Underwear in action

Historical underwear is usually fetishised. The garments themselves, in museums, as historical artefacts. Period advertisements for those garments, as consumer artefacts. Caricatures fetishise the wearing of the underwear as a ridiculous sign of vanity. Then, of course, historical erotica fetishises underwear sexually – that is, the form of fetishisation with which we're most familiar.

But when we fetishise historical underwear – that is, focus obsessively on it as an object and imbue it with an almost magical meaning – we lose perspective on what it was like to wear these garments on an everyday basis. It's very difficult to view images of the past without bringing our own fetishes to them (Indeed, our ideas of how to wear and comport ourselves in old-fashioned underwear often come from our own narratives set in the past and vintage fetish imagery), or misreading historical fetishes as objective truths about the past. We should aim to tread a middle path.

When we think of 'sexy underwear', for instance, it seems commonsensical to wear a garter belt over underpants, as Dita von Teese does here:

But in pinup illustrations and vintage 'naughty postcards', we often see the undies worn over the garter belt so the suspenders emerge from beneath, as in this 1969 Gil Elvgren illustration:





And this one, from 1954. Elvgren's girls always have such hilarious wardrobe malfunctions involving their skirts getting ripped off, stuck in machinery, or snagged on fences and nearby trees…

From the shoes, the images below seem to be from the 1920s or 1930s. Stockings from this era are also, apparently, quite recognisable for the sheen they give the legs; this is when semi-synthetic 'artificial silk' appeared; it was renamed Rayon in 1927. Nylon didn't come in until 1940.







Here, we see a corset modelled over the top of the chemise or camiknickers, with attached suspenders. Also, notice how the purpose of the corset is not to cinch the waist but to slim and smooth the abdomen and hips. Speaking of corsets, these days they tend to be worn as an alluring undermost garment:



…but back in the day, when corsets were everyday items, you wouldn't do that because you would sweat into your expensive corset or get chafing, even abrasions. A chemise was always worn underneath, as in this image from the 1900s.



Note how the suspenders attached to the corset bunch up the chemise.


Blogger and US Civil War re-enactor Scott B Lesch noticed that his female colleagues were wearing their drawers under their shifts, as we might wear underpants under a slip. But he unearthed quite a few archival references to the earlier practice of tucking one's shift into one's drawers (which had no crotch seam; they were only attached to the waistband, so ladies could relieve themselves without getting undressed).

If you weren't careful, or the chemise was too long, it poked out the back and your little brother laughed at you:



At this time, stockings were held up with leg garters rather than suspenders, which were hidden under the chemise and drawers.


The trouble with using naughty postcards as source material is that they probably do depict sexually fetishistic practices from the time they were photographed. Take this image, for instance:



Whether or not it has been airbrushed, it almost certainly depicts a participant in a tight-lacing fetish culture. We're tempted to claim that everyone in "the Victorian era" tight-laced – mainly because of the moral panic media coverage about it at the time – but it was only a niche practice. We marvel at the tiny waist dimensions of corsets in museums, but of course they were seldom worn completely closed. Besides, women's bodies were trained to wear corsets from a very early age.



Meanwhile, advertisements for underwear speak so conspicuously of comfort and fit that we should be skeptical that they really depict the lived experience of wearing the underwear. A slightly different picture emerges when we look at the 'toilette' genre of art, which was basically an excuse for painters to depict women in attractive states of déshabillé.

While some of these paintings depict the fashion that began in pre-revolutionary France to invite people over to hang out and gossip with you while you got dressed, others depict women in a dreamy, vulnerable state somewhere between nudity and social visibility.


Woman at Her Toilette, Edgar Degas, 1876-77


Femme à la Toilette, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1896.


La Toilette, Georges Croegaert, 1891

They also offer information about how and in which order garments were donned. In Pietro Longhi's Lady at the Toilette (1736), we see the decorative petticoat, neckline and sleeves that will end up peeping from the pink outer dress her maid is holding out.





But if we are to believe Nicolas-René Jollain's La Toilette, the hat always went on first.

The 40-year nostalgia cycle

Having written about nostalgia and re-enactment – and earlier about cycles of retro – I've just been pointed (thanks, Jess!) to this New Yorker piece by Adam Gopnik, who identifies a 40-year lag between history as experienced, and as re-enacted.

Gopnik argues that this happens because the creators and gatekeepers of pop culture are largely in their forties. "Forty years past is the potently fascinating time just as we arrived, when our parents were youthful and in love, the Edenic period preceding the fallen state recorded in our actual memories."

And so, if we can hang on, it will be in the twenty-fifties that the manners and meanings of the Obama era will be truly revealed: only then will we know our own essence. A small, attentive child, in a stroller on some Brooklyn playground or Minneapolis street, is already recording the stray images and sounds of this era: Michelle’s upper arms, the baritone crooning sound of NPR, people sipping lattes (which a later decade will know as poison) at 10 A.M.—manners as strange and beautiful as smoking in restaurants and drinking Scotch at 3 P.M. seem to us. A series or a movie must already be simmering in her head, with its characters showing off their iPads and staring at their flat screens: absurdly antiquated and dated, they will seem, but so touching in their aspiration to the absolutely modern. Forty years from now, we’ll know, at last, how we looked and sounded and made love, and who we really were. It will be those stroller children’s return on our investment, and, also, of course, a revenge taken on their time.

Gopnik is onto something. There is already a movement to post online the youthful images of one's parents – and even grandparents or other ancestors – and to appreciate their clothes, their hairstyles, and their attitudes as cool and chic by today's standards.

Perhaps this identification with one's parents (before they were parents) is an attempt to find a personal connection to the past that doesn't rely on one's own memories. It's literally intergenerational nostalgia.

When I see my friends posting pictures of themselves with their young children on Facebook, I imagine myself as those kids all grown up, looking back nostalgically at how happy and beautiful their parents were, unaware of how these dudes, my friends, are just getting through their day-to-day lives. It makes me melancholy.



This image (from Dads Are The Original Hipsters) is undated, but the slogan on the T-shirt sounds like a riff on the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld – wittily contemporary, yet ominously true. Do we have no future when we constantly look to the past?

Historical re-enactment as political forgetting

Yesterday, April 25, was Anzac Day, an Australian and New Zealand national holiday to commemorate war dead. Ideologically it's best compared to the US's Memorial Day, as it arose from a specific conflict (in this case, oddly, a disastrous military blunder in April 1915 that unnecessarily claimed tens of thousands of lives) yet has become generalised as an event of national remembrance in a way that, ironically, Remembrance Day has not.

The motto of Anzac Day is "Lest we forget". It has become a ritual text, almost an incantation, along with the third verse of Robert Lawrence Binyon's poem For The Fallen, which is inscribed on many Australian war memorials:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

But Jeff Sparrow's current essay at Overland begins with a contentious claim: "Anzac Day celebrates forgetting."

For Sparrow, the political context of World War I has been almost entirely forgotten by an Australian population that thinks of war as a specific brand of hellishness utterly removed from everyday life, calling on a form of courage and sacrifice utterly lacking in civil affairs. Hence, it requires a response of horror and attempted empathy, rather than social or political critique.

