When the bustle went out of fashion, the average woman must have felt joyously liberated, permitted as she was to stand and sit without a huge lump of horsehair wedged above her bottom.
And when corsets were released, so that underwear no longer meant asphyxiation, she would doubtless have embraced the liberty bodice as a symbol of emancipation. When a few daring women shed skirts in favour of wide trousers in the 1930s, they claimed a thrilling freedom for, like a Tampax ad, they could now climb, ride and play tennis. By the late 1940s, all that the overalled factory worker longed for was a voluminous skirt to twirl about her calves.
For the past century, each decade has presented women with a fresh idea of what it is to be emancipated by fashion, every new look offering the promise of sartorial freedom. And yet each failed to deliver lasting liberation. While the basic structures of men’s fashion have remained almost static, women have embarked on a frantic fun-fair ride through length, shape and cut in a bid to discover a form of clothing that offers freedom as well as — or in spite of — fashion.
Liberation means different things to different women. For some, it is an androgynous release from the lustful male gaze; for others, the ability to move the way a man moves, without the fear of something ripping or popping off. For the rest, it means a chance to look attractive, painlessly.
In the Sixties, liberation was tights and miniskirts. A swinging young woman could bend, stretch and have sex without worrying about pinging suspenders.
By the Seventies, fashion freedom was aligned with the concept of feminism. Bra-burning was key, although most women discovered that unsupported breasts were a direct route to chafing. There was a brief, jolly period of unisex fashion until the fashion companies got bored and designed jeans tighter, tops smaller, and boiler suits unpopped to the waist.
But, as women prodded at the glass ceiling, there came the power suit. Its initial aim was to help women compete with men in the boardroom by aping the bulky, male signifiers of success, but the trend to accessorise with red, S&M-style stilettos led to the now ubiquitous — and deeply undermining — porn image of the bespectacled businesswoman about to be ravished. Nothing changed.
By the Nineties, women were still staggering to work in toe-squeezing stilettos, wearing bras that crushed, pushed and lifted, snapping on flesh-pinching, hold-up stockings under their skirts because men preferred them to tights. We still weren’t released from the male gaze, or bodily discomfort, or the fact that running for a bus meant risking a pratfall.
At least, not until the arrival of the Spice Girls, with their shrieked girl-power war cry, and their tungsten determination to force every female over the age of three into crop tops and thongs. It was about reclaiming the power of womanhood. It was about dressing for ”who you are inside”.
It swiftly became about women drinking their own body weight in blue vodka shots, while wearing a fluffy bra and a visible G-string.
Our latest chance to embrace true fashion liberation arrived this week with the news that thongs are out of fashion. The discomfort of a flossed bottom is to be replaced by the far more comfortable, stretchy boy-pants. At last, perhaps, we can relax — a glimpse won’t drive men wild, they’re easy to wear, they won’t inch painfully above our waistbands if walking speed increases beyond a slow totter.
The hope is that next season’s outer fashions will prove equally emancipating — baggy jeans perhaps, with flat boots, and cotton tops. A brief glance at the fashion pages, however, promises otherwise. This time around, we’ll be emulating ballerinas. We’ll be cinching our waists with satin ribbon, draping ourselves in layers of drifting chiffon, and accessorising with ”dainty” satin high heels. And we’ll wonder afresh why we put up with the tyranny of fashion, why we don’t just refuse to play, and ask when someone will design clothes that won’t keep us squashed, pinched and unable to run away.
And, belatedly, it might occur to us that even after all this time, we still have no one to blame but ourselves. — Â