6 minute read
Imagination Wove This Flesh Garment:
An Exploration on Fashion and Its Complacency in the Gender Binary
By Van Anh (Moon) Dang (International Trade & Marketing ‘23)
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Fashion (noun), defined as “the prevailing style (as in dress) during a particular time” by Merriam-Webster Dictionary, indicates the specific sartorial choices that are well-liked and accepted by a dominant group of people. Fashion (verb), defined as “to give shape or form to : to make, construct, or create (something) usually with careful attention or by the use of imagination and ingenuity,” illustrates the manner in which a structure is created through the action of sculpting and draping the body with garments. This action being done usually references the dependent relationship it has to the person performing the action – that is, the garments’ wearer.
Fashion can be seen as a visual and tangible way for individuals to explore identity and self expression, since the wearer has full control over what they can place on their canvas. Therefore, what one chooses to display on one’s body directly reflects the relationship one has to oneself. However, we should question whether we truly have the full autonomy we may think we do when the act of fashioning oneself is being executed.
What are the factors that come to mind when constructing an outfit: where you are going? Who you’ll be seeing? How you want to be perceived?
Fashion, as individualistic of an experience as it is, is a reflection of the self in relation to the world. A person’s garment choices not only paint a picture of their character, but are also indicative of how they have been socialized to think and act. Through an aggregate of individuals interacting with one another in a collective space, a culture manifests itself. With a culture comes sets of norms, values and beliefs. To not live in defiance of these rules, individuals tend to submit to an accepted way of behaving. More specifically, the concepts of “womanhood” and “manhood” are prime examples of the cultural norms that our society has designed and implemented. These concepts of “womanhood” and “manhood” greatly impact the sartorial choices that we make on a daily basis.
What is “womanhood” and what is “manhood?” What defines being a “woman” versus being a “man?” These are nothing but arbitrary concepts defined by a consistent set of behaviors and the patterns associated with them. Gender is a socially constructed understanding that we as a collective agree to adhere to. To understand gender as a performance, it is crucial to bring up the work of philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler. She argues that gender is performative – meaning that the performance of gender is what makes gender exist.
Gender identity is constructed through a continuous number of acts that create “the appearance of substance” that the audience and performers come to believe as truth. As gender identity is defined as the stylized repetition of acts through time, not a seemingly seamless identity, Butler argues “the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style.”
The division of people into the binary of male vs. female creates a power dynamic by declaring one group powerful and the other powerless; it is a system ushered in by colonialism to exercise mass control. By exploring precolonial communities, we open our eyes to a pre-existing world filled with expansive gender identities that do not exist in a fixed binary structure. Such examples being India’s hijra, a community of intersex, asexual and transgender people, whose existence has long been revered in South Asia. Dating back as early as 1950s to the indigenous Zapotec cultures of Oaxaca, Mexico, there are muxe, people who are assigned male at birth that dress and behave in ways associated with being female. Another indigineous community known as the Ojibwa people, who lived in what is now considered Manitoba, Canada and North Dakota, U.S., also celebrate the idea of gender fluidity. These gender variant people are called two-spirit, translated from the Ojibwa’s words niizh manidoowag, representing people that carry both masculine and feminine spirits within them. It’s crucial to point out, however, that the term twospirit has been met with criticism from indigenous peoples, as it still implies a binary and does not fully encapsulate their beliefs of sexual and gender variance. However, the European colonial powers brought upon the violent erasure of indigenous peoples, cultures, values and belief systems through Christian beliefs about gender. Christian missionaries at the time acted as the religious accomplices to the Europeans’ imperialist agenda. Subsequently, the cultural norm of the gender binary was forcibly implemented worldwide.
As an industry with roots in Western imperialism, colonialism and white supremacy, fashion has acted as a convenient tool for the widespread exploitation of marginalized identities that do not fit within the cisgender heteronormative society. Fashion, as liberating as one may assume it to be, is one of the main contributors in the creation andexacerbation of the gender binary. One of the most notable moments of strict gender roles being enforced in fashion history is during 16th and 17th century Victorian England. During this time, the relationship between the anatomized body and sartorial presentation was imperative. Specifically, the dressing and display of the legs was a privilege for men. Bifurcated clothing that covered men were the defining garments of gender; these bifurcated garments, known as breeches, were worn only by men. As young boys mature and graduate from wearing gowns to breeches, it was a celebratory moment and an honor for a boy to be “breeched,” or obtain his first pair of breeches. Breeches becamea symbolic cultural understanding of manhood, and since they were inexorably tied to masculinity, women were not allowed to wear them and would be criticized for being “unwomanly” (shown in Figure 1).
Figure 1: John Leech’s cartoon from Punch magazine, 1851 depicting an “unwomanly” female adopting masculine traits after wearing bloomers
Up until the late 1800s, mass campaigns calling for women’s dress reform followed the movement of Bloomerism. Bloomers, named after the originator Amelia Bloomer, were Turkish-style trousers that were usually worn under a loose over-tunic reaching around the knee (shown in Figure 2). The movement was met with harsh and negative criticism. Unintentionally, this wave of dress reform coincided with the question of women’s rights. According to Colin McDowell in The Anatomy of Fashion, “Bloomerism lectures almost invariably included discussions of the position given to women in society & their rights under law.” The change was too radical for British society. At the 1875 Parliament session that debated education options for women, one man stated that the debate was a political agitation brought from America by women who “usurped male attire.” Not all women who wanted emancipation were in favor of trousers and vice versa, but the two social movements were linked. The term “bloomers” later became a derogatory term against strong-minded, “unwomanly” females. Although the 20th century brought two world wars, universal suffrage, contraception and the Equal Pay Act, it still did not allow women equal access to trousers.
Figure 2: Amelia Bloomer wearing bloomers
The fight for equal rights to wear trousers is one of many representative examples of the intersectionality between gender and fashion within society. Fashion has been used to exercise social control on a specific gender category since the dawn of time. Gendering fashion is not only holding design back in terms of what you are allowed to create under “womenswear” and “menswear,” but it is holding back society as a whole. Consequently, the call to degender fashion is one of utmost importance. Fashion is a creative expression, and creative expressions should allow us to liberate ourselves from arbitrary norms. If we do not allow creative expressions to freely form, we are not allowing human beings to freely be.
Illustration by Delaney Siegler