I really recommend reading Sparrow's article if you've ever felt uneasy about the celebration of nationalist warriors as righteous Übermenschen. But what struck me as relevant to my project is Sparrow's observation about the increasingly common Australian pilgrimages to the Gallipoli peninsula, the birthplace of the Anzac mentality:

The attendees at the dawn service do not ask themselves why Australians died invading a country thousands of miles away. No, that particular issue’s rendered inherently irrelevant, since the backpackers go there not to think about history but to marvel at the height of the cliffs and the sharpness of the rocks, and to feel an awe at people their own age experiencing horrors that they couldn’t imagine. The question arising from the pilgrimage is thus not ‘why did it happen?’ (a query that leads not only into history but into politics) but rather ‘what did it feel like?’, an aestheticisation of the past that’s explicitly anti-political. [my emphasis]

For me Sparrow isn't really speaking of aestheticising the past, but of phenomenologising it: seeking an understanding of how it felt to live through the past. This is a key aspect of my project, because clothing fit is so clearly about phenomenology – about the experience of wearing clothes, as well as how one looks in those clothes.

However, Sparrow's article has given me pause about whether the desire to empathise with the past is a worryingly anti-political gesture that evacuates the past of its context, filling it instead with today's political imperatives (even if that is, as Sparrow argues in this case, a political imperative to 'forget politics'). We are driven to re-enact things rather than to analyse or question them, because as Sparrow argues, "the question ‘what did it feel like?’ always implies a follow-up: ‘I wonder what it would be like.’"

There are, of course, many military re-enactment groups who gather on weekends to play out famous battles, and medieval or Renaissance groups who compete in mock-tourneys. On a wider level, many people re-enact favourite historical periods in their everyday lives by consuming goods from those periods – as 'commodity nostalgia'.

I've thought a fair bit about nostalgia. In 2010 I wrote an essay on whether there is an ethical dimension to nostalgia, or whether it is always anti-political, or politically conservative.

And in 2009 I wrote an op-ed on Mad Men theme parties as nostalgic events. In it I mentioned an exhibition of Australian modernist design from 1917-1967 that was showing at the time. At a public forum discussing the influence of modernism on design today, industry heavyweight Garry Emery remarked that people today focus on the aesthetics of modernism without considering its political aims (which ranged from utopian to iconoclastic).

I might also highlight the irony of this disconnectedness – that a design philosophy based on functional rather than aesthetic principles has come to be appreciated for its aesthetics alone. But I mention it here as it seems uncannily to foreshadow Sparrow's contention that, viewed retrospectively, aesthetics are anti-political.

My article appeared in the A2 lifestyle section of The Age and isn't archived online; however let me quote:

In a sense, Mad Men parties are a hipper version of those much-maligned historical re-enactment societies. Both create a vision of the past that is self-consciously imaginary and ephemeral. Yet they allow participants to feel a mastery over the past by experiencing – with their eyes, tastebuds, the bodily sensations of unfamiliar clothes and hairstyles – what it might have been like to live it. [again, my emphasis]

I feel anxious now about those words "mastery over the past", because I don't believe it's a good thing to feel that the passage of years allows us to understand history more perfectly than the people of the past understood it at the time.

Who gets to be the expert on, say, corsets? Us, examining them in museums and in old advertisements and magazines, or dressing up in them for special events? Or the women who wore corsets on an everyday basis, the way we wear bras?

Historical Disney princesses

If you're interested in historical dress, Disney or Tumblr, you have probably already come across Claire Hummel's illustrations in which she reinterprets the Disney princesses in outfits that are historically appropriate to the time when the films are set.

I came across them last year in one of those un-annotated Tumblr photosets whose origins were lost several hundred reblogs ago, but I've only just discovered Hummel's thoughtful, well-researched rationales for her choices.



That's Belle from Beauty and the Beast, obviously. What I like about the images is that Hummel has worked hard to keep the recognisable tropes of the characters intact, while being imaginative about their historical contexts.

"Beauty and the Beast has always hovered hesitantly in the late 18th century (especially in the earlier concept art), so I redid Belle's gold dress to match 1770's French court fashion," she writes of this image.

It's fascinating stuff because the Disney films are already such 'impure' texts, with such hazy evocations of time and place, full of anachronisms and anatopisms. Of Mulan, Hummel says, "pinning down her time period stopped being fun and rapidly became a headache- you have the original legend taking place in the Wei Dynasty, the Huns as an actual threat during the Western Han Dynasty, the Forbidden City of the Ming Dynasty, the hanfu fashion setting it earlier AGHGHGhjffjhfghgjhkh".

And of Pocahontas: "the shell necklace should in theory be a deep purple (turquoise is a much more Southwestern commodity), but you lose so much of the Pocahontas visual identity without the splash of teal around her neck."

The project throws an agreeable doubt blanket on the entire idea of 'historical accuracy', about which it's really easy to get pedantic.

Fit as narrative in period film and television

At this stage, at least one chapter of my book will discuss ill-fitting clothes in popular culture, from Cinderella to The Incredible Hulk. But I'm already running into trouble when it comes to contemporary texts set in past eras.

For a historian, it's reasonable to conclude that the attitudes towards size and fit displayed in a book, a film, a TV show, a comic book, etc, are those of the time the text was created. These change over time as texts are remade by new generations. For instance, think of the way the Batsuit has changed from Adam West's almost vulnerable-looking leotard and satin undies to Christian Bale's carapace-like Kevlar armour. And take a look at my old post comparing Honor Blackman's catsuit in the 1960s Avengers to Uma Thurman's in the 1998 movie.

But when it comes to period-set texts, we have a certain suspension of disbelief. We're prepared to take the author, the screenwriter, the production designer and costume designer's words for it that we are seeing an 'authentic' representation of a particular era. 

But we are wise to be skeptical of these images as transparent visions of 'what it was like', because like any other reinterpretation of a text, they apply our own ideas about clothing size and fit. For instance, take what I reckon is the single worst-costumed period film of all time: the 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier:

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813. They've got Darcy's look down okay, but Lizzie looks absolutely wrong. Her hairstyle is totally '40s with the upper hair in a smooth puff and lower hair in rolls curled towards the neck, whereas fashion plates and portraits of the early 19th century depict a chignon on the back of the head with small ringlets softly clustering around the temples.

Meanwhile, the voluminous skirt, nipped waist and shawl collar of her dress are far more contemporary than the Empire-waisted columnar silhouette of the period. The middle image of the three below is closer to how young women would have dressed at that time (more 1813 fashion plates are here)

I also want to include this image to show that while we tend to think of 'Regency fashions' as being relatively stable over time, they altered just as fashion always has and still does. In the image on the far right, you can see the migration of the waist closer to its natural point, and the broadening of the skirt to a bell shape.

Mind you, sometimes period costumes are quite accurate. Here is Queen Victoria's 1840 wedding dress, which was vastly influential for wedding fashions (not least of all, the tradition of brides wearing white):



And here is the dress Mia Wasikowska wore in last year's Jane Eyre (costume by Michael O'Connor). Jane Eyre was published in 1847 but Jane's wedding took place several years earlier than her narrative.



As I wrote a few years ago in a feature article about period film casting, "what we really seek from contemporary historical cinema are emotional truths: impervious to anachronism, resonating down the ages to reassure us of the universality of human experience."

In the service of this universality, costuming is often used as narrative metaphor. For instance, contemporary period dramas often use corsetry and voluminous dresses to mimetically convey women 'trapped' or 'subjugated' by class and marriage (for instance, in Marie Antoinette, Titanic and The Duchess).

Mad Men is set in the 1960s but similarly seeks universal emotional truths, even though its meticulous strivings towards period-accuracy are a key marketing strategy. Season 5 episode 3, 'Tea Leaves', which aired last week in the US, has a storyline in which Betty has become a sad, fat hausfrau. In the opening scene, her children struggle unsuccessfully to help her do up her dress…



…and she has to plead "a women's thing" (which isn't actually a lie – wardrobe malfunctions are often presented as a feminine failing) to avoid the humiliation of being seen to have gained weight.



