Fashion is one of the very few forms of expression in which women have more freedom than men. And I don’t think it’s an accident that it’s typically seen as shallow, trivial, and vain. It is the height of irony that women are valued for our looks, encouraged to make ourselves beautiful and ornamental… and are then derided as shallow and vain for doing so. And it’s a subtle but definite form of sexism to take one of the few forms of expression where women have more freedom, and treat it as a form of expression that’s inherently superficial and trivial. Like it or not, fashion and style are primarily a women’s art form. And I think it gets treated as trivial because women get treated as trivial.
I feel like this about lingerie and specifically the value people place on lingerie (which is very often women’s work). The devaluation of things associated with women and women’s labor is reified in garments that are almost exclusively seen on women’s bodies. There’s this overwhelming sense that the labor associated with sewing, say, a bra is valueless, and that the laborer should be willing to work for free…or at least for inhumanely cheap wages. Culturally, I think this devaluation also ties into a lot of other things (for example, in America, puritanical Protestantism and its suspicions of the body, and, globally, the taken-for-granted exploitation of people of color), but I’ve just been idly pondering the way lingerie links up with many other conversations. And that’s not even getting into all the other expectations surrounding lingerie and how women are penalized for not conforming. Lift your breasts, but don’t wear push-ups. Wear underwear, but make sure it’s invisible. And so forth and so on. (I’m on my phone, by the way. Please pardon any typos.)