clothing
“Historically, feminism and fashion have been pitted against one another,” writes Manjima Bhattacharjya in her book, Mannequin. It’s a dilemma the fashion industry has struggled with for decades – being perceived as flippant, or existing in a vacuum”
What if we refused to assimilate? What if we collectively decided to dress in a way that made it so society could not render us invisible?
While women’s colleges are certainly a step ahead of other institutions in creating spaces of liberation and encouraging freedom of choice, this rare advantage must expand itself onto the landscape of our entire country.
Attire and sexuality in the common imagination and approach as represented (and also as received) by the mainstream media tell us a lot about prevailing attitudes to both. Advertisements bombard us with all kinds of representations, negative and positive, of human sexuality, sexual expression and desire. In the creation and marketing of attire and fashion, there is a great awareness of sexual buy-in or rejection by the market – that’s us.
How could I be trans if I didn’t tick off all the correct checkboxes demanded by politics, law, society and even the transgender community itself?
If a woman’s clothing is tight or revealing (in other words, sexy), it sends a message — an intended one of wanting to be attractive, but also a possibly unintended one of availability. If her clothes are not sexy, that too sends a message, lent meaning by the knowledge that they could have been. There are thousands of cosmetic products from which women can choose and myriad ways of applying them. Yet no makeup at all is anything but unmarked. Some men see it as a hostile refusal to please them.
I find that my own clothes are all just pieces of a larger archive I’m slowly constructing: an archive of the women I love, a half-hearted attempt at mimicking what I love.
Clothes for me are our first line of defence. They are also our first act of providing relief.
For women like me, there is an enormous lack of options in addition to the market that relegates us to a corner of ‘plus-size brands’
“Large will not fit you.” / She is scoping me, up and down, eyes / Flicking fast and darting away…“Try extra-large instead.”
“Large will not fit you.” / She is scoping me, up and down, eyes / Flicking fast and darting away / From the roundness of my breasts / To the happy jiggle of my thighs.
Why must others judge her appearance and grace
When true beauty is not confined to a face?
In a world obsessed with the outer shell,
She knows in her heart inner beauty dwells.
In tailoring the way we present ourselves to the world – be it as fashionista, frump or an artful fusion of the two – we think we are the ones making a choice about how we express our gender and sexuality along with other markers of our identity.
For many people, fashion serves as a vehicle for expressing their unique identities, their political beliefs, and their sexual orientation.
Fashion is a language that expresses survival, rebellion, freedom, visibility and invisibility, identity, representation and inclusion.