Column:

Fashion throwbacks not always to golden age

By ChaToyya Sewell

Published March 12, 2010

Look y'all, I'm tired. In the last couple of weeks since diversity has been brought into the forefront of campus attention, I've received support, props and lots of hate mail. So I'm going to talk about something fun: fashion.

I've written about my interest in fashion before, particularly fashion's often-problematic relationship with race and my clotheshorse tendencies (Closet space? What closet space?). I'm interested in looking at fashion from an intellectual standpoint, as not merely an exercise in frivolity, but an example of culturally mandated and acceptable expressions of desire.

Two women after my own heart in this arena, Minh-Ha T. Pham and Mimi Thi Nguyen, describe themselves as academics who teach "about the politics of fashion and beauty." They maintain a blog at threadbared.blogspot.com. Threadbared has been running a series of posts called the politics of vintage, and they recently posted a piece about nostalgia in "All-American" clothing.

Nostalgia seems a thread that runs through a lot of fashion, from high fashion editorial campaigns to the naming of mass-marketed J. Crew pieces (plantation madras).

It feels like almost annually Vogue will send a young, waifish, usually white actress/model to Africa to model neo-colonial wear. In 2007 Vogue styled Keira Knightly in a mixture of safari-esque khaki, prairie skirts and motorcycle boots and surrounded her with Maasai and elephants.

Aside from the overt issue of fashion's propensity for using people of color as colorful background pieces for fashion stories, what is this editorial supposed to represent? The editorial feels almost infused with a longing for stuffy English corsets and the subjugation and oppression of people.

As a history major, I often find this sort of historical nostalgia stupid. Would I like to live in the past? No, I like penicillin and birth control and representative democracy. I also like to use my right to free speech and non-violent dissent.

I also often find the language used when referring to the past can be very telling.

"Glory Days" and "A Time of Civility" often ignore the trauma many people (people of color, LGBTQ and disabled people) were subjected to in the name of civility.

And this nostalgia not only relates to race but has a clear intersection with gender and class as well. For every "plantation madras," there are Ralph Lauren "old money green" chinos (both examples from the original threadbared post) and the idea that civility equates to the myth of the fragile white woman, ignoring the capabilities of women in general.

And before the Internet erupts into five cries of "It's just fashion" — I get that.

I don't examine the political implications of my clothing as I purchase it. I tend to buy things based on a visceral attraction to them; they remind me of something a book, a painting, a film I've always imagined myself related to in some way.

A million people have a million reasons for the way they dress, some about pure comfort, others about presentation.

Yet our choices, however miniscule, don't exist in a vacuum regardless of our consciousness or our thought processes. We are all informed by our histories and societies, both on the relative microcosm and the global scale.

So when fashion, which by its nature as an industry is supposed to be an elusive and desirable representation of what we would like to be, shows a trope of this problematic nostalgia, what does that say about us and how we view our past?