Fashion and Style

Fashion Friday: Jewelry

Greta Christina24 Comments

When the original conversation in this blog about fashion and style went south, I had two emotional reactions. The first was to want to crawl into a hole and hide; to think, “I never ever want to write about this topic again, it makes people hate me, I clearly can’t write about it without having people jump down my throat, so never mind, let’s just forget the whole thing.”

The second was to think. “Fuck that noise. I love this topic, and I’m fucking well going to write about it as much as I want. Anyone who’s interested can read it, and anyone who isn’t can ignore it, and the haters can go fuck themselves.”

This is me. Guess which route I’m taking.

I am officially inaugurating Fashion Friday. Every Friday, I’m going to write something about fashion and style. Maybe a little something… maybe a lot. Maybe an exegesis on some complex issue of fashion and society; maybe a discussion of a personal fashion issue I’m having; maybe some pretty pictures or a link to an interesting fashion blog.

I will do this every Friday, except when I don’t feel like it, and until I get bored.

*

Today’s Friday Fashion topic: Jewelry.

I came to jewelry late in the game. For years, it was barely in my style consciousness at all. I had a few pieces I wore for special occasions — but on a day to day basis, I never wore it. And I mean never. I didn’t hate it or feel anxious about it or anything; I just didn’t care about it enough to explore it. It seemed like a hassle, one more thing to worry about. I wanted to spend my clothing budget on, you know, clothes.

But as I’ve been exploring fashion and style more consciously and thoroughly, and as I’ve been having more fun with it, I’ve been embracing jewelry. And I’ve come to a couple of realizations about it that have made me want to embrace it and explore it even more. Continue reading “Fashion Friday: Jewelry” →

Fashion Friday: Jewelry
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Here's Where You Can Get That T-Shirt

Greta Christina7 Comments

Some people in my Facebook page have been asking, and I thought some of you might like to know as well: Here’s where you can get the awesome “Atheists” T-shirt I used to illustrate my last post.

And I would just like to point out: This is my very first post tagged with both the “Atheism” and “Fashion” categories. Let’s hope it’s not the last.

Here's Where You Can Get That T-Shirt

Fashion Can Be Hard/ Fashion Can Be Fun

Greta Christina72 Comments

I get that this stuff is hard. I really do.

When I wrote my recent pieces on fashion and style, I seem to have stepped on some very raw nerves. When I wrote that fashion could be seen as a sort of language, and that what we wear expresses something about ourselves, and that we can make that expression conscious instead of unconscious… a lot of people pushed back, and pushed back hard. And a lot of people did this in a way that made it clear: This was a sore spot, a frustrating and irritating and even painful issue.

If fashion and style are like a language… then for a lot of people, they’re a second language. And it’s one they don’t understand, and don’t feel comfortable with. They feel like they woke up in a world where people are speaking French, and they don’t know how to speak it, and they’re constantly saying “My hovercraft is full of eels” when they’re just trying to say “Please direct me to the railway station.” They feel intimidated. They feel self-conscious. They feel like people are judging them, or laughing at them behind their back, or jumping to conclusions about them that they feel aren’t fair at all. (Which does sometimes happen. There are mean people in the world, and they do, in fact, suck.) Or else they just don’t care about this particular form of expression… and they get frustrated and irritated by the expectation that they should.

And when I wrote that what we wear expresses something about ourselves, and that we can make that expression conscious instead of unconscious… they felt like I was lecturing them, or scolding them, or being the bitchy mean fashion girl making them feel stupid and ugly.

So I’ll say right at the outset: That was not my intention. If that’s how it came across, I sincerely apologize.

And I want to try having an actual conversation about it. Continue reading “Fashion Can Be Hard/ Fashion Can Be Fun” →

Fashion Can Be Hard/ Fashion Can Be Fun

Further Thoughts on Fashion and Style

Greta Christina89 Comments

So as I should have expected, my recent post on fashion and feminism generated a rather substantial volume of conversation. Much of it quite vigorous. (In fact, as of this writing, the fashion post has substantially more comments than my post on diplomacy and accomodationism. I think this is hilarious. I love you guys.)

And of all the comment debates and conversations that this blog has generated since it switched over to Freethought Blogs, this is the one I feel most inspired to respond to. Which I also think is hilarious.

A lot of people made a lot of points in this conversation. Some of which I take issue with, some of which I think are valid. I want to get into a few of these… and I want to start with one of the most valid ones.

Namely, the distinction between fashion and style.

