Le Smoking
Came across Robin Givhan’s thoughts on the tuxedo as it relates to gender roles and identity politics in my Google Reader today. Her article is pegged to Constance McMillen (the lesbian Mississippi teen banned from going to her prom for wanting to wear a suit) and sagely breaks down how the tuxedo becomes a tool of societal defiance when worn by a woman:
No matter how often we attempt to deny the notion that clothing exerts such outsize influence over how we define one another, episodes like the one is Mississippi serve as a reminder that we still use clothes as a way to signal to people how they should react to us.
The tuxedo isn’t just a woman’s sophisticated alternative to an evening gown. Indeed, when it was first offered up on thine catwalks in the 1970s by Yves Saint Laurent, who referred to it as “le smoking,” it was a provocation. The sleek pantsuit allowed a woman to dabble in a man’s world and leave her frothy universe behind. In taking on his evening uniform, she assumed his mantle of power and his cloak of charisma. In some ways, she was teasing him, displacing him and making him moot.
…In our small corner of the world, each gender is assigned particular pieces in the fashion closet. (She gets frilly blouses; he gets wingtip loafers.) And while there can be vast variations on certain themes, the rules mostly are set. A host of stereotypes that connect gender to attire then proceed to help us make sense of the world. They provide a shorthand for understanding relationships and hierarchies. .
And it gets better:
Men’s apparel owns the language of power and authority. The clothes are in service to the man. They are tailored to him — designed to make him look good and feel comfortable. Men’s suits are stitched to be easily altered. Pants are sold unhemmed. The clothes are not finished until the gentleman says they are. Menswear aims to make men feel like they are the masters of their destiny.
Womenswear all too often is constructed to make women feel manipulated, shamed or unworthy. Comfort? Often it’s an afterthought. Something as simple as a pair of pants, hemmed to a particular length, that do not fit, whisper to a woman: You are the wrong size for this perfect pair of trousers. You have failed. Women, in a fit of insecurity and self-flagellation, all too often believe they have to alter themselves — fix themselves — to fit the clothes.
I second that. I’d even take that conversation a bit further and point out the fact that since the 1950s, the vast majority of fashion’s most influential designers have been men. Take a scroll through the collections of Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli on up through Vivienne Westwood, Jil Sander, Miuccia Prada and Phoebe Philo. With the exception of, say, Donatella Versace (who ironically is building on a vision originally laid out by her brother), the clothing produced by women generally has a certain forgiving ease to them that isn’t always apparent in the work of their male counterparts.
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