Victorian Redux, Dov Charney’s D, and Fashion Bloggers At Large

Not long after mentioning the plague of American Apparel and pornofied culture in my post on feminism’s future in new media, Jezebel has a great post discussing their latest move, which is a partnership with online fashion social networking site Chictopia.  Three top-rated Chictopia users are being featured in American Apparel spreads featured on the site.  “This follows the retailer’s quiet unveiling of a unique ad run for a few select sex blogs last month,” Jezebel notes.

I have been doing a lot of note-taking about fashion blogging lately, and its value/reception in overall internet culture.  The ostensible diversity of a street-style aesthetic was a democratic answer to the oligarchy helmed by Anna Wintour et al.  From there, as internet literacy had its boom, we’ve seen in the last two years the rise of the fashion blogger, the evolution of democratic fashion ideals in the age of a participatory spirit in internet culture.

Like all the rest of the internet, there’s a scrabble for control over unconquered wilderness. Fashion ain’t no different.

In the 100 most popular blogs back in August, only 13% of them were written by women, either in group or single-author formats.  Blogs about culture in general make up only 4% of those 100 sites, and fashion remarkably holds down a 1% on its own.  Overwhelmingly, tech blogs dominate at 57%, followed by politics at 18%—neither of those genres very famous for their appeals to female demographics.  What are women doing on the internet?  Of the gender split, the author comments, “I interpret this as supply rather than demand. Blogs catering to women will likely find audiences much more easily than the over saturated male-oriented market.”

Will they?  While change and trends are instant on the internet, I would bet here’s one that will remain somewhat static.  We can see material culture mirrored in the web, where mainstream values are geared for, promoted to, and authored by stereotypically “male” interests.  This is all, of course, been of interest for some time, and the subject of much research.  In a post by an author hoping to understand better the relationships of blogging and gender, the writer innocently captures a larger cultural sentiment at work:

I am starting to believe that the reason my research sample has so few female bloggers in it is not because fewer women are blogging about emerging church stuff, but are doing it in the wrong genre. That is, while I have come aross many religious blogs written by women, their focus has been on discussion about daily religious life, rather than explicit discussions about emerging church issues. Thus they don’t present themselves in the same way as other types of emerging church blogs, as ones written by men, whose intentions to engage people in all things EC are done explicitly in their style of blogging, be it [blogs which link to other sites] or [blogs which collect new information]. I must confess I have considered including some blogs in my sample but late changed my mind for their lack of discussion about events, theories, opinions about others’ opinions etc., in favour of talking about personal experiences, emotional respones, private reflections on general theological suppositions.

And there it is: the division of public and private spheres, and privileging one as “right” and the other as “wrong.”  The blogger, of course, doesn’t intend to reinforce that dichotomy, in fact it’s important to understand he’s hoping for just the opposite.  Yet still, we see a familiar theme under the implicit suggestion that women wedge themselves into blog culture by communicating in and of masculine modes of speech; the issues women are writing about and the ways women are talking of them are “wrong.”  Women, by extension, are therefore “wrong” (in an irony that beats all ironies, we see this criticism of an inverse of this sometimes legitimately leveled at feminism still).

The Victorian era was actually an incredible moment of dialogue in Western culture (comically, psychologists en masse have apparently just decided it made us “better people”).  Arguably at its center was “the woman question,” Without going into a full-scale reading of  of 18th century literature, the rhetoric of the time was highly concerned with women’s place and ‘natural abilities’ in the public (ie commercial) sphere, as well as arguing or denigrating the value of traditionally domestic interests.  One of the largest issues to spur debate was the legitimacy of career female writers, and a developing a market accessible to women that would find some ladies financially independent of men, and therefore significantly less at their mercy.

The upshot of this, especially in more economically privileged circled, was increasingly lax conditions of social mobility.  But the “will to power” never seems to die easy; where one way of exercising control fails, another typically crops up in its place, by nature less visible than its predecessor.  It was also in the Victorian era in which we saw the rise of consumer culture as we still know it today.  Funny enough, the central commodity Victorians loved to consume was fashion.

Understood by Victorian men as a largely frivolous yet enjoyable province of the lady of his house, fashion was controlled by and marketed to almost entirely women.  Men would be expected to participate, but to be overly concerned with such trivial interests would be seen as quite “fey” (queer eye for the straight guy, as we know).  Social control was thus exercised in new ways:

Women have a profound sense of the constant surveillance of their public selves, and this extends to their surveillance of other women too. Female narcissism was encouraged in the Victorian plates and in fashion illustrations generally which tended to feature a large number of mirrors.

Victorian feminists grew more agitated as the obsession raged on.  From an issue of The Rational Dress Society’s Gazette (1888):

She extends her authority to the minutest details of our lives; tells us when we must eat and when we must strive to amuse ourselves. She turns day into night, ignores our comforts, disposes of our money and our time, and engages in successful war even with Nature itself.

So much of feminism’s shortcomings, and its disconnect from mainstream women, lies in the tendancy of discourse to be destructive and largely reactionary.  In some ways, we are constantly trying to undo the havok wrecked by a culture thriving on latent misogyny, but this also means we’re always one step behind.  We’re truly on the cusp of new media and where that will reach, and we can see here how consumer culture seeks to reinforce its own power through invasion of our freest spaces.