Meanwhile at chez Draper, Megan slips easily into her own dress…



and is promptly zipped up by Don, cementing that Megan has just as easily slipped into Betty's place at his side. What makes this juxtaposition quite unfair, however, is the issue of ease. Betty's dress is super-fitted, whereas Megan's is loose through the dropped waist.



Later, at the doctor's office, Betty wears a horrible, boxy synthetic knit jacket. "Betty Draper – I almost didn't recognise you!" says an acquaintance who runs into her. Throughout the episode, Betty wears garish housedresses and dressing gowns in bright synthetics, as opposed to the cool pastel palette and sleek, fitted lines she wore in the show's earlier seasons.

Universality aside, I really appreciated a line of dialogue in which dropping a few pounds is referred to as "reducing" rather than the more familiar (to our ears) "slimming" or "weight loss". I've just finished reading Calories and Corsets, Louise Foxworth's excellent cultural history of dieting, in which she extensively quotes diet books and advertisements going back centuries. While reading the book I was struck by the way "reducing" or even "reducing flesh" was a favoured 19th- and 20th-century turn of phrase, and so I was pleased to see it in Mad Men.

Survey on retro and vintage sewing

A large part of my project is investigating retro and vintage fashion practices – that is, why people prefer the styles of the past over what's currently fashionable. 'Retro' and 'vintage' are often used interchangeably in mainstream culture; let me explain the differences I see between them.

I see 'vintage' as a specific retail fashion system that gleans original garments from past eras and sells them in boutiques, auctions, markets and fairs. For the shopper, the value of vintage is knowing the garment is authentically of a particular time, with a particular provenance. Similarly to the antiques market, the vintage fashion aims to capture and preserve past eras through the garments themselves.

Pardon my pun, but it's also a material culture, in that it's interested in a garment's industrial context – its fabrics, its labels, its designers, its manufacturers – that makes it representative of its time.

By contrast, 'retro' is an ethos as well as a retail logic. I argue that people who consume 'retro' are attracted to the overarching aesthetic of a past era – and an accompanying set of feelings and cultural associations – so authenticity is less important than semiotic fit.

If you're 'into retro', or a member of a retro-oriented subculture, you learn to seek out contemporary objects and experiences that look and feel like those of the era you love, even if they're not made the same way. While you ultimately prefer original stuff, reproduction stuff is okay too.

At the moment I'm interested in home sewing as an expression of these ideas. A vintage-oriented maker might be more likely to choose original clothing patterns, construction techniques, and fabrics and trims authentically of the right period. It would be very important to this maker to create a close replica of an authentic vintage garment.

On the other hand, a retro-oriented maker might be more likely to choose a contemporary pattern that just has a retro look, and more likely to alter it so it has a retro 'spirit' but is not entirely faithful to the way authentic vintage dresses would look.

Of course, these are just hypotheses at the moment. To make a start on excavating these issues, I've created a survey on size and fit in retro and vintage sewing. It only has ten questions and so is a very blunt tool, but I'm hoping it will lead me in directions that clarify my ideas, and will help direct my more in-depth interviews.

If you make your own clothes – either to vintage patterns, or to obtain a retro look – please help me out by completing the survey. And please feel free to forward the survey link to anyone you know who makes their own vintage or retro clothes. It's anonymous, but you have the option to leave your name so your comments can be credited in my finished book.

Retro retro

So, Mad Men has just started up again in the US, sparking a fresh wave of general '60s nostalgia. But we shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking we are the first people ever to idealise the past.

The films Midnight in Paris and The Artist, along with ABC TV's series Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, have sparked renewed interest in 1920s style; I found the images from my previous post on anachronistic fit while researching my Phryne Fisher costume for a costume party. No doubt Baz Lurhmann's version of The Great Gatsby will fuel the fire when it comes out early next year.

But as Lizzie Bramlett reminds us at The Vintage Traveler, the 1974 Robert Redford/Mia Farrow Great Gatsby film was just part of a general wave of 1920s and 1930s nostalgia during the 1970s. Art Deco, which had languished in popularity during the Atomic Age, enjoyed a comeback around this time, and there was a renewed interest in Golden Age Hollywood.

Take paisley, for instance. I associate it with '70s hippie clothing, and men's casual shirts in the 1980s and early 1990s. This picture, which I found at 'Ivy style' menswear blog The Trad, is from 'Clothes with Style', a 1985 article by legendary New York fashion journalist Robert Bryan, in the January 1985 edition of M magazine.

"It doesn't take a Douglas Fairbanks Jr to know that … a paisley shirt and khaki trousers are indigenous to a Saturday afternoon stroll," Bryan writes. Indeed.

But as this truly amazing visual history of paisley illuminates, it first entered Western fashion from Persia, via India, in the first part of the 17th century. It was so crazy popular that a French royal decree banned its import between 1686 and 1759.

Whether imported, made in Europe or brought home from India by soldiers and colonialists as souvenirs, cashmere shawls with paisley weaves became status symbols for women by the early 19th century. The English term 'paisley' comes from the central Scottish weaving town that came to specialise in the textiles.


Empress Josephine, 1809

During the Victorian era, paisley shawls were a common outer garment for women. Old shawls were also used as linings in newer garments, or cut up and DIYed into informal robes and jackets like this one from 1890:


By the 1960s, paisley had gathered counter-cultural associations – perhaps because the Beatles and psychedelic rockers had reignited interest in India (the psych-rock influence is clear in Prince's 1985 song 'Paisley Park'), or because hippies were generally into 'ethnic' and 'folk' motifs? Perhaps it's with these connotations in mind that Faye Dunaway wore a paisley bandanna in 1967 to portray 1930s rebel Bonnie Parker.


All these layers of retro associations in one image. Paisley's use in bandannas also took on other contexts when these scarves were used as signifiers of gang colours. Snoop Dogg has never stopped Crippin'…

Forearms and sleeves

Today I had the sleeves of my T-shirt pulled up to just below my elbow as I was reading the paper, and when I happened to glance at them I quite liked the effect. I bought this top five or more years ago and sewed the lace around the collar and cuffs in 2010 as part of a costume for a party where we had to come dressed as our favourite kids' book character. I went as Burglar Betty from Alan and Janet Ahlberg's Burglar Bill:



…but at the time I couldn't find my copy of the book, and there were no images online of Burglar Betty, so I went by memory and ended up getting the colour of her top wrong, along with the fact it had plain cuffs, not lace. I didn't even wear a hat because I couldn't remember what it looked like.



The lace was just hurriedly tacked on for the party with the intention of unpicking it afterwards, but in the end I couldn't be bothered and it survived the wash anyway, so here it remains. The lace is not stretchy, so in order to still be able to push up my sleeves, I sewed the lace onto the cuffs at full stretch. Here's what they look like at my wrists:



The top is one of those cheaply made Asian imports and while the body and the upper arms are very tight on me, the sleeves are actually too long for me, even before I added the lace, and aren't tapered in the lower arm, so they're quite baggy. This is why I often push them up.

What struck me at the time was how gestural a three-quarter sleeve can make the forearm and hand look.



I'm not especially proud of my forearms or hands, but I like the way they look in this sleeve. It reminds me of the graceful look captured in 18th-century portraiture:



Queen Charlotte, by Thomas Gainsborough, 1781. Along with a portrait of Charlotte's husband George III, this hung in the royal dining room and was widely copied, coming to represent the 'official' royal portrait of the Georgian era. I love her graceful arms emerging from the lace sleeves.




