“It’s not the clothes.” How many times have I said that when the lament of “women wear pants, so why can’t I wear a dress” surfaces with clockwork regularity on online crossdressers’ groups I belong to. Usually it’s in the context of making the what-ought-to-be-obvious point that women wearing men’s-styled clothing aren’t trying to portray themselves as the opposite gender, as crossdressers typically do. And yet, after reading Anne Hollander’s fascinating “Sex and Suits,” which looks at the evolution of modern men’s and women’s clothing, I wonder just how much of my crossdressing is in fact about the clothes.
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Hmmm…. another justification, sounds good to me
Forget pretending you are talking to one person or concentrating on a single point in the audience–having sex is good way to calm nerves before giving a speech or presentation. But Stuart Brody, a psychologist at the University of Paisley in Scotland, said it has to be full sexual intercourse to get the best results.
What does 13th century plate armor have to do with modern fashion? Plenty as it turns out in Anne Hollander’s fascinating “Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress,”
which traces the evolution of modern men’s and women’s dress – and which convincingly argues the counterintuitive idea that it’s men’s fashion that’ actually have been far more innovative over the centuries since the late Middle Ages and that women’s fashion has been imitating and borrowing from it for centuries. It’s also Hollander’s paean to the men’s suit. Both ideas are particularly ironic to a crossdresser for whom men’s fashion seems drab by comparison. While I have always appreciated a good suit, it’s never felt particularly sexy to me.
Hollander acknowledges her views run contrary to popular opinion: “Actual women take “Fashion” seriously or not, depending on their lives, means and views; but they may all believe that it is something legitimately possible for them, something any woman may ignore if she likes but always has an absolute right to take part in.… Most men, in accordance with modern rules, are still quite comfortable ignoring “Men’s Fashion” in its show-businesslike aspects, and feeling that it is not actually available to them nor really even aimed at them.” But Hollander, an art historian, is focused on the formal qualities of clothing, particularly their structure.
For centuries in Western culture (and commonly in non-Western culture to this day), both sexes wore roughly the equivalent clothing: bag-like garments that were variously wrapped, belted and fastened. The length might differ—men often wore shorter ones for activities, such as physical labor and war, that required greater movement—and Northern European men added loose-fitting leg covers to cope with the climate, but the similarities far greater than the differences. However, the first revolutionary advance in men’s clothing occurred in the late 1200s when plate armor required a close-fitting undergarment to protect the wearer from the metal casing—and men’s fashion quickly imitated the shapes created by the linen-armorers, who were effectively the first tailors of Europe. Subsequently, men’s fashion varied wildly over the centuries—compare the portraits of Henry VII, Rembrandt and George Washington—before settling down with the invention of the “modern” men’s suit around 1800.
In contrast, Hollander argues: “The female costume stayed essentially the same since the Middle Ages….[F]ashion might thicken or thin out the female formula, sometimes imitating the simplicity of the poor, sometimes adding more display with extreme extensions or extra details, sometimes imitating men’s accessories; but the scheme was not radically challenged until this century….” In other words, as Hollander sees it, women’s clothing was inventive but not innovative. She argues the only two major formal innovations in women’s fashion were the skirt (as opposed to a the dress) and décolletage (not only of the neckline and back, but also exposure of the wrists, arms or shoulders—and finally the legs in the 20th century). Interestingly, this sort of exposure seems to be fascinating to many crossdressers, in part no doubt because décolletage (and skirts) has always been a “women’s-only” style of dress.
But aside from the obvious feminine connotations of décolletage and skirts, their appeal to crossdressers may stem from two other more common desires in fashion. First, is simply the unbearable desire for something new and different—something that Hollander argues sets “modern fashion” apart from traditional modes of dress. “Fashion abhors fixity, or form or meaning, of knowledge or telling, or the past itself. Fashionable dress thus has a built-in contingent character quite lacking to all ethnic and folk dress, and to most clothes of the ancient world.” In contrast, traditional dress illustrates “the confirmation of established custom, and to embody the desire for stable meaning even if custom changes…. [E]ven with considerable change in the look of traditional clothing over time, the formal relation of new to old is direct, a straightforward adaptation….”