When I talked about fashion in the original piece, a lot of people thought I meant “the dictates from the fashion industry about what people should and should not wear.” Do’s and don’ts. What’s in and what’s out. Fashion magazines; women’s magazines; celebrity fashion icons; celebrity gossip magazines obsessively examining this week’s red-carpet looks under a microscope; designers telling women what to wear this month and what kind of body we should wear it on. Etc. And this, these folks argued, was not a form of personal expression that could be likened to a language. This was a form of oppression. They made a distinction between style, i.e. the individual ways that a person expresses who they are through their clothing and other personal adornment… and fashion, i.e. what some self-appointed arbiters in society tell us about how we should be expressing ourselves, and indeed what we should be expressing. Nobody quoted Lester Bangs — “Style is originality, fashion is fascism” — but they certainly could have.

I thought it was clear from context that, when I used the word “fashion,” this wasn’t what I was talking about. But I guess it wasn’t. And it’s my responsibility as a writer to make myself clear. If a lot of smart and thoughtful people don’t get what I’m saying, then I need to say it more clearly. Let me try again.

In my original piece, I used the word “fashion” instead of “style” somewhat deliberately. I wasn’t just talking about one person’s individual expression — I was talking about the cultural vocabulary, the global conversation that goes on through clothing and hair and makeup and jewelry and shoes and other forms of personal adornment. I was using the metaphor of language to talk about clothing and personal adornment as a shared vocabulary and grammar that we use to communicate. And “fashion” seemed like a better word for that than “style.” (I also couldn’t resist the title “Fashion is a Feminist Issue,” with its echo of the famous book “Fat is a Feminist Issue.”)

But yes. What I was trying to get at is probably closer to what many people think of as “style” rather than “fashion.” (Especially since the word “fashion” seems to rub so many people the wrong way.)

And in fact, this discussion has given me a new way of looking at the distinction between fashion and style, and a new way of looking at the entire issue of using language as a metaphor for fashion and style. This is a new idea for me, one of my “thinking out loud” ideas, and I want to run it by y’all.

Here’s the idea:

Fashion is a language.

Style is what we choose to say in it. Continue reading “Further Thoughts on Fashion and Style” →

Further Thoughts on Fashion and Style

Fashion is a Feminist Issue

Greta Christina146 Comments

Can you be a feminist and still care about fashion?

As some of you may know, I’m pretty interested in fashion. I spend a fair amount of time and energy (and probably more money than I ought) on my wardrobe and appearance. I pay a fair amount of attention to other people’s style: admiring it, analyzing it, deciding if I can steal it. I watch TV shows about fashion. I read books and blogs about fashion. I buy fashion magazines, and even subscribe to a couple. (It would have been just one, but we got a two- for- one deal when we subscribed to Vogue and got Glamour thrown in for free.) At big public events, Ingrid and I will spend many happy hours checking out/ commenting on other people’s outfits. Fashion has become one of my central hobbies.

And in general, I find fashion to be a fascinating form of expression. A language, even. Not in the literal Chomskyan sense, of course — we’re not born with a fashion module wired into our brains, the way we’re born with language modules — but in a metaphorical sense. In the sense that many extremely useful parallels can be drawn between the two. In the sense that different articles of clothes are assigned meaning more or less arbitrarily, in the way words are assigned meaning — not because those meanings bear some connection to objective reality, but because we all more or less agree on their meaning. (It doesn’t matter why, historically, a suit and tie means “I am willing to treat social conventions with some degree of respect, and expect in return to be treated with respect myself” — that’s what it means now, regardless of its history). In the sense that the meanings of these clothes shift over time, the way the meanings of words shift over time, rendering them even more arbitrary. (The meaning of makeup on women, for instance, has shifted over the decades from “prostitute” to “brazen” to “fashionably cutting-edge” to “entirely conventional.”) In the sense that these meanings change depending on how we combine them — the “grammar,” if you will (jeans with muddy boots and a baseball cap from the feed store mean something different from jeans with stiletto heels and a $500 Dior T-shirt). In the sense that these meanings can change depending on context (jeans at a rock concert mean something different than jeans at a funeral). In the sense that different cultures assign vastly different arbitrary meanings to clothing. (A short skirt and stiletto heels mean something different in Manhattan than they do in Cedar Rapids… and something very different again in Dubai.)

In fact, fashion and style are so much like a language, I’m always a bit baffled when people say things like, “I want to be judged on who I am, not on the clothes I wear.” It’s a bit like saying, “I want to be judged on who I am, not on the words that come out of my mouth.” But that’s a point for another time.

Here’s my point for today. Fashion is a form of expression. A language of sorts. An art form, even.

It’s also one of the very few art forms/ languages/ forms of expression in which women have more freedom than men. Continue reading “Fashion is a Feminist Issue” →

Fashion is a Feminist Issue