Miss Susanna Gale, by Joshua Reynolds, c1763-64. This portrait is owned by the National Gallery of Victoria and is my favourite work in the gallery. I love Susanna's alert expression and the richness of her gown. She was the daughter of a colonial plantation owner and these paintings were commonly commissioned when the sitter went to study in England.

18th-century dresses seem designed to show off the forearm. They were closely fitted through the upper arm, and then cut shorter on the inner forearm while the sleeve continued over the elbow. The forearm emerged in a simple, elegant line, framed by the elaborate puffs of lace, ribbons, trim and ruching continuing past the elbow over the outer arm.



The best way to observe this effect is in portraits, as many museum garments are displayed on armless mannequins. This is a detail from The Marquise d'Aigurandes by François-Hubert Drouais, 1759. Fashion Is My Muse explains further how fashions in ruffled lace sleeves changed over the course of the century.

But I am more interested in the exposure of the forearm, because historically Western women's forearms have not been eroticised – although in Japan, their judicious display is part of the geisha's art. Today, men's forearms have become sexy. There's a photo gallery of 15 "super sexy" male celebs, some of whom aren't revealing more than a couple of inches' worth.

One fan of musician Raul Malo enthuses about how on stage, he rolls his sleeves up between songs:

Love long sleeve shirts with the sleeves rolled up just about two or three turns […] I'm not sure I can explain what it is that makes a sexy forearm but it has to do with the amount of hair on the arm, the tan, the musculature of the forearm, a refined wrist....not too thin, not too pale not too much hair or too little hair.

Documentary series The Desire Project has an episode devoted to women's appreciation of male forearms. In the commentary of this blog post about the project, user @ilikemints says, in part:

[My boyfriend] got really confused. He had never heard of the male forearm as a sexy body part before, or what made a forearm sexy. I had to do an image search to show him, explain why that was a big part of why dudes in bands tend to get ladies even if they're ugly (he has been in bands for almost 15 years!), because playing guitars and drums get dudes' forearms ripped. He knew that women like guys' bodies, but had never really thought deeply about individual male physical attributes that had merit or were valued in any specific way, other than general "that dude's really muscular, most girls want that"…

Perhaps it's in the name of gender contrast that popular culture does not encourage female forearms to be either muscular or slim. They are one of the few parts of the female body that can be plump. Instead, we tend to concentrate our arm-related shaming and resculpting on the fleshy upper arm. Remember the absurd mania over Michelle Obama's arms?

"You can cover up legs and bottoms, but many women lament their flabby 'tuckshop lady arms' or 'batwings' because they're often bared to the world," says fitness trainer James Menage in Woman's Day magazine, which alleges "flabby arm syndrome is on the rise." Meanwhile at Mamamia, women bemoan the difficulty of finding summer clothing with sleeves.

Some in the plus-size fashion community knowingly suggest that plus-size clothes are sleeveless so that shoppers will be coerced into buying shawls, boleros and short-sleeved cardigans as additional summer items. Those with an edgier, more activist bent argue that shoppers should not capitulate to pressure to disguise 'unflattering' aspects of their bodies. Plus-size fashion retailer Dream Diva includes in its manifesto:

In summer a plus size girl wants to enjoy the warmth of the sun on her skin just as much as anyone else. Strappy and sleeveless tops and short skirts and sundresses are what she wants to wear.

Sure you hear some plus size women saying that they want to cover up their upper arms and that they prefer to wear dark colours because they create an illusion of a smaller body shape. But these plus sizes are the exception to the rule.

The "now" plus size girl is not afraid to show off her curves and is proud of who she is and is happy in her own skin.

Conversely, flaunting very muscular or thin arms is another kind of wardrobe malfunction. Last year I wrote in detail about UK tabloid The Daily Mail's war on sinew, which targets celebrities including Madonna, Sarah Jessica Parker, Renee Zellweger, Angelina Jolie and Courteney Cox. The raw disgust in the language the paper uses is quite extraordinary, as well as its dismay that these women continue to go out in public showing their sinewy arms to the world.

Anachronistic fit

We all have a basic idea of how dresses fitted in the 1920s: they hung loosely from the shoulders in a tubular or columnar form, and if the dress had a waist, it was usually dropped to the hips. The hem could hover anywhere between the knee and just above the ankle; mid-calf seems to have been common, although much like today, young chickybabes liked to push the envelope and wear shorter skirts, rouge their knees and roll their stockings down… and all that jazz.



This is a fairly typical evening dress of the period, featuring the ancient Egyptian motifs that were very modish after the 1922 discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb.

We also have a basic idea that these fashions looked best on a very slim, youthful figure. But women of all ages and shapes wore columnar dresses, too – as our models, here are Helen Keller and her teacher Anne Sullivan:



So clearly it wasn't impossible to get these dresses to fit correctly at the time. However, my Google Image searching has turned up some examples of anachronistic fit. In 2007, the Reedsburg Area Women's Club in Wisconsin staged a fundraising parade of dresses from 1928-1931 using club members as the models.

Looking at these pics, I felt a cognitive dissonance that I can only describe as "costume party". There was something a little wrong about the way some of the dresses fitted, in the way that a hired costume never seems to fit properly and the wearer seems awkward and self-conscious.



This model looks too tall for this 1928 dress; the dropped waist sits too high.



But this dress looks much more '1920s' on her.



This 1928 wedding dress is too small; see how it pulls across the bust and at the armholes, and digs in at the hips?



This dress is also too small in the hips.



This 1929 frock also looks much too short for the model and too tight in the bodice – much more like a contemporary fit.



But she looks much better in this 1930s-style fit.

I also came across a fascinating Tumblr called Draw This Dress, in which two illustrators, Emily Carroll and Vera Brosgol, bring to life garments from museum collections, vintage stores and historical photos. What's fascinating about this site is the way they take the dresses from their static, lifeless contexts and put them on dynamic, emotionally expressive, sometimes dishevelled bodies.





They liberally use that fashion-illustration convention of adding a weightless quality to the garments – which is very noticeable when comparing Grant Cowan's Dreaming of Dior illustrations to the actual garments in the Darnell Collection.

It's also a genre marker of fashion illustration to stylise the look of the body in the dress… although where most fashion illustration evokes a sylph-like fantasy body, many of the Draw This Dress illustrations feature a womanly figure with plump arms and legs. Meanwhile, this has to be the greatest ancient Egyptian fashion illustration of all time! Of all time!

However, sometimes I felt that Draw This Dress didn't always get the fit period-correct.





I suspect the gown wouldn't have been nearly as short when originally worn.

Still, I really like the way Brosgol has styled this 1935 'Coq de la Roche' dress by Madeleine Vionnet to resemble Princess Leia in Star Wars (costumes by John Mollo). I find this fit way less anachronistic – or rather, anachronistic in a clever way, because it makes me remember that George Lucas was partly inspired by the adventure serials of the 1930s.

The heartache of the underwear department

Jeans, swimsuits and bras are perhaps the three most misery-causing garments to buy. All three are closely fitting and reveal the shape of the body, and all three have posed immense challenges to the garment industry to ensure good fits.

People come in a vast variety of shapes and sizes, none of which is intrinsically better or worse than the others, but some of which are marginalised by the clothing industries and by popular culture, making those who have these 'outlier' bodies feel ugly and rejected. My research is interested in the strategies by which this happens, and also in the embodied feelings of pleasure and shame linked to clothing fit and size.

An excellent place to observe these processes in action is the underwear floor of a department store. Because it's not a specialty lingerie store, it only stocks mainstream brands and sizes, and so it can't possibly fit everyone. It is an exercise in heartache, a machine for making women feel bad about their bodies.

