Josephine Baker and her pet leopard, Chiquita
Beyoncé in the ‘Formation’ music video, wearing an ensemble reminiscent of the SNCC.
Members of the SNCC protesting.
Fashion’s relationship to capitalism is also a source of analysis, as we can examine the complexities which arise from an industry with feminist philosophies that operates within a competitive, market-driven system. As Ilya Parkins explains, “With its embedded relation to global capitalism, its ability to penetrate the psychic lives of consumers and wearers, and its expressive power, the fashion system is an ideal diagnostic tool for the contemporary moment” (Parkins 2018). Fashion’s role in capitalism can serve feminism through the proliferation of a woman-dominated industry and the creation of micro-enterprises.
Angela McRobbie suggests that as a job sector, fashion has the potential to make women’s working lives more equitable and socially engaged. She demonstrates this through her research of micro-enterprises in Berlin, London, and Milan, which determined the corporate orientation of fashion as once a source of resistance to a more egalitarian system. McRobbie delineates the current systems of each city and explains how female designers work within each system: designers from Berlin rely on government grants which are given to those who demonstrate social engagements within their communities, designers in London rely on networks created in school due to the highly stratified and competitive nature of the industry, and designers from Milan pour all their energy into creating start-ups. Furthermore, within each respective city is a network that exists parallel to the corporate model of fashion, utilizing local artisans and resources to expand their business. For example, the predominantly female cohort in Milan replenished several traditions associated with Italian fashion, such as working with silks and leather goods.
Similarly, in Berlin, designers across genres (the avant-gardes, the socially engaged, and the low-income home-based crafters) work together in an informal capacity, relying on one another in a way that breaks down a hierarchical system. The same is true for London, where the industry has become led by self-organized, informal networks of former art and design schools and predominantly female graduates. McRobbie’s research demonstrates how all three cities function as micro-enterprises, creating a less hierarchical system for women to work within. She summarizes by explaining there is an urgent need to decentralize fashion away from the existing corporate framework and continue to shift toward this more egalitarian system. McRobbie’s research demonstrates the immense potential fashion has as a site of institutional feminist change.
Another example of a feminist fashion designer operating within capitalism is Phoebe Philo, whose “new minimalism” aesthetic allows wearers to impart their own personal style onto their clothing. Philo built the fashion house Céline and her current aesthetic on the idea that women may feel more powerful and persuasive when they feel less visible. Erin O’Connor argues that this uniquely feminist approach allows us to explore performative rhetoric within Philo’s design, analyze how clothing functions beyond language, and explore authorship within fashion design. She begins by defining performative rhetoric as “utterances that do not only describe but, through language and embodiment, constitute the things they say” (O’Connor 2018). In the case of Philo’s work, O’Conner asserts that we can understand the performative value of Philo’s clothes by understanding that clothes simply exist as the material goods we put on ourselves; however, it is the meaning we ascribe to them that makes them function within the larger network of fashion. Philo’s “new minimalism” does just that, allowing wearers to “create a signature citationality via clothing that produces its own ‘unwriting’ therefore allowing the wearer to believe she inscribes her own iteration while maintaining control” (O’Connor 2018). This feminist approach allows women to command and objectify their clothing, as opposed to the inverse. Philo’s feminism exists in her ability to share her authorship, “giving visibility even as she gives privacy,” and creating spaces for wearers to erase the connotations associated with their various roles (mother, feminine, etc.) (O’Connor 2018). By making the wearer central to the design, Philo deconstructs the notion that fashion only serves to objectify women. O’Connor reaffirms this by stating, “the ability to rewrite a self into the text (the clothing) while also letting the text become part of that self/life sounds like Iris Young’s version of a feminine language which, ‘moves and twists, starts over again from different perspectives, does not go straight to the point’” (O’Connor 2018).
The present literature demonstrates the immense value fashion holds in practicing feminism. Through an analysis of capitalistic, political, and cultural functions, it becomes clear that fashion can be utilized to grow female-dominated industries, allow us to communicate political messages to the mainstream, and act as a mode of physical analysis for feminist thought. What you wear communicates something about you—we can better understand this through feminism.
Josephine Baker wearing her famous banana skirt and bra ensemble.
In addition to Baker’s revisioning of primitivism, artist Beyoncé has utilized fashion as a means of deliberate political resistance. Her 2016 music video,’ Formation,’ addressed the media’s critiques concerning “ the blackness of her daughter’s hair and nose” while drawing “a firm affiliation to her black and Creole Southern heritage” (Sweeney-Risko 2018). Kadeen Griffiths explains that ‘Formation’ was Beyoncé’s way of speaking to black women and telling them to acknowledge their beauty unapologetically.
Beyoncé’s “Formation” music video opens with her perched atop a police cruiser sinking below the flooded streets of New Orleans. As the car drifts further beneath the surface, Beyoncé turns her body into an agency of power, spreading out her arms and legs over the vehicle in a way that suggests she’s pushing the car under—a symbol of her resisting the police state. The significance of this visual is intensified when we also account for the political undertones in her clothing. Sweeney-Risko explains that Beyoncé is wearing garb reminiscent of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC.
