Tuesday, 21 February 2017

Fashion, Culture & Identity - Fred Davis


Notes from Text
  • Chapter 3 - Ambivalences of Gender: Boys will be Boys, Girls will be Boys.
  • Gaultier's 1984 fall men's collection - sarongs and pants-skirt... 'They'll share the same wardrobe, but they'll wear it differently. Men will stay masculine and women feminine'.
  • 'Looked like the sort Marlene Dietrich would wear. His boutiques turned out to be a lot more popular with chic women than with men' - Pierre Cardin, Paris, late 1950's.
  • 'Small wonder then that feminists, rather than viewing current androgynous style as symbols of sexual equality, regard them suspiciously as but another subtle sexist device for muting the egalitarian demands emanating from the women's movement'.
  • 'the boyish androgynous look, it is alleged, serves at one and the same time to appeal to latent homoerotic impulses in men and assuage fears over a loss of power to women' - Dietrich.
  • Chapter 2 - Identity ambivalence, fashion's fuel.
  • 'Dress, then, comes easily to serve as a kind of visual metaphor for identity and, as pertains in particular to the open societies of the West, for registering the culturally anchored ambivalences that resonate within and among identities'.

  • Ambivalence definition - the state of having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone.
  • Androgynous definition - Partly male and partly female in appearance, of indeterminate sex.

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