Today I went to Myer Melbourne to buy a black T-shirt bra with plain thin straps. This is often defined as 'everyday' underwear (as opposed to the 'fashion' underwear you don in romantic scenarios when you want to be admired); its main purpose is to provide a smooth, moulded and unadorned silhouette that looks good under tight-fitting tops. My shopping was utilitarian – I was seeking to plug a hole in my repertoire of bras for everyday wear. But I also wanted something a little bit fancy; maybe some lace, ribbon, tucking or satin, or an understated print that combined black with other colours.

A truism of bra fitting is that women's shape changes over their lifetimes, but they cling to the idea that they wear a particular bra. There's a genre of popular media reportage bemoaning women who wear ill-fitting bras, which Time magazine neatly summarises:

If you are a woman, and you are wearing a bra, you are probably wearing the wrong size one. That's what they say. According to "experts," "industry studies" and "surveys," anywhere between 70% 85% of women are treating their breasts badly, either shoving them into too-small cups or allowing them to float freely in a draping sling. The statistic's origins are murky — some cite a Victoria's Secret poll, others something from the Wacoal brand. But it has been quoted back to me by friends, colleagues, interns. It sounds true. "Eighty percent of American woman are wearing the wrong bra" is the "more likely to be killed by a terrorist than get married" statistic of the new millennium.

The current bra sizing system that combines a lettered cup size with a numbered back size was invented in the early 1930s as a marketing technique, similarly to the way corsets had earlier been marketed by defining certain body shapes or customer life cycle stages as problematic and then offering the corset as the solution.

In 1933, advertisements for SH Camp and Company were categorising their bras by their ability to counteract varying degrees of 'sag', with A being the least degree of correction needed and D the greatest. I haven't read anything yet that convinces me this system has any biometric basis whatsoever; the persistence of ad-hoc additions such as "DD", "FF" and "GG", as well the logical alphabetical progressions, certainly suggest bra manufacturers have been making sizes up as they went along.

Similarly, if the use of back measurements numbered by inch did not actually originate in biometrics, its adoption after WWII was a marketing response to a cultural interest in biometrics and ideal body proportions. If women were already measuring themselves against an ideal "36-24-36" hourglass figure, it made sense to size bras in inches as well.

It is ridiculous to believe your bra size defines you, yet so many women have strong emotional and psychological responses to bra sizes. Back sizes larger than 16 carry the same stigma as plus-size clothing, while women feel embarrassingly juvenile or unwomanly in AA and A cup sizes, and the stigma of obesity rubs off on cups larger than D. So do prurient, fetishistic associations; take the exploitation movie sequel Piranha 3DD, or the tabloid focus on the cup size of famous women's breast enlargements. Women feel freakish in large cup sizes.

This blog post from Knickers offers a good summary of bra sizing and fit issues that also offers insights into the general confusion that consumers feel. Many people feel that clothing size and fit ought to be intuitive: you try something on and if it feels comfortable, or if you're pleased with the way it makes your body look, then you call that feeling 'a good fit'.

For instance, when I buy a bra, I want it to make me look good in my clothes. I want the bra to create the illusion of a Barbie doll's smooth, firm body; it should not draw attention to its presence by creating visible rolls or lines in my flesh, or a crinkly texture that's visible on the surface of my top.

Also, because I sometimes wear low-cut or strappy tops and wide necklines, I needed to consider the accidental exposure of the bra. Mary Russo writes in The Female Grotesque that the notion of 'making a spectacle of oneself' carries specifically gendered assumptions:

"For a woman, making a spectacle out of herself had more to do with a kind of inadvertence and loss of boundaries: the possessors of large, aging and dimpled thighs displayed at the public beach, of overly rouged cheeks, of a voice shrill in laughter, or a sliding bra strap – a loose dingy bra strap especially [my emphasis] – were at once caught out by fat and blameworthy."

There is a thriving industry of bras and bra widgets designed specifically to create invisibility under particular kinds of clothes – for instance, strapless bras, super-low-cut plunge bras, 'convertible' designs whose straps can be reconfigured, and those clear plastic straps that fool nobody. Owning these items is a technique of compliant womanhood that acknowledges our culture's requirement of public propriety in women. Alternatively, the visibility of one's bra mimetically conveys a messy psyche or messy morality. Loose bra strap = loose woman! Dingy bra strap = dirty woman!

It has become far more acceptable to reveal one's bra than when Russo was writing in 1994. I could trace this to subcultural bra-wearing that re-coded 'sluttish' (in both its original sense of 'slovenly' and its patriarchal sense as 'sexually active') as 'insouciant' – for instance, in punk and Riot Grrrl music scenes – and the popularity of the burlesque and 'retro' aesthetic that has made it fashionable to glimpse lingerie in necklines or through transparent garments. Talk about mainstream: Dita von Teese has a lingerie line at Target!

But even this contemporary bra-exposure is concerned with propriety – the criteria are simply different. It's acceptable for bra straps to echo the straps of singlet tops, or boldly stripe across shoulders exposed by off-the-shoulder or racer-back cuts, but you don't want a chunky sports bra; you want a thin, plain strap, or a deliberately decorative one. Similarly, if the bridge of your bra is visible in your neckline, it should be a fancy one with ribbons or lace, and one that matches the aesthetic of your outer garment in style or colour.

Meeting these expectations while also meeting the criteria of 'support' and 'comfort' actually poses a major challenge to bra manufacturers and fitters. My body is upholstered in soft flesh, and the wide, spongy strap that looks like shit under my singlet top, or creeps into the frame of my boat-neck T-shirt, is the same one designed to stay put on my shoulder all day. The fancy lace that looks so sexy peeping from my neckline looks terrible rumpling the contours of my T-shirt.

Unfortunately, the bra industry deems phenomenology – that is, the wearer's feelings and experiences – to be a thoroughly inadequate method of determining bra fit. Instead, bra fitting is cognitive and quantitative – it's about measurement and problem-solving.

For instance, today I tried on a bra that I found really pretty, but it was too small. But the next cup size up in the same style was a fundamentally different garment. The straps were wider and made from a different fabric and colour; it had three clasps in the back rather than two; and it had corsetry-style boning inserted in the sides of the band. This shit makes sense to the bra manufacturer, which has made the industrial decision that these design elements are more 'supportive'. But it disrupts my expectations.

A successful bra fitter understands these dissonances. She is halfway between a counsellor and an engineer. She simultaneously scrutinises the wearer's body, exerting her expert knowledge on it, and offers change-room sympathy when the wearer feels vulnerable and frustrated because the bras she's trying on don't make her feel the way she wants to feel.

When she's good at her job, she can inspire feelings of gratitude and even liberation in her customer. That is, she has successfully influenced the bra wearer's perceptions and associations, subtly realigning them with bra manufacturers' size ranges.

While I was trying on some bras today, I overheard a bra fitter at work in the neighbouring cubicle, fitting a pregnant woman for her first maternity bra. Making matters difficult was that the customer claimed to wear a 16G, which you will immediately recognise as an outlier size.

It was fascinating to hear the fitter and customer talking, growing more and more apologetic as it became obvious that Myer didn't have anything to sell this lady.

"It fits well here, but not here"
"It fits fine now, but it will be too small once your milk comes in"
"I'm sorry, that one only goes up to an F-cup"
"Sorry it looks a bit old-fashioned, but that's the only one we have in a G"
"There's another good brand you can find in maternity boutiques – you could try XX in Australia On Collins…"

The bra fitter succeeded in creating sympathy with her customer, but she failed to align the customer's feelings about bras with the sizes available.