While women’s clothing underwent this “modern” shift in meaning, Hollander argues that it was strictly within the realm of “surface” aspects. In part, this may have been due to another historical event. In 1675, Louis XIV granted a group of French seamstresses royal permission for the first guild of female tailors to make women’s clothes—the first professional dressmakers. However, men remained the corset-makers (a skill set which traced it roots to the linen-armorers). Consequently, the seamstresses didn’t control the fundamental shaping of the body in the same way that tailors could sculpt men’s clothing. However, women were acknowledged experts in fine needlework and when they became dressmakers they focused on the “exquisite finish of surface details.” Consequently, while the elegance of men’s clothing depended on the subtleties of cut, women’s clothes focused on surface decoration and “the making and arranging of ephemeral trim and small accessories that gave feminine fashion an increasingly bad reputation for frivolity and extravagant costliness.”
The “modern” men’s suit, invented around 1800, coincided with both a sharpening of gender differences as well as the Industrial Revolution in which men were expected to take a more “serious” role in order to literally take care of business. While Hollander does touch on surrounding social trends, her focus tends to be on the clothing itself (probably due to her background as an art historian). Which is unfortunate because the rise of the suit has fascinating correlations with the rise of “The Self-Made Man” as the dominant image of manhood in the United States (as detailed by Michael Kimmel’s “Manhood in America”). But Hollander does note that: “Paintings of the later nineteenth century often contrast a somber-suited man with the riotous light, motion and color of the natural world…. His suit was not supposed to be beautiful, but reasonable by contrast….”
And so men’s fashion—at least on the surface—retreated into a pseudo-uniform to allow them to devote their energies to the “serious” business of becoming success objects. But while it’s taken 200 years, men seem to be finally tiring of the suit and men are starting to borrow from women’s fashion for the first time in centuries, although within carefully “acceptable” limits.
But ironically, Hollander argues: “To make clothing express a more radical form of equality for men and women, something more has lately been needed than simply dressing women in men’s suits—that finally smacks too much of giving in to male dominance, unless it is done for fun in the old coquettish form….The real solution has instead been found to in dressing everyone like children. A crowd of adults at a museum or a park now looks just like a school trip…. Everyone is in the same colorful zipper jackets, sweaters, pants and shirts worn by kids—which are the same as traditional work-clothes, only made in jolly colors.”
But if Hollander’s argument about the insatiable need of Fashion for novelty is correct, we’ll seen the pendulum swing back toward formality one of these days. In fact, I just ran across an article that men are starting to dress more formally for work—nominally to decrease the chance they’ll get outsourced, although Hollander notes the expressed reasons for changes in fashion rarely seem to match the actual, unconsciousness ones that are clearly visible in hindsight.
As far as the downsides to the book, Hollander does have a weakness for Proustian-length sentences, although they do remain fairly readable. And transgender readers may find it irritating that Hollander uses “sex” and “gender” interchangeably (instead of realizing the former is what’s between your legs and the latter is between your ears). Finally, the initial chapters, which take a philosophical look at “what is fashion” can be a little hard going at first. If so, I’d suggest skipping them and then circling back afterwards, since they’re easier to understand after seeing Hollander’s examples in action.
But on the whole, it’s fascinating read with many intriguing—if unintended—insights relevant to crossdressing.
How good are you at spotting the trannies in the house? Me…
You got 12 out of 12 right, or about 100%.
Fantastic- you can spot a transvestite every time! Clearly, you have a disturbing familiarity with crossdressers.
Yeah, you could say that… The funny thing is I’m not sure how I decided who was who. Some were pretty easy (big brow bone, obvious ringer, etc.) but with others I think I just lucky since the most of the “males” were clearly transsexuals on hormones. I’m just annoyed the language on the site was fairly offensive, but I suspect it’s more ignorance than malice.