That of feminism and fashion is a story of coexisting affections and disaffections with a long tradition. On the one hand, feminism has been responsible for pointing out throughout history all those traps that patriarchy set for women by using fashion to discipline them through aesthetic pressure. But on the other hand, fashion has served countless times as a weapon for feminist movements to express their demands in a world in which women were assigned the duty of existing to be seen instead of to be heard.
Well-known is the story of designer Mary Quant and the popularization of the miniskirt, which in the sixties embodied what it meant for women to be able to stop hiding their bodies and take control of their sexual freedom. Or the time when Coco Chanel decided to put on a pair of pants. Also that of that t-shirt-banner that Maria Grazia Chiuri launched with the motto “We should all be feminist” at the height of the commercial boom of feminism in 2017. But, what other dialogues have been established between fashion and feminism over time? ?
During the 1920s, just after World War I, the role of women in Europe and the United States changed significantly. The progressive but increasingly widespread incorporation of women into salaried work outside the home represented a true revolution in terms of the assumption of their autonomy and independence. Thus, many women began to adopt behaviors that until then had been reserved only for men, such as partying, consuming alcohol (despite the prohibition law) or approaching jazz and other indecorous forms of leisure that, without However, for the first time they made them freer.
Consequently, they began to leave behind those garments such as corsets and to cut their skirts shorter than ever, to knee length, as well as their hair, with bob hairstyles. They claimed their sexual freedom, comfort and, above all, their freedom of movement. And, despite the social scandal that all this aroused, these women made their own bodies, also through fashion, a tool that allowed them to be masters of themselves.
Few symbols in the history of fashion and beauty have gone through as many resignifications as red lipstick, an identifying element of great women like Eva Perón and Marylin Monroe. Initially, it was an immoral color, whose use was restricted to those women who lacked honor (or, rather, what the patriarchy considered as such). Later, however, many others began to appropriate it, turning it around to the point that the same conservative and patriarchal society reacted by transforming it into a useful tool for its own purposes.
When the suffragettes took over Fifth Avenue in New York in 1912, Elizabeth Arden gave them red lipsticks to demonstrate their support for the movement. A few decades later, Winston Churchill himself encouraged its use and production during World War II as part of his propaganda strategy, since he believed that women being beautiful was a way to raise the spirits of soldiers and American society as a whole. In fact, he even commissioned Arden herself to design a specific shade for it: Victory Red.
In this struggle over the symbolic use of red lipstick, it was debated between ending up being an element of hypersexualization of women, which put them at the service of the male gaze, or an element of vindication of their own existence in the public sphere. In any case, every time someone has tried to use it for the former, discrediting those who had decided to dye their lips lipstick, the reaction of feminists has been overwhelming.
Some examples: the Pico Rojo Women’s movement, in Nicaragua, started by Carmen Chow in response to the persecution carried out against activists like her within the Daniel Ortega regime; or the hashtag
In Spain, one of the aesthetic gestures most associated with the feminist revolution is the one that gives its name to the generation of women known, precisely, as Las Sinsombrero, in homage to it. This group of intellectual women, which included thinkers, artists and writers such as Maruja Mallo, María Zambrano, Remedios Varo and Luisa Carnés, among many others, rebelled against the gender impositions of the time, which forced women to have to to be, yes or yes, mothers and wives.
Mallo said that one day, walking with Lorca, Dalí and Margarita Manso during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, the four of them had the idea of ??taking off their hats, which at that time was a practically obligatory garment whose absence was considered a scandal. . “It seemed like we were congesting our ideas,” Mallo explained, referring to always having to wear it. The revolutionary nature of the decision is demonstrated in the reaction aroused then: as they crossed through the Puerta del Sol, people began to stone them.
They say that the trans and feminist activist Marsha P. Johnson was the one who threw the first brick against the police forces who tried to retaliate against LGTBIQ people on June 28, 1969 at the Stonewall club in New York. Johnson, who today is considered a historical reference for intersectional feminism, used to actively participate in voguing culture and ballrooms, spaces of celebration and resistance against the daily horror that crossed the lives of Afro people or people with dissident identities.
Here, fashion emerged as an essential revolutionary tool to question gender mandates and the dichotomy of normative aesthetics, which seemed to reserve certain ways of dressing (even making them an obligation) to cis women. Faced with the sobriety required of dissidents, who were expected to go as unnoticed as possible, many began to practice cross-dressing and drag, using striking, colorful and shiny elements, such as feathers and sequins. A statement of intentions in the form of an outfit.
Although today the most widespread color associated with feminism is purple, at the beginning of the 20th century the British suffragettes popularized the combination of green, white and purple as a symbol of their demands. Currently, while green is associated with the fight for the right to abortion and sexual and reproductive rights, white has ended up establishing itself as one of the favorite shades of power dressing. Thus, it is common to see leaders such as Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or even Yolanda Díaz herself, attend political events dressed in white suits.
The reason? The great march that took place on July 9, 1978 in Washington DC for the Equal Rights Amendment, which brought together more than 100,000 people – most of them women – all dressed in white.
While it is true that hoop earrings never go out of style, it is also true that they have not always enjoyed the same reputation. And its origin dates back to African culture and its use, traditionally, constituted a sign of identity for Afro women, something that, from white hegemony, detracted from their value, as if it were inelegant jewelry.
Currently, however, they have become something much more transversal, since rich white women have begun to include them in their looks as another accessory. Hence the importance of not forgetting that it was women like Josephine Baker, Sade and even Beyoncé who were really responsible for its popularization, to build a history of anti-racist fashion and from the recognition of those who were singled out for resisting without giving up their symbols. .
In 2023, the movie Barbie became one of the largest mainstream audiovisual products with feminist content in history. The barbiecore trend, born from the hype that the film aroused even before its release, was characterized by an indiscriminate use of the color pink, bows, hearts and everything that during the last century had been associated with hyperfemininity. infantilized.
Now, the coquette aesthetic seems to be taking over, without straying too far from the main premise: leaving behind that masculinized aesthetic, that power dressing that began as a symbol of empowerment in Thatcherite times and that served to demonstrate that women were so capable of hold positions of responsibility like men, ready to break glass ceilings.
Now, young girls react to this false empowerment, assumed as a new patriarchal and capitalist mandate that seems to require them to be superwomen: good mothers, professionally successful women in the terms in which the system establishes it and, of course, good feminists. For now, it seems that they are doing so by recovering what the misogynist gaze has always called frivolous and banal because it is linked to femininity and women. We will have to see how it continues to evolve.