Take it easy

In garment construction, 'ease' (or easement) is the difference between garment measurements and body measurements. It determines how tightly the garment fits, and as the name implies, how easy it is to move in the garment.

There are two kinds of ease – 'wearing ease', which is the amount of ease you need to be comfortable in your clothes; and 'design ease', which is the creation of looseness as an aesthetic choice. According to this chart, wearing ease is generally 6.4 cm (2 1/2") in the bust, 2.5 cm (1") in the waist and 7.6 cm (3") in the hip.

Ease could also be part of various clothing brands' marketing strategies – for instance, sportswear and casual wear might allow more ease than a brand marketed as fashion-forward, whose customers will accept a certain restriction of movement as the trade-off for achieving a very fitted look. I still need to do more research to discover whether different manufacturers have different ideas of wearing ease.

I'll also need to figure out if ease is factored into online size charts, because online shoppers are entitled to expect that if they measure their bodies to decide which size to buy, they should get a good fit.

Online vintage dealer Maggie Wilds consulted her colleagues at the Vintage Fashion Guild on how much ease to allow when purchasing clothes. Nicole Jenkins of Circa Vintage Clothing recommended an ease of between one and two inches at the waist, with less for smaller sizes and more for larger. Anne Marie Cook of Vintage Baubles recommends that since most movements – walking, sitting, bending – are through the hips, ease is more important there.

Ease, like other size and fit issues, changes over time; for instance, a 1947 Simplicity sewing guide suggests, "About 4 inches larger than bust measurement is usual allowance." My chapter discussing shifts in ideal silhouettes over time will have to address this.




Ease is also a factor in vintage clothes, because these fabrics often don't behave in the same ways we expect of contemporary fabrics. Christina Hendricks' costumes on Mad Men have very little ease – look at how this dress pulls when she lifts her arm. They're also very tailored – look at all the vertical darts on the back of this dress – and made from woven, rather than knitted, fabric – although Joan does wear sweaters, and in season four of the show she begins to wear more jersey and other knitted fabrics.

The vintage dealers consulted by Wilds suggest that fabric is a key factor in ease. Amber of The Vintage Vortex said: “I think if I were wearing a much older item than 1950s I would want more ease for myself as thread and fabric deterioration would be a factor … I think that the age of the garment should also play a part in determining ease.” Meanwhile, Jody of Couture Allure Vintage Fashion added that it's easy to stress the seams of taffetas, satins, and loosely woven fabrics and pull the fabric along vertical seams.

I was thinking about Joan because on Friday night I went to the launch of Australian Modern magazine and decided to wear a dress I altered back in 2010 to wear to a Mad Men costume party. The dress is in a crepe fabric; I bought it from Savers in a very large size, and basically put it on inside-out, pinned it until it was tight enough to recall Joan's costumes, then took it in along the line of pins.

When doing this I allowed more ease through the waist and hips, because I'm self-conscious about this part of my body and wanted the dress to flatter me. But I made it very tight around the bust and turned the skirt from a straight shift to a tapered pencil silhouette.

The consequences of this are that I find it very difficult to walk quickly in the dress, and I have to turn sideways to walk up stairs. Wiggling my hips as I walk really does help me move better. Also, I can't wear it for an entire day or evening, because it quickly becomes uncomfortably tight across my ribs.

Hendricks told UK Glamour magazine that the costumes influence Joan's distinctive wiggly walk: "I think I was just trying to get across the room in that tight dress."

Now I know what she means! But another provocative thought regarding ease is that perhaps we, the contemporary wearers of 'old-fashioned' styles of clothing, have very little idea how to be comfortable in these clothes. We interpret the tightness, the physical discomfort, as markers of authenticity, because we have a teleological idea of history in which things always get better with time. For instance, we think of 19th-century corsets as cruel and oppressive, but what if the historical wearer of a properly fitted corset interpreted that garment's tightness as safe, civilised, 'put-together'?

Out of Shape, in progress

Phew, another long break between posts. Not as if I've been idle, however – I've been working on the book project formerly known as "What Fat Chicks Used To Wear", and I'm pleased to announce that it has been commissioned by Affirm Press, for a scheduled release date of March 2013.

The book now has the working title Out of Shape, and I'm imagining it as an adventure through the cultures of clothes that don't fit, fuelled by curiosity and delight. I begin with a set of questions many readers will recognise:

“Why is it so tricky and unpleasant to find clothes that fit?”
“Is my body the problem, and if not, whose problem is it?”
“Have people always struggled this way?”

Importantly, I never, ever suggest these are problems faced by only a certain set of consumers – fat, skinny, tall, short, young, old, men, women. Rather, I want to show that by even presenting them as problems for only certain consumers, we are avoiding issues that everyone shares.

Then I set off for answers, taking the reader on a journey into the privileged insider spheres of the clothing industry and the corners of the pop-cultural archive. It's also a journey into the past, which I argue is not “a foreign country” where “they do things differently”, but contains many of the same size and fit issues we face today. The past doesn't only shape our present; we actively remould and reinterpret the past according to our contemporary values and anxieties.

I can't wait to be surprised and excited by the information I discover and the connections I draw. I hope to provoke, but ultimately to comfort readers by revealing the imperfection and struggle that lies beneath the elite glamour of ‘fashion’ – to show that no wearer of clothes is alone in feeling he or she doesn’t measure up to these images.

Since I'll be working on the book pretty much full-time in 2012, expect more frequent posting here. I'm hoping to use this blog as a sort of work-in-progress journal, posting snippets of the cool stuff I discover along the way.

Offering tips to hipsters

So, quite a lot of radio silence here. However I have been boasting about my recent purchases on Twitter. This has never been a haul blog or a GPOY blog, although I am kind of regretting turning down the invitation to blog at I Op, Therefore I Am a couple of years ago, because I get most of my clothes at op-shops and would happily rabbit on about them.

One thing I've done, however, is start a Tumblr called The Hipster Tipster. I had this idea last October after spotting a rack of free greeting cards outside a surf shop, and thinking hipsters ought to have been all over it. I thought, "Someone should start a blog where they offer these kinds of little tips and ideas."

It is not as though I am Queen of the Hipsters and hence am speaking from an authoritative position. But I do think I should be honest with myself: I work for an alt-culture website. I know lots of coolsie types. I'm acutely conscious of how my tastes present me to the world and situate me among my peers.

Also, I feel strongly that hipsterism is unfairly maligned; as I wrote in an op-ed last year, haters gonna hate. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with wanting to be cool, liking the things you like and wanting to be around other people who like those things too, and this Maria Bustillos story from The Awl really resonated with me:

When you are around young people who have ambition and taste, and who long to enter an imagined world full of gloriously attractive and brilliant cognoscenti, it can break your heart to see their fear and insecurity—which is very natural and really, almost inescapable for the young—manifested in distrust and an assumed arrogance, in a pretense at more knowledge than they really have. The way they pretend to know about this or that band, or the way they suddenly up and say that Pitchfork itself is "too mainstream," or they pretend to read a book that they haven't read. They literally twitch with grief and fear. They are suffering! And this suffering stifles their natural curiosity and pleasure, imprisons them in an airless chamber of embarrassment and insecurity.

As Bustillos shrewdly recognises, a cultural disposition predicated on connoisseurship offers no room for people to admit they don't already know everything. But nobody knows everything, and it shouldn't be uncool to admit as much. So The Hipster Tipster comes from this position of being a face-saving solution: offering little hints and ideas that you otherwise have to figure out on your own.