Created in the 1960s, the SNCC was an organization of politically active students who traveled through the American South planning sit-ins, freedom rides, voter registration drives, etc. (Sweeney-Risko 2018). While working in the South, the students began to adopt a style similar to that of the black working class, sporting blue jeans and simple dresses (Ford 2015). Like Josephine Baker, this silent rebellion openly opposed the black middle class’s strategy of respectability politics. Just as the clothing of the SNCC signified they would not follow the gendered narrative of respectability politics, Beyoncé’s reiteration demonstrates her solidarity with the underprivileged black Americans of the South (Sweeney-Risko 2018). Through her use of historically layered fashion, Beyoncé expands her articulation of black feminist thought while maintaining the mainstream appeal that helps to make her message so potent.
Phoebe Philo for Céline and her ‘New Minimalism’ aesthetic.
References
Beauvoir, Simone de. (1949) 1997. The Second Sex. London: Vintage Books.
Black woman's manifesto. (1970). New York: Distributed by Third World Women's Alliance.
Cooper, Brittney. (2017). Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Ford, Tanisha. (2015). Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Gibson, Pamela. (2013). "To Care for Her Beauty, to Dress Up, Is a Kind of Work": Simone de Beauvoir, Fashion, and Feminism. WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, 41(1-2), pp.197-201.
Griffiths, Kadeen. (2017). “This is what Beyoncé’s Lemonade Meant to Me as a Black Woman & this is why it Needed to Win Album of the Year.” Bustle, February 14. https://www.bustle.com/p/this-iswhat- Beyoncés-lemonade-meant-to-me-as-a-black-woman-this-is-why-it-needed-to-win-albumof- the-year-37653.
Groeneveld, Elizabeth. (2009). ‘Be a feminist or just dress like one’:BUST, fashion and feminism as lifestyle. Journal of Gender Studies, 18(2), pp.179-190.
Hunter, Margaret. (2008). Teaching and Learning Guide for: The Persistent Problem of Colorism: Skin Tone, Status, and Inequality. Sociology Compass, 2(1), pp.366-370.
Jackson, Sue. and Vares, Tina. (2013). ‘Perfect skin’, ‘pretty skinny’: girls' embodied identities and post-feminist popular culture. Journal of Gender Studies, 24(3), pp.347-360.
McRobbie, Angela., Strutt, D. and Bandinelli, C. (2019). Feminism and the Politics of Creative Labour: Fashion Micro-enterprises in London, Berlin and Milan. Australian Feminist Studies, 34(100), pp.131-148.
O’Connor, Erin. (2018). Performative Rhetorics in Invisibility: Phoebe Philo's Undone Authorship. Australian Feminist Studies, 33(98), pp.530-547.
Parkins, Ilya. (2018). Introduction: Fashion and Feminist Politics of the Present. Australian Feminist Studies, 33(98), pp.423-427.
Sweeney-Risko, Jennifer. (2018). Fashionable ‘Formation’: Reclaiming the Sartorial Politics of Josephine Baker. Australian Feminist Studies, 33(98), pp.498-514.
Sweet, Elizabeth. and Ortiz Escalante, Sara. (2014). Bringing bodies into planning: Visceral methods, fear and gender violence. Urban Studies, 52(10), pp.1826-1845.
How does Feminism Inform Fashion?
Fashion has long served as a reflection of our society, acting as a platform through which citizens can express their views, values, and aesthetics. In the past, fashion has been viewed by feminists as “a man-pleasing manipulation of the ‘natural woman’” (Gibson 2013). However, current feminist fashion scholarship rejects this notion, instead delineating how fashion can be used constructively and philosophically to uphold the principles of feminism. Fashion’s relationship with our bodies and society makes it a rich site of analysis, as our clothes act as the agency through which we can communicate feminist thought.
Fashion has deep political roots, as explained by Jennifer Sweeney-Risko, who details how black female artists such as Beyoncé and Josephine Baker utilized the clothes in which they performed as a mode of communication. Baker rose to fame after traveling to Paris in 1925 to escape the violence of segregation in the United States. Once there, she was able to monetize the racist stereotypes used against her by playing into the primitivism dominating Europe, an ideology that “interpreted black bodies and cultures in terms of a ‘primitive’ African past, one that was innocent of the horrors of modern, industrialised living categorized by events such as World War I and the rise of industrialisation” (Sweeney-Risko 2018).
In her most famous performance, Baker dons a sequined banana skirt and beaded bra, which leaves her nearly topless. Baker’s sexual dance “represented the primitive sexuality and availability of black women” (Sweeney-Risko 2018). Offstage, Baker accumulated an extensive collection of couture and expensive clothing, which she sported while walking down the Champs-Élysées with her pet cheetah, Chiquita. In leaning into the racist stereotypes forced upon her, Baker took Europe’s obsession with Africa and created a public identity for herself as a black woman who, under most circumstances, would not be permitted to perform.
Through analysis of her dress on and off stage, Sweeney-Risko explains that Baker’s performance represented a revisioning of black femininity, one that freed black women from the stereotypes to which they were historically constrained. This is best explained in the context of disrespectability politics, a theory that acknowledges “that respectability politics, the black strategy for equality based upon conservative, middle class white values, damages black women’s ability to express themselves fully” (Cooper 2017). Baker’s performances and fashion allowed her to exist within the primitivist system she was ascribed to while maintaining the respect she acquired as a talented black dancer. Through dress, Baker shifted the lens through which audiences viewed her and created a space where she could express herself.
A poster from a performance by Josephine Baker, demonstrating her incorporation of primitivism.