there's our catastrophe

w/r/t this whole thing (people getting mad at natalie dee for saying cupcake-baking housewife-drag 50s revival is kind of weird and stupid and antifeminist)

Does anybody remember the time that super-annoying fashion blogger Gala Darling or whatever her name was was out in public in ostentatious 50s fashion?  Nipped waist print dress with a circle skirt over a crinoline and stilettos and that rockabilly kinda hair.  It was the crinoline that took it over the edge, in my opinion. 

And an older woman came up to her and was like “why are you dressed like that?”

Darling: “Because I like it, I think it’s pretty, I wish people still had that sense of decorum.”

Practically crying older woman: “What are you doing?  Do you even know what it means to dress like that?  Do you actually want to go back to that time?  You can’t know what it was like.  You young girls have no perspective.  It makes me so angry.”

And darling blogged about it being like “lol some people just don’t get it” and it was gross, but there is a larger point here, which is:

If you are a young woman who has not actually lived through a time that was in many ways worse for women than today, and in any case certainly a very different context, you need to have some thought about what it means to dress like you’re a time-traveller from there, thought beyond “it’s so pretty”, or “I’m wearing this but I’m a feminist, it’s so subversive”.  And you need to be prepared for many women to feel that nostalgia for or reappropriation of that time is insulting, if not dangerous.  It’s pretty dismissive of the strength and courage and activism of many 50s women to assume that just by being your feminist self in 50s garb while baking you’re participating in some kind of radical détournement. Also I think it’s weird, frankly, for a bunch of predominantly white women to want to look like they’re the bosses from The Help. 

If you listen to older women you might feel pretty uncomfortable making a dress-up game out of their youth, and that has nothing to do with distaste for femininity. 

One question for fans of the “hipster indian” look

grrspit:

If its just that you “appreciate the culture” and “think its beautiful” why don’t I ever see fashion spreads of Native Americans dressed in the attire as it was meant to be worn? Why is it always shirtless white ladies in the desert with a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of whisky in the other?

My theory? Its because the culture being appreciated is not any particular Native American culture. It is the culture of middle class America from 30 years ago, back when if you dressed your kid up as an “indian princess” for Halloween no one would think twice about it (I’m looking at you, mom.)

You can tell because all these pictures also often exhibit artifacts of the 70s, like feathered hair and tube socks pulled up to your knees, or have orangey red faded color palettes or excessive lens flare like a flashback in a Wes Anderson movie or something.

The “more innocent time” these images are hearkening back to is not to some imagined time of pre-colombian noble savagrey but the time from my childhood when middle America felt free to stomp all over Native American culture without guilt.

I plan on writing a more thought out post about this on blogger when I’m more awake. It will have spellchecking!

ooh, good point. 

I read this interesting article a while ago — I wish I could remember where, sorry — about young women dressing in 50s fashion.  and one of them mentioned in passing that women who were actually alive in that time had come up to her and been like “what the fuck are you doing?  why do you want to go back to then?  do you know what life was actually like?” 

threadbared had a really good link round-up on the politics of vintage fashion a while ago, check it out