I was very conscious of wanting to offer tips for both men and women, for people who like cutesy stuff and people who like futuristic stuff, for DIY fans, students, workers, and all sorts of creative people. I also wanted the tips to cover a broad terrain – not just fashion, accessories and grooming, and not just interiors, and not just food, and not just culture, but things from across all these fields.

But one of the things I've realised when running the blog is that there are so many different hipster dispositions that I can't possibly represent them all. My own tastes tend to the feminine, the DIY and the retro, and on Tumblr, your tastes curate the information you encounter (via the users you choose to follow). But I try not to make The Hipster Tipster too prescriptive.

A big however. I also want to condemn the aspects of hipsterism that I find repugnant or just irritating. I want to show readers that they can pursue cool without being reckless or callous, and point out the ways that trying to be individual sometimes leads to ill-thought-out herd behaviour and venerating dickheads. By contrast, I want to show how you can do alt-things politely, thoughtfully and ethically.

I offer readers the opportunity to ask for tips. Disappointingly, very few people have taken me up on this, and when one guy asked how to attract a hipster girl, I was tempted to think he was taking the piss. But it really pleases me to see the social negotiations of hipsterism made public like this, and for me to get an opportunity to put my oar in!

Fewer and better shoes

This year, one of my New Year's resolutions is to buy fewer and better shoes. In the past I have chosen not to spend money on shoes because I've observed that no matter how much money a pair of shoes cost, I tend to grind the soles away and tear the insoles. So why not buy ten pairs of shoes for $100 rather than one?

However, I am sick of having a wardrobe stuffed with canvas or vinyl flats that have holes in the soles or are coming apart at the toes. I'm sick of the way that cheap shoes always have uncomfortable, pancake-thin soles that make walking a misery. I'm sick of spending more money on insoles, glue and gaffer tape than I spent on the damn shoes in the first place. And I am sick of the dismay that comes from realising, every time it rains, that I don't own any shoes that won't leak.

I've spent some time thinking about what constitutes 'value' in clothes shopping: for instance, a few years ago when I was dissed about my beloved handbag, Stam. Interestingly, my knock-off Stam bag got so much use it wore out and I had to replace it. I decided that leather would be more durable than vinyl, but oddly enough you just can't buy a knock-off Stam made from leather – the real Marc Jacobs bags are leather and the knock-offs are always 'leatherette', 'leather-like material' or other euphemisms for vinyl.

So in mid-2008, I bought a real Stam, even though I don't really give a shit about branded merchandise. What has taken me by surprise is the affective bond I have with this inanimate object. The design is not an 'It bag' any more, but I love Stam, and when it wears out, I'll buy myself another one.

But I have digressed. To recap, here are a few different ideologies of value, which sometimes intersect and complement each other.

Brand-led value: Some people believe that they're getting the best value by purchasing prominent brands or designers who act as stylistic innovators, gatekeepers of quality and markers of authenticity. If these brands are expensive, brand-led consumers reason that "you get what you pay for". My brother, for instance, always buys designer merchandise and finds cheaper, unbranded or knock-off alternatives offensive.

Material value: Some materials, or proportions of materials, have been consensually allocated a higher exchange-value. For instance, the 'thread count' of bedsheets, or the presence of 'Egyptian cotton', is now a marker of 'better quality' sheets. Right now, natural fabrics are deemed better quality than synthetics – garments are advertised as being 'cotton rich', or '100% silk', and leather is better than PVC or vinyl – although historically, synthetic fabrics have been greeted as desirable innovations.

Price value: In this ideology, the cheapest (or most discounted) goods are the best. It prioritises 'bargains' and getting more for your money, and celebrates sourcing items from factory or warehouse outlets, discount malls, VIP sales and markets, as well as through shopping at stores known for offering super-cheap prices.

Fashion value: This ideology prizes owning only items that are 'on-trend': on the leading edge of the fashion cycle. Purchases are frequent and items are turned over quickly in order to maintain maximum fashionability. Items can be very cheap (as in 'fast fashion' chain stores) or very expensive (as in designer ranges), and fashion-led consumers always have their eye on particular, coveted future purchases.

Classicism value: This ideology deliberately opts out of the fashion system and considers it vulgar to chase trends. Rather, it's interested in 'elegance' and 'chic'. These qualities can be attained by developing a repertoire of plain garments that have become consensually deemed 'classics' – usually through their appearances in classic Hollywood cinema or through being favoured by fashion icons. Little black dresses, ballet flats, beige trench coats, striped Breton T-shirts, blue jeans and 'crisp' white shirts are all classic garments.

Ethical value: For some shoppers, paying attention to ethics is the paramount consideration. This can mean being 'thrifty' by buying fewer items and re-using or altering existing garments, avoiding cheap items which are likely to have been produced by sweated labour, choosing environmentally sustainable materials and supply chains, or favouring local and independent designers over big global brands.

Affective value: While the other ideologies each have their own affects (from moral conviction to glamour), affect-led shoppers tend to buy things based primarily on how the items make them feel. A fluffy scarf feels lovely nestled against the cheek; comfortable shoes offer instant relief when tried on in the shop. Bright colours cheer you up; sparkly things make you feel rich, or that you'll attract the gaze of others.

My own shopping decisions have mainly been a combination of price and classicism value – not necessarily because I prize the 'classic' aesthetic, but because I believe that when you buy plain, simple clothes, it's less obvious how little you paid for them. As I've mentioned, I also tend to buy many identical, cheap items in the belief that this is 'good value'.

But my 2011 shoe resolution sees me shifting priorities to a combination of classicism, affective and material value, downgrading the importance of price. The idea is to possess fewer shoes, but to buy only comfortable shoes made of leather, in styles I'm 100 per cent happy with. So I'm going to throw out the worst of the current canvas ballet flats. And when I'm in a shop and get excited about some hipster plimsolls that cost $5, or when a pair of shoes is almost but not quite what I'm after, I will say to myself, "Fewer and better shoes, Mel!"

I have also – embarrassingly! – decided to invest in some 'sockettes' or 'footlets' – those shoe-liners designed to be worn with bare legs to prevent you sweating in and stinking out your shoes. I've decided that it will prolong the life of my shoes never to wear them without socks.

Damn, I've written so much and haven't even really touched on the sexist notion that all women fetishise shoes and love shopping for them, which is absolutely at odds with my own experience. Another post, perhaps.

Wardrobe malfunction

You know that perhaps you have too many clothes when your wardrobe rail breaks.



This happened to me last Friday. Because I was sick of tripping over my collection of sub-$10 canvas shoes, from my local op-shop I bought one of those IKEA hanging shoe storage units. It looks like this, except in plain black. It cost $8, which I thought was overpriced but didn't fuss about because it was a charity shop. But if the retail price is $17.99, I got it pretty cheaply.

I have lived in my current house for almost five years, and the wardrobe rail has always bowed alarmingly in the middle. I have to say that this, more than any single other factor, is why I have been trying to sell my old clothes on eBay.

When I hung up the shoe pigeonholes and filled them with shoes, I was very pleased with my newfound tidiness for the 30 seconds or so until the rail fell off at one end. However, my cat was very pleased with his new cushion.



The rail – which is metal with some kind of latex coating – was actually bent in the middle. I got my trusty sledgehammer and banged it straight again. Then I headed down to the local hardware shop, where one of the Bondi Vet's younger brothers sold me three brackets for $5.

Since I don't own a power drill, it was Handy Dad to the rescue. He helped me reinstall the wardrobe rail, this time reinforced by the three brackets screwed into the wardrobe ceiling. Now the weight on the rail is spread five different ways rather than just two.



