Dress as Metaphor British Female Fashion and Social Change in the 20th Century. Katarzyna Kociolek

by the end of the 19th century such elements of men’s attire as ties, hats, and trousers, were adopted by women for sports and manual work. Knickerbockers, divided skirts or bloomer dress and pants, accessorised with buttoned blouses, ties or neckties and straw hats comprised what Crane calls “alternative dress” (2000, 99) at the turn of the 19th and 20th century, metaphorically connecting femininity with masculine active leisure pursuits and technological innovation. Such masculine elements of female attire entailed areas of men’s leisure or professional activity, with sports, manual labour and university education being the conceptual spaces to which they related. As demonstrated by a selection of photographs in Crane’s work, women sporting “alternative dress” were found among college students, affluent members of aristocracy, but also physical workers. While the outfit seemed to metaphorically place women on an equal footing with men, in the case of female physical labourers, male clothes downplayed gender differences not only to ensure safety and protection at work but also to mark class distinctions, legitimising the social demand for women’s hard physical work, which clashed with the dominant models of middle- and upper-class femininity. In other words, working-class women’s exclusion from normative female identity was metaphorically indicated by the fact that they wore trousers. In contrast, middle and upper-class women most often appropriated ties, which also in menswear metaphorically connoted the higher status of the wearer, informing about his “regimental, club, sporting, or educational” background (Gibbings 1990, 81, qtd. in Crane 102). As observed by Crane, middle-class women wore ties as part of their “business dress, school uniform” (103) or servants livery. The ties worn by women in public spaces seemed to metaphorically link feminine identity with spheres formerly dominated by men, becoming a “symbolic statement about women’s status” (Crane 106). On the other hand, Susan B. Kaiser observes that women’s fashion mimicked male fashion’s “evolutionary streamlining” (135), which resulted in the simplification ←27 | 28→of vestimentary habits. With few notable exceptions, such as “wedding dresses, bouffant skirts, little girls’ tutus” (136) since late 19th century womenswear could be characterised by a general tendency to simplification and reductionism. Sartorial renunciation in female fashion, according to Kaiser followed the great masculine renunciation, metaphorically linking simplicity of attire with authority and high social position.

      While several fashion scholars (Wilson, Entwistle, Crane, Davis) point to the fact that gender differences are communicated through clothing, they also view sartorial expression of gender as historically intertwined with the expression of class identities. In fact, many of the 20th century ideas about female fashions and female sartorial practices have their roots in the 19th century’s marked distinction between female and male identities in relation to public and domestic space and also the radically different fashions for men and women. Both Fred Davis (1994) and Joanne Entwistle (2000, 2007) focus on historical, social, and political developments that led to the infusion of male and female fashions with meanings related to middle-class (Davis) and bourgeois (Entwistle) values of the 19th century and the Industrial Revolution.

      Mass consumerism of the 1950s encouraged sartorial experiments with class identities, but the importance of dress in the construction of class identities can be traced back to Thorstein Veblen’s theories of “conspicuous consumption”, which viewed fashion as a site of class struggle (Partington 221). Unlike in Veblen’s model that was based on the so-called trickle down theory, according to which the lower classes emulated styles of the more affluent and privileged social groups, since the 1950s, fashion started to represent greater consumer fragmentation, catering to a variety of tastes and trends. The fashion industry seeking ways to lure customers of all social backgrounds, became more expert in producing and controlling consumer tastes through the use of the mass media “so [that] the flow of information and influence [was] primarily within, rather than across, class groups” (Partington 223). In that way fashion merely concealed rather than obliterated class divisions within societies, offering “always enough ‘choice’ between a range of equally fashionable styles to meet the demands of different tastes” (Partington 223).

      In the mid-20th century various social groups represented radically different approaches to fashion. While in the 1950s lower-class women on tight budgets were keen on adopting latest trends, the better-off female consumers were using dress to communicate either hereditary privilege, choosing ‘classic’ styles (the upper-class), or to accentuate their professional high status, opting for clothes that indicated affluence and luxury (the upper-middle class) (Partington 223–224). In view of this ‘trickle across’ or ‘mass-market’ theory of fashion, ←28 | 29→fashion is hardly a democratising factor. Instead, as noted by Partington, “class differences do not disappear in this system, on the contrary more complex and multiple differences are made possible through increasingly elaborate and complex manufacturing, media and retailing strategies” (224). Such complexity of meanings was reflected in the changed connotations of fabrics. With the arrival of synthetic fabrics in the 1950s, class associations of cotton and wool shifted. Clothes made of synthetic fibres replaced those made of cotton, as distinctively working-class garments, “because to working-class women quantity, disposability, colour, and ‘easy care’ became a priority while craftsmanship and ‘naturalness’ did not” (224). At the same time, the 1950s marketing of natural fabrics as more exclusive resulted in both cotton and wool becoming preferred textiles of the socially privileged consumers.

      Since the 1950s there has existed a new relationship between the fashion producers and the fashion consumers, with the latter being increasingly skilled in discerning brands, and adopting styles, demonstrating that “consumer choices became an integral part of identity-formation” (Partington 225). It was also in the 1950s that conflicting views on ideal femininity became represented in fashion. Utility styles and Dior’s New Look, argues Partington, were the two styles that connoted radically different ideals of womanhood. On the one hand, the New Look evoked “bourgeois ideal of womanhood as ‘decorative’,” on the other hand Utility styles represented a woman as a “dutiful homemaker” (226). While in the domestic sphere, practical, simple unornamented styles were deemed and promoted as appropriate (e.g. advertisements and commercials of domestic products featured models wearing such dresses), the highly decorative, excessive fashions based on the New Look became “accepted as a separate but complementary look, which could exist alongside Utility styles as long as it was not adopted for ‘inappropriate’ situations” (227).

      Regardless of the view one takes on the relationship between individuals in society, it can be noted that members of different social groups adopt diverse styles, and that “fashion constructs and communicates social identity/difference” (Partington 187). Through dress, individuals are also capable of expressing their resistance to the commonly accepted fashions. Instead of being just passive consumers of existing styles, for example the working classes could sartorially subvert the power relations by appropriating and modifying the upper-class dress code, as it was the case in the Teddy Boys and Mod subculture. According to Barnard, “Fashion and clothing are […] one of the ways in which cultural identity may be challenged and resisted” (2007, 189). In this way, fashion seems to be overtly political.

      ←29 | 30→

      Despite the fact that “for a long time, fashion has been seen as an apolitical phenomenon, outside of politics, and of little concern to politicians” (191), as Tim Edwards argues, the 20th century saw the politicization of fashion largely due to the arrival of identity politics following the social changes in the 1960s and 1970s. In spite of radical political and cultural transformations that found their expression in minority movements and peace protests of the 1960s, the fashion of the decade was a continuation of the styles popular in the 1950s. In the 1960s similarly to the 1950s styles, gender distinctions were visibly marked and “men looked like men in their sharp, shoulder-widening suits and slick hair-styles, and […] women equally looked like women with their hour-glass figures and high-heels” (192). It was only after the arrival of the hippy fashions that the true sartorial revolution began, according to Edwards. With identity politics gathering momentum in the 1970s,