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From the Anti-Rape Bra to Chastity Belts: How Women Use Clothing for Protection
We now have the fashion industry interested in 'rape prevention' clothing.
What rape culture?
Shira Tarrant, co-editor of 2012's Fashion Talks: Undressing the Power of Style, a treatise on the politics of contemporary style, believes these newfangled attempts at arming women have symbolic importance. “Things like camouflage and body armor and ninja fashion, these have all been used in warfare—and rape is the everyday war that women face,” she tells The Daily Beast. “The fact that our fashion designs are beginning to reflect this means that we're shifting awareness about how seriously we're taking these issues.”
A collection of Yves Saint Laurent's Le Smoking female tuxedos are displayed at his retrospective in Denver in March 2012. (Ed Andrieski/AP)
Still, she accedes that what you wear can serve as a shield without the garments being literally rigged. “There are ways that I might clothe myself that are aesthetically pleasing, but also don’t highlight certain aspects of my sexual body. That’s a form of armor. It’s like armor lite,” she says. One of the examples she offered was the uniform worn by ’90s riot grrrls, the feminist punk rockers whose bands, including Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney, regularly spoke out against rape and in support of empowerment. These were the women who made flowing “tentlike” baby-doll dresses and “kick ass” combat boots fashionable.
Along those lines, Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, dismissed protective clothing as being outside the realm of fashion. Instead she thinks contemporary fashion’s “psychological aspects of protection” are more pertinent than its physical aspects. “The early theories of fashion tended to focus on the idea that dress was originally and primarily about protection, meaning essentially physical protection,” she tells The Daily Beast, and gives the example of shoes protecting feet. “Later theorists pretty much rejected the functional origins of dress and suggested instead that dress is much more about symbolic communication, particularly to display gender, sexuality, position in society, et cetera.”
Fashion can empower, even if it can’t protect. The little black dress is “like armor” in the sense that it bestows confidence on its wearer, Steele says. Not to mention Yves Saint Laurent’s iconic pantsuit, which started the ball rolling toward equality couture. In 1966 the French designer created a tuxedo suitable for women, called Le Smoking, which, according to Vogue, for the first time positioned the so-called second sex “at glittering galas standing lapel-to-lapel with a roomful of men in black.” In the 1980s Le Smoking became the power suit, and those glittering galas became executive offices. All this is not to say that men’s clothing has not historically served a physically protective function.
A collection of Yves Saint Laurent's Le Smoking female tuxedos are displayed at his retrospective in Denver in March 2012. (Ed Andrieski/AP)
Still, she accedes that what you wear can serve as a shield without the garments being literally rigged. “There are ways that I might clothe myself that are aesthetically pleasing, but also don’t highlight certain aspects of my sexual body. That’s a form of armor. It’s like armor lite,” she says. One of the examples she offered was the uniform worn by ’90s riot grrrls, the feminist punk rockers whose bands, including Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney, regularly spoke out against rape and in support of empowerment. These were the women who made flowing “tentlike” baby-doll dresses and “kick ass” combat boots fashionable.
Along those lines, Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, dismissed protective clothing as being outside the realm of fashion. Instead she thinks contemporary fashion’s “psychological aspects of protection” are more pertinent than its physical aspects. “The early theories of fashion tended to focus on the idea that dress was originally and primarily about protection, meaning essentially physical protection,” she tells The Daily Beast, and gives the example of shoes protecting feet. “Later theorists pretty much rejected the functional origins of dress and suggested instead that dress is much more about symbolic communication, particularly to display gender, sexuality, position in society, et cetera.”
Fashion can empower, even if it can’t protect. The little black dress is “like armor” in the sense that it bestows confidence on its wearer, Steele says. Not to mention Yves Saint Laurent’s iconic pantsuit, which started the ball rolling toward equality couture. In 1966 the French designer created a tuxedo suitable for women, called Le Smoking, which, according to Vogue, for the first time positioned the so-called second sex “at glittering galas standing lapel-to-lapel with a roomful of men in black.” In the 1980s Le Smoking became the power suit, and those glittering galas became executive offices. All this is not to say that men’s clothing has not historically served a physically protective function.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/05/from-the-anti-rape-bra-to-chastity-belts-how-women-use-clothing-for-protection.html