Once I had a functioning wardrobe again, I tried to be ruthless and cull anything I didn't wear. In the dead of night I took four bags of clothing and accessories to the same op-shop that had precipitated the disaster. But it really didn't make much of a dint in it:



All my coats and jackets are on the far left, hidden behind the door. Then you can see some of my rainbow of cardigans. Then my shirts and blouses, then skirts, then long dresses, sleeveless dresses, spaghetti-strap dresses, short-sleeved dresses, long-sleeved dresses, cocktail and evening dresses. Then a section of stuff I'm planning to sell on eBay. And on the very far right, the notorious shoe pigeonholes.

That is just the wardrobe. I also have a chest of five drawers: the bottom drawer is knitwear, the next up is pants and foldable skirts, the next up is, shamefully, accessories, and the top two contain undies and other lingerie.

My T-shirts used to live in the accessories drawer; now they're crammed into one of those giant IKEA bags. My underwear collection grew too big to keep in the drawers, too; now a giant plastic tub holds my socks and tights (with a cardboard divider stickytaped into it). And I have a hatstand for my bags, scarves and hats.

Is it wrong – is it wasteful, narcissistic, shallow, compulsive – to own this much clothing? For instance: I own 16 cardigans. Sixteen cardigans. Does even Emma Pillsbury own that many? I also didn't have enough clothes hangers for everything. I bought a dozen more on Saturday at Big W, suckered by the sign that said, "That's 29c per hanger!"

In popular culture, women with large clothing collections are presented as out-of-control spendthrifts, the idle wealthy, fashion-obsessed, or combinations of the above. Think of Carrie Bradshaw's walk-in wardrobe and its obscene upgrade for the Sex and the City movie, Cher Horowitz's computerised outfit selection system or Rebecca Bloomwood's dangerously overstuffed cupboard.

I wouldn't put myself in any of those categories. None of my clothes or shoes are expensive or 'designer' – they are all from op-shops, trashy teenwear shops or discount department stores. Yet I don't really follow fashion; I tend to buy plain, non-trend items and keep things for years.

For a while I've been meaning to blog about clothing repairs – and perhaps I still will – but basically, I also extend my clothes' lifespan by mending them. So the only reason I get rid of something is if it no longer fits, is irretrievably stained or has totally worn out.

The other reason I have so many clothes is because I'm obsessed with repeat purchases. If I like something in one colour, I will buy it in others – usually at the same time. I see it as good value. If you eliminated all the clones from my wardrobe, you'd probably halve it.

It's also interesting that there are deemed to be two sorts of large wardrobes: the well-organised large wardrobe and the jumbled, messy large wardrobe. The storage and organisation industries prey on women whose clothing collections are so large they can never find the item they're after when they want it.

But I'd argue the well-organised wardrobe is much scarier. The sort with spots for everything, and everything always in its right place. It reminds me of Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest: "No wire hangers!" Doubtless she would be appalled at my plastic hangers – no lovely wooden or padded hangers in my wardrobe, I'm afraid. In the numbers I require, they would probably cost more to buy than my clothes.

Some pretty basic thoughts on racist fashion

Back when I wrote about the keffiyeh as a hipster totem (and, of course, one which seems so naff and passé now), I said:

Let's set aside the well-known debates over cultural and political appropriation, because they've been rehearsed so many times before when it comes to hip-hop apparel, bindis, dreadlocks, Thai fisherman pants and any number of other 'ethnicised' forms of clothing.

Clearly these debates have not been rehearsed often enough. It seems weird to me now that I could have considered this terrain well mapped, because the fashion industry continues to deploy imagery and 'inspiration' that quite startlingly disavows any politics whatsoever.

But of course, we live in a culture in which people who draw attention or object to racist cultural moments are routinely accused of being 'politically correct', 'over-sensitive' or 'reading too much into things'. Maybe we do need to point this shit out, even if the points we are making seem obvious.

I don't make a habit of tracking this stuff; for all your erudition needs on the politics of fashion, I heartily recommend Threadbared and Fashion For Writers. However, here are several pretty basic observations I would like to make:

1. It's not okay to participate in other countries' racist traditions



Dotti window display: demonstrate your individuality by thoughtlessly replicating racist imagery.

When KFC aired its notorious "fried chicken at the cricket" ad, the company was shocked that American commentators would be upset at the suggestion that it's "too easy" to quieten down rowdy black people by offering them buckets of fried chicken.

The company's view was that the ad was never intended to be seen in the US; that in Australia, black people/fried chicken doesn't have the same racist connotation. "The ad was reproduced online in the US without KFC's permission, where we are told a culturally based stereotype exists, leading to the incorrect assertion of racism," said a KFC statement.

"We are told"! Pshaw! Such a statement betrays the attitude that cultures other than our own are fundamentally unknowable to us, and hence we can elude accusations of racism by saying it's not our racism; it's another culture's! We didn't know! To us, it's funny, or glamorous! Go tell them about racism!

Today, via Cate Lawrence, I came across this blog post about cultural appropriation, which made me remember my horror at the Dotti shop window. It was also quite eye-opening to see the resentment that ordinary consumers felt at being implicated in racist fashion practices. Some people quoted in Julia's post seemed to feel badgered by the 'PC police', or having their innocent consumer choices unfairly tainted with the racist brush.

In Australia, appropriations of American racism have been excused as harmless humour and spectacle, because "we don't have the cultural context to interpret them as racist". There might be an outcry if national chain store Dotti used cartoonish Australian indigenous imagery, but since we don't have Native Americans, it's okay to dress up as them.

Now that is just bullshit.

2. 'Nude' is not a colour



"I'm sorry Barack, you don't have X-ray vision."

I can't remember where I first read about Michelle Obama's 'nude' dress, but I was reminded about it on the weekend because Sushi Das wrote about it in The Age's A2 section, months after everyone else.

Personally I don't use the term 'nude' to describe those pale, insipid colours that so many Hollywood stars seem to find flattering on the red carpet. But the Obama incident did make me recognise that I do subconsciously think of these colours as ones that will blend with my skin tone.

There are whole industries built around the aesthetic privileging of pale skin. I've never had trouble finding concealer, stockings or Band-Aids to match my skin… but plenty of people do. It's obvious as soon as you see dark-skinned sportspeople strapped up in tape, or wearing knee, elbow and ankle supports that are clearly intended to 'blend in' with pale skin.

To think of these colours as 'nudes' implies that pale skin is the default skin tone, the skin tone. But what gets me is how easy it would be for the fashion industry to use the many other words for these colours – beige, champagne, peach – yet how 'nude' is still the preferred term. It's almost as though you show more mastery of fashion terminology by using 'nude'.

Recently Westfield shopping centres promoted a new stylist/online community manager role that they're calling the "Westfield Insider" by getting well-known fashion bloggers to put together an outfit sourced solely from a Westfield mall. There were several 'on-trend' looks to work with, including "the blazer", "the maxi dress", "nautical", "military", "coloured denim", etc.

Lady Melbourne, who is one of the Westfield Insider judges, picked several trends, but one of them was "nude and pastels".



"I loved the colour of this bag, it jumped out at me immediately as soon as I set eyes on it," she wrote.

Here's where I might start to get in trouble… But I've gotta ask: what made the bag so attractive? Was it because we hold bags close to our bodies and almost consider them an extension of ourselves, and this bag is so similar to Lady Melbourne's own skin tone?

Lady Melbourne doesn't really intellectualise fashion, which is a terrible shame considering the position of influence and respect she commands among fashion bloggers. What a missed opportunity to comment, even in passing, on the oddness of that term, 'nude'.