8.

In Defense of Fashion II

My mom just sent my sister and me this movie via email.  I love how these women - as quirky as they are -  use fashion to their own ends. They use it as a way to exercise creativity, to sustain a certain youthfulness, to communicate whatever they want to the world.

I think the right to dress one's self is powerful and a critical part of feeling "in control." In Margret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, cumbersome uniforms are used to oppress women. Physically heavy and with extensive coverage, the costumes leave the handmaid's deprived of the simple, yet important power of bodily freedom. Certain colors correspond with specific roles in society. A woman's role and rights are insinuated immediately with whatever she wears. Women are not given the right to control their own immediate reality, the initial, visual message sent out to whom ever they encounter.

In this light,  power resides in the right to choosing how you dress. In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf references a number of devastating trials in which the key right withheld from women was the right to dress. In these examples, workplace dress codes are manipulated to fit the needs of the employers and to render female employees helpless. Wolf cites Diaz v. Coleman, in which she says, "a dress code of short skirts was set by an employer who allegedly sexually harassed his female employees because they complied with it"(39). In M. Schmidt v. Austicks Bookshops Ltd., another case was lost by a female employee after the court "ruled that telling a woman how to dress was no more than trivial"(40).

In reality, Wolf observes, "the area of appearance seems to be the one where women feel they can most easily exert some control over how they will be responded to" (43).

I often forget it, but with the process of getting dressed everyday comes the power to communicate.