Wearing the pants
Are straight women allowed to or?
The cultural consensus to describe all gender non-conformity in terms of queerness, and all non-conformity in terms of gender, has put your garden-variety straight lady in an odd spot. How does one articulate that one possesses an inner life if one has the lady-bits and the she/her pronouns and sees (some) men and thinks, as Alistair from As Time Goes By would put it, “hey hey”?
A New York Times T Magazine piece by Colleen Hamilton declares that lesbian fashion (which would of course be too problematic to define; lesbian fashion is fashion worn by lesbians you guys) is having a moment on the runways.
For what some actual lesbians make of this, The Lesbian Project has answers, but I’m sticking with my very own lane for the part of the article I cannot get past:
Even celebrities who don’t identify as queer are experimenting with fashion in similarly gleeful, nonconformist ways. See Rihanna’s cropped haircut and black necktie in the April issue of Interview, and Anne Hathaway’s velvet, linebacker-shouldered three-piece suit on the cover of V Magazine’s summer issue, under the headline “His and Hers.”
My first thought was, I bet someone had to do some serious fact-checking that neither Rihanna nor Anne Hathaway has ever so much as hinted at gender-fluidity or bi-curiosity.
My second and more urgent one: What exactly does the Times imagine straight women wear?
It is, I can’t believe I’m typing this, not unusual for women, even the man-affixed ones, to wear jeans and a t-shirt. Slacks and a button-down. Or even, as a flourish, a necktie as an accessory. None of this is new, nor did it ever go anywhere, except if you’re a tradwife or on The Only Way is Essex or something.
And heels, these are largely over! Phoebe Philo’s white sneakers, fashion embracing Birkenstocks… What I’m saying is, if you go out in Manolos, the message you send isn’t ‘I’m straight’ but ‘I’m living in 2003.’
Formalwear is slightly more gendered but, as with casualwear, the unidirectional androgyny (women can wear menswear without raising eyebrows but not vice versa) is uneventful.
But if all subversion of gender norms must be interpreted in terms of queerness, then every time a straight woman leaves the house in something other than a fuschia ballgown, she has to do a solemn acknowledgement that she is appropriating queer culture. We have to pretend that it is the exception, rather than the rule, for a straight woman to defy gendered expectations in all sorts of ways, including the expectation (that isn’t even an expectation) that we go around in daily life dressed for the most glamorous event at the most exclusive Southern sorority.
I say all of this as a basic-bitch straight lady who spends too much money and thought on clothes. I am nevertheless most comfortable in the sort of clothing that is most comfortable, and if this means I have stolen baggy carpenter jeans from the lesbians then let it be known that I did not steal them, I purchased them (from sellers whose identity categories I’ve never stopped to ponder) on Poshmark.
Well, not unlike what Shirley Bassey once sang, it strikes me as all just a little bit of history repeating.
What seems novel to me about these notions, really, is just the terminology. The eighties were a terrific example, where it was nothing for New Wave and Synthpop male artists to be androgynous (or in the case of Boy George, Erasure, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, outright gay), and for the women to be Tomboyish or Riot Grrl (think Wendy O. Williams, L7, or Kathleen Hanna from Bikini Kill, or Tribe 8, who were out-and-out lesbians).
What is different, however, is gender is being brought into the equation, and far short of being anything innovative or progressive, I think it’s going to wind up tying the whole discussion up in a Gordion knot, because there is no keystone or benchmark to it. The eighties radicalism of style still swung on the axis of the relative immutability of “male” and “female”. Once that anchor point is lost, all bets are off.
So the whole discussion of “lesbian”, “male”, “female”, “trans”, or “queer” style is only going to last until someone dissents and everyone splinters and the bottom drops out of all of it became no one can agree on anything. It’s just like economics: ideas reach a memetic saturation point before the bubble bursts.
very amusing writing!