Like the writer of the Jezebel post, I also find it hilariously myopic to describe a girl who takes pictures of herself in her bedroom in expensive clothing as “a beautiful stylista actively pursuing her passion via Chictopia and creative expression on her own blog.”   I mean, that is the sort of shit which ensures one will never be taken seriously.  And yet I think it’s relevant to reconsider how a fashion blogger might be re-appropriating the gaze for herself in new ways—ways that hadn’t exactly been ravaged by capitalist exploitation any more than fashion itself—and the incredible power in that.

That sounds suspiciously like the sort of dumb arguments given by “Playboy-style Feminism,” where women find empowerment in serving up their own exploitative media.  But consider how street-style is neither of interest to nor intended for the consumption of the male sexual imagination.  Tricia Royal, who started the flickr pool Wardrobe Remix, is very much of the DIY ethos and writes often and with great enthusiasm about the non-frivaloty of fashion, at times in explicitly political ways.  Wardrobe Remix still feels very much like a women-centered space of creativity and expression, and clicking through the pages of contributors is a fascinating look into the lives of an almost indefinable range of lives.

That energy was then extended to an even more politically charged agenda with a communal flickr pool geared specifically for plus-sized posters, affiliated with the website Fatshionista, who’s byline is “fat, fashion, & intersectional politics.”  The fascinating part of Fatshionista’s flickr pool is that we see in no uncertain terms fat people, whom we are socialized in various degrees to identify with lazy, unmotivated, stupid, slovenly etc, exercising a great deal of care for their appearance.  We see, in a forum which by nature is an invitation to be looked at, the myriad faces (in all senses of this word) attached to the fat bodies typically encouraged to be ashamed of themselves.  And I wonder, were I not a fat girl who takes great pleasure in fashion myself, if I was to stumble upon these pictures of fat people dressing so deliberately and smartly, how would I read it?  Would I be surprised by the beauty I might have thought was impossible on a fat body?  Would I be able to recognize it at all?  Would it change how I saw others, change how I saw myself?

So we see there is a political value to fashion blogging, but it’s still unclear how we negotiate it with the more undesirable parts of fashion at large.  Tricia wonders this:

the last few months or year has seen what seems to me to be to be an explosive proliferation of street style/personal style/fashion blogs… there has also been a launch of a myriad of fashion-sharing sites. many of the fashion/style sharing sites have an element of rating (or rating systems)…i.e., users are encouraged not to simply celebrate, but to criticize

Therein lies the difference between Wardrobe Remix and Chictopia, and why American Apparel would choose them as an appropriate Trojan Horse over the matter-of-fact spirit of Remix.  It’s not that users don’t judge the outfits of personal value to them on Remix, it’s that outside assessments are beside the fact.  This outfit was significant enough for a user to document and then share—this in itself is all the legitimacy it needs.

Chictopia instead sorts itself through popularity, not a consistently changing database.  Unsurprisingly, the popular users share a (if you ask me, and you are) somewhat ubiquitous aesthetic, boring in particular when you understand the bredth of creativity at work on the site—bloggers like Zana of Garbage Dress or Jane of Sea of Shoes both participate in chictopia as well, the latter even as a newly contributing writer.  It almost boggles the mind that people who engage with their own everyday presentation at a level approaching constantly evolving, living works of art are not recognized with the same fanfare, but of course, if users are solicited to vote, the mediocrity of the masses never fails to make itself known. Users immediately approach others critically rather than openly, and a sellable uniform aesthetic will soon emerge.

That’s something feminists might want to learn from; by laughing at fashion bloggers, both the Jezebel writer and I are snidely divorcing ourselves from something of importance to a significant and still growing number of women.  Feminist bloggers are constantly stuck trying to reconcile the private (personal) in the language of the public (political), and we can’t exactly afford to eschew anything of obviously overwhelming interest to young girls especially as “wrong.”  We need to make sure we give support and build upon what is right.  Otherwise we’re doomed to learn the same lesson twice; ultimately, Victorian feminists criticizing fashion were not especially effective:

Whilst the reformers had succeeded in raising and deepening the debate about women’s dress and health, they did not make any permanent or serious impact on the advance of fashion. But for them, the rejection of what they saw as the pernicious and repressive aspects of fashion meant a step towards emancipation, and to be emancipated was what it was to be truly modern. A popular device used by feature writers on fashion, both adherents and reformers, was to connect it to the world of politics. Both fashion and politics shared a connection to change and to progress, and it was towards this particular kind of advancement on which both groups set their sights. Fashion as represented in women’s magazines was always connected to commodity culture and to modernity, whatever the nature of the debate.

Without positive engagements with new media, we leave more and more room for robberbarons like Charney to move in on some very lucrative ground–lucrative to those who care about women’s lives and those who wish to exploit them.  We will see this kind of infiltration in all new media related to the “private” sphere; sex, fashion, home, etc.  Without supporting a number of alternative voices in the mix, whose narrative do you think will win out?

American Apparel’s move into the world of fashion and sex blogging signals something big—that whatever you think is truly open and democratic (like the internet), this too will be commodified.  The aesthetics of street-style were both informed by and dictated AA’s trajectory into the pornography of “everyday women,” and now we see the space created by street-style being further impinged upon by tastemakers looking to be moneymakers.  Anna Winteur’s regime is dead, but there’s nothing egalitarian about what might be coming next: get ready to salute Dov Charney’s notorious erection.  And nobody is going to want to clean up after that mess.

(Unless I guess they give one of us a “modeling” spread?)