shape how others perceive me and understand my identity. Some days, I’m feeling bold and a flamboyant, so I’ll put on a pair of red ruffle pants or my lime green Hawaiian shirt-dress. Other days, I want to feel more softfeminine, so I’ll pair a plaid mini-skirt with a black knit wrap top. And then there are the days when I want to feel comfortable and unstoppable as I move through the world, so I wear my Doc Martens or sneakers with jeans and an oversized band t-shirt. In this way, my personal style gives me agency over how I express myself, and specifically, how I express my identity as a woman. I definitely feel a tension between my obsession with personal style, and the relationship between personal and the fashion industry. The fashion industry is historically grounded in the exploitation of the female body, the perpetuation of cultural standards of femininity and female beauty, and the desirability of erotic capital. Women’s bodies are used to display clothing and accessories, often becoming nothing more than objects used and disposed by the industry. The industry is infamous for employing extremely thin bodies for shows and shoots; many models respond to beauty pressures by undergoing plastic surgery or adopting an eating disorder. Lastly, women’s sex appeal is of utmost importance to the fashion gaze that displays women in advertisements, magazines, and on runways. As stated by Leslie Rabine, “…the gaze functions in the domain of fashion as a framing device of the photograph that invests it
with desire and provides the erotic charge in which the image is bathed for the female spectator” (as cited in Miller 2016, 55). In this quote, Rabine emphasizes that female spectators to the fashion industry are bombarded with images that reinforce the utmost importance of women’s sex appeal and erotic capital in relation to the clothes they wear. Although the fashion industry is making progress on the aforementioned issues, there’s still have a long way to go.
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Despite these toxic underpinnings of the fashion industry, personal style itself can paradoxically be utilized as a means by which women can exercise agency over their identity presentation and how they display their femininity. In her 1996 book Fetish: Fashion, Sex, and Power, Valerie Steele discusses the notion of a “phallic woman.” Steele’s phallic woman “uses fashion to embody a kind of power that might be understood to threaten conventional masculinity by in turn signifying masculinity through fashion and in relation to the female body” (as cited in Miller 2016, 53). A phallic woman may be wearing a pair of baggy utility pants or a collared button-up shirt. Although Steele’s concept is antiquated in ascribing to a gender binary, it remains relevant in expressing how clothing can be used by women to empower themselves and present themselves outside of societal expectation for femininity. While the fashion industry may communicate a narrow notion of what being a woman is, personal style is a means by which we can make our performance of gender and identity fluid, exciting, and varied. It’s this empowering, agency-bestowing aspect that drives my passion for personal style as a valuable tool of self-expression for women.
Because everyone knows...
...that it’s the bag that makes the woman.
Bag e b a B
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Doing & Subverting Gender Through Personal Style Judith Butler’s formative essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” posits that gender is an aspect of identity that is established “through a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler 1998, 519). Per Butler’s view, gender is intentionally constructed by individuals and subsequently performed to the external world. The way individuals act out their gender is based on societal expectations deeply embedded in history, culture, and language. Butler goes as far as to say: “Just as a script may be enacted in various ways, and just as the play requires both text and interpretation, so the gendered body acts its part in a culturally restricted corporeal space and enacts interpretations within the confines of already existing directives” (Butler 1998, 526). As such, Butler’s theory outlines an expression of gender that must play by rules grounded in society’s perception of a gender binary. Butler’s theory of performativity speaks to fashion and personal style, especially for woman-identifying individuals. In circulating countless images of women in clothes, the fashion industry creates norms and expectations for what a woman is and how “woman” can be enacted through clothing. In a sense, fashion contributes to the construction of the female body by interpreting and materializing cultural codes that restrict how womanhood and femininity can be visually performed (Wissinger 2016, 289).
Does personal style reject these cultural codes, or does it fall prey to them just as the fashion industry at large does? I believe that personal style in the digital age, where OOTDs are accessible in abundance on Instagram and YouTube, is able to push the bounds of and manipulate the bounds of gender expression in demonstrating that there are countless ways to present as a woman. No longer is the performance of woman solely in the hands of the fashion industry and advertisements featuring women. Visuals of women have been amplified and democratized. I can take a mirror picture showcasing my outfit, post it to Instagram, and become an image of the performance of the female gender.
“…One can never be in fashion, as it is always becoming something else, just as one can never arrive at being a woman, as one is always becoming one in the process of doing gender” (Wissinger 2016, 294). In my opinion, personal style transcends the ephemerality of fashion. In a way, personal style subverts the notion that one should strive to “be in fashion,” replacing that aim with an ongoing, ever-evolving practice of self-expression. In this way, personal style supports the ongoing process of “doing gender,” where gender is something that is to be modulated, stretched, and tested through the everyday practice of getting dressed.
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On Personal Style // Identity Kits
Defining one’s personal style is a bit of an obsession within the fashion media space. I’ve spent many minutes anxiously trying to pin down my fashion aesthetic and worrying that I’m too all over the place in what I wear. The fixation on developing a coherent personal style stems from how we rely on clothing to communicate our identity with others. Sociologist Erving Goffman utilized the term “identity kits” in 1959 to refer to the forms of clothing and other bodily adornment that we employ to manipulate the image of ourselves that we present to others. Identity kits can incorporate a variety of apparel, hairstyles, makeup, jewelry, shoes, etc. that we mix and match to signify different “roles” we want to perform (as cited in Kaiser 1985, 126). When we pick out clothes to buy, we enhance and modulate our identity kits. When we deliberately pair items from our wardrobe together, we are pulling from our identity kit to craft a presentation that fits a particular look or identity that we are seeking to emulate on that particular day. Reflecting on one’s own identity kit is an interesting, revealing exercise. In taking stock of my own wardrobe, I realize that I gravitate to bold shapes, textures, colors, or patterns. These characteristics of my identity kit indicate that I prefer to project an image of a confident, bright personality. Maybe instead of trying to pin down our personal style, we should assess the items in our identity kits. Thinking about why we wear what we wear, and why we want to present the image of ourselves that we do, is a more fulfilling way to understand our personal style than attempting to define it within visual aesthetic terms.
References Kaiser, Susan B. 1985. The Social Psychology of Clothing and Personal Adornment. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. Miller, Janice. “Sigmund Freud: More than a Fetish: Fashion and Psychoanalysis.” In Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists, edited by Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik, 46-63. London: I.B. Tauris. Wissinger, Elizabeth. “Judith Butler: Fashion and Performativity.” In Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists, edited by Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik, 285-300. London: I.B. Tauris.
Things to Check Out On Fashion, edited by Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss “Fashionable Feminism or Feminist Fashion?” by Miglena Sternadori and Mandy Hagseth “Fashion, Representation, Femininity” by Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton “How Stockholm’s Best-Dressed BFFs Use Fashion to Confront Conformity” by Laird Borrelli Pergson “Finding My Androgynous Style: New Clothes, New Hair, Same Me” by Harling Ross