Stylish Sexism - An Argument For Fashion
~ This “stuff”? Oh, okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you.
You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean.
You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic “casual corner” where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of “stuff.”~
The cerulean monologue. The most iconic moment in the film The Devil Wears Prada and one of my favorite film moments ever, tied with The Cool Girl Monologue. I love this monologue so much because it gets it. It puts the pent-up anger and frustration that comes from a girl who is interested in anything even remotely girly into words.
Because fashion is not an art form, no, of course not, it is just a shallow and pointless thing that girls do. And I mean, if a girl does something, of course, it doesn’t hold any worth.
That is why fashion isn’t, and never will be accepted as an art. Because even though it has a rich history and represents everything from class status to how the economy is doing to one's current emotional state, fashion is still far inferior to films that solely depict women as objects. Or books where the richest thing readers learn about a female character is what her body looks like. Or paintings by old white men that depict naked (but perfectly shaven and thin) women.
If you couldn’t tell, I am being sarcastic, but to me, that is what those who so violently claim fashion isn't an art sound like. Because the argument against fashion being an art form is truly only thinly veiled sexism, and another effort to keep women, and women's interests out of the art world. Or really, out of the world in general.
The definition of shallow is: having little depth or requiring little thought.
That is not the case with fashion. Many fashion designers come up with genius ideas on how to represent current events and cater to the public through fashion. As a society, we characterize entire decades and eras by the clothes people were wearing and what that means for the period. You can look at someone's outfit in a movie, or hear it described in a book and immediately know who that character is, through and through. An art form that is capable of portraying so much about a person is most definitely not shallow.
One of the arguments against fashion is that it contains trends and therefore speaks to the desire for societal conformity above all else. But aren’t there also trends in painting and sculpting styles? Writing styles? Styles of the film? Even styles of speech and day-to-day communication contain trends.
Trying to pin down the complex issue of societal conformity in fashion and fashion alone proves further sexism. As that claim is essentially saying the only reason girls dress well and according to current trends is because they are surface level.
This entire argument speaks to the larger idea that women cannot do anything, literally anything without the thing they are doing being called worthless. Enjoying fashion and containing substance and depth are not mutually exclusive and rather fashion says so much about a person, the way someone dresses describes their depths and multitudes, whether you want it to or not.
