Jezebel 
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New York, 6:17 PM
Mon Dec 21
44 posts in the last 24 hours
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12/16/09
Also, as a side note, I remember I went shopping recently with my mother and tried on some 50's dresses. She hated them ("You look like you're waiting for your husband to come home and you baked him cookies!") and I realized that for her, she saw the 50's dresses her mother wore & that she rebelled against with her hippie clothes, where I saw a pretty dress. So I think perhaps because young women are so removed from the oppression of that time period, we can appreciate its clothes more.
12/15/09
12/15/09
Women of the 50s used excessive flouncy skirts in part as a movement away from a wartime era, a period where women had limited access to fun fabrics. With women working in more industrial jobs during WWII, fun clothes were also just impractical. Who wouldn't want to mix it up with girly stuff?
I think it's too easy to remember a period with one symbol and meaning, when the truth is so much more complicated.
12/15/09
'This is what you are going to wear this year. We have decided it for you ahead of time. You will like it, and you will say you like it. Resistance is futile (or, maybe you're just the next hot thing).'
That said, I am so sick of foil and studs.
12/15/09
Now I really have to finish grading so I can get to posting.
12/15/09
I don't think just because I prefer to wear vintagey dresses screams that I want to be locked in a kitchen making meatloaf, and martinis while I wait for my husband to come home, so I can kiss him on the cheek when he gets home.
Sometimes I just like to wear a cute dress...
12/15/09
When I came out of college all sloppy and slouchy, my mom bought me all these horrible shoulderpad, baggy, unflattering 80s-style workwear. Watching film noir (Laura,The Big Sleep, anything Hitchcock, etc) and screwball comedy (The Thin Man, Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, etc), taught me how to dress both well and office-appropriately.
These films portrayed culturally disenfranchised women who were completely empowered (except for Hitchcock).
Plus, IT FITS ME. I've got a 23" waist and 38" hips, and they just don't cut fabric for that in our sad modern times.
12/15/09
12/15/09
12/15/09
Not that I don't think clothing can have meaning in context -- where and when I grew up, simple black/charcoal/navy/chocolate was the style and color spectrum that signified "career woman", and I think that's part of why I was drawn to that style for most of my teen years and young adulthood. I wasn't a traditional old-fashioned small-town girl, and I disliked anything that signified such. But the older I get and the more confident in myself I become, the less I care about what an outfit might "mean" to others and the more I focus on whether I actually like it aesthetically... which means my wardrobe has gradually done an almost total 180 from that [think Chuck from Pushing Daisies and Emma from Glee... heightened-reality vintage-girly]. And so far as I know, no one has ever assumed anything about me or my politics based on my clothes, because my actions and words speak a LOT louder than that. In fact, the idea of there being any particular way one can dress that signifies "Feminist" (aside from wearing a NOW t-shirt?) presupposes that there is one "right" way to be a feminist, or to present oneself as female, which I find offensively reductive.
12/15/09
I'm a historian/history teacher. Even though I strongly loathe the treatment of women in past eras, I still enjoy the study of such history. This makes people less likely to forget ill treatment and to (hopefully) progress past it.
As far as vintage goes, I like wearing old stuff because there's a history. As a person obsessed by history, finding it in everyday items (such as clothing) adds an entirely new dimension to that context.
Sure, I've thought about the implications of wearing vintage and the potential feminist or anti-feminist statement (depending on who you talk to), but for me personally, it's all about me being a massive dork about history.
12/15/09
We like to think that skinny jeans and high heels aren't contemporary analogues to some of the symbolically-heavy vintage fashions everyone likes so much, but I'm sure '50s housewives saw a similar distance between the daily costumes they were slingshotting themselves into and the corsets worn by their Victorian counterparts. They too probably rolled their eyes at the notion that anyone would think their hoop skirts said anything about their culture's ideas/ideals of womanhood.
But we know it's more complicated than that. And I think we could have a more interesting conversation if we took that as given, instead of finding ways to dismiss those points in defense of individual behavior.
12/15/09
12/15/09
12/15/09
Witness the glut of blogs devoted to cooking, knitting, sewing and such, wherein gals in their 20s and 30s document their adventures in rediscovering the things their great-grandmothers did out of sheer necessity. Recreational cooking, wearing funky vintage clothes and engaging in crafty hobbies (which produce garments and home items that would surely be cheaper if made in a factory in China) are all fun, indulgent things.
(Says the middle-class girl who cooks only when she feels like it, spends her disposable income on random vintage objects, and spends $10 and five days on one pair of hand-knitted socks because she has the luxury of time and a [very] few extra bucks).
12/15/09
12/15/09
Levi's were invented and sold to California miners, but I don't think about the harsh economic and social realities those miners faced when I'm putting on my favorite pair of jeans.
Similarly, the classic men's suit has basically stayed the same since 1880 or so, from what I can tell. Minor variations here and there, of course, but essentially identical. When I got married a couple of years ago I bought a vintage tux from the sixties, and the biggest difference I could tell was in the quality of construction.
Do men's fashions exude an aura I'm not seeing?
12/15/09
12/15/09
Men's fashions are more static than women's are, but there is a lot of interesting things that go on there, perhaps in not ways you're thinking about them. Think of the code of dress of white wife beaters and baggy jeans and tattoos and what that might symbolize to you, the leather motorcycle jacket, the Zoot Suit... All these looks have specific socioal meanings.
12/15/09
Sorta OT, but you seem to know a ton about the subject. Are there any good books you can recommend for me to read so I can learn more about the subject? Thanks!
12/15/09
"On Fashion" by Shari Benstock was the first book that introduced me to looking at fashion in a broader context and I still have a copy of it on my shelves. I would also recommend "Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism" by Linda Scott, the Beauty Myth, and "Dress Codes" by Ruth Rubenstein.
If you're looking for male-specific works, I think you might be SoL on that matter, and many of the academic works on fashion tend to brush males by the wayside. Most of the really interesting things I've read about male fashion trends tend to be in other books -- try topics on youth culture in particular, or film analysis, especially in genre films.