I’m aware that The Guardian’s Saturday magazine isn’t the place to turn for advanced critical thinking; nevertheless, one contributor in particular, as I glance through the supplement, never fails to get my goat. – What frustrates me about Alexis Petridis’s weekly column in The Guardian Weekend Alexis Petridis on fashion, isn’t so much that he takes easy shots at men’s fashion, but that in doing so he reveals assumptions which are manifestly heterosexist, gender-normative and conventional.
Petridis’s critique of currently fashionable short-shorts (the sort worn by a male athletes in the 1970s) is indicative of the intellectual laziness of his articles. Any garment which reveals the male figure, and in particular, any garment which is highly fitted or exposes flesh is instantly targeted by Petridis. On the one hand it’s easy to see why leggings or cowl necks might be difficult to pull off and might seem potentially silly in menswear. But the subtext to these critiques, it strikes me, is that while the expression of sexuality and of the physicality of the body in women’s fashion is proper and authentic, in men’s attire it is inappropriate.
For me, fashion, as well as having the potential for formal and aesthetic innovation, is about constructing identities and communicating ideas about oneself. While the narrow and proscribed nature of menswear may appear to be relatively minor issue in the wider battle for gender equality, it is indicative of the way in which men’s gender continues to be policed. In this way, the suppression of authentic, self-expressive modes of male dress is symptomatic of attempts to maintain and enforce a limited, conformist and increasingly irrelevant model of masculinity.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/apr/04/alexis-petridis-fashion
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Hello Jay,
ReplyDeleteI may have mentioned this to you before, but I find it interesting that in other forms of artistic endeavour, film, stage, and so on, the bearing of the male body is indicative of masculine power. Oddly at odds.
I would suggest, too, that fashion, though capable of upturning gender and other structures, is overtly and inherently a normative process. Such upturnings are part of this normative impulse.