Fashion and Gender
In what ways has fashion and dress provided the means for creating and establishing a gendered identity during the later 19th and mid 20th centuries. ... The most radical change in woman wear through the 19th and 20th centuries would probably be the androgynous fashion. ... This is also apparent from the fact that the first male “boutiques” in Paris were opened as late as 1950’s, even then with an uncertainty in mind showing that the men were afraid of even having a “fashion” and were relating it to femininity and/or homosexuality. ... Mens fashion becomes a series of undecorated black tubes, like the smoke stacks of the Industrial Revolution (an analogy they were even conscious of at the time), while womens dress continues to balloon out with ruffles, decorations and petticoats until women look like ambulatory wedding cakes” . ... In general; however, in the industrial period gender difference was stressed remarkably by dress and fashion became an important instrument reflecting the consciousness in gendered individuality. ... And then the fashion of orientalism –thanks to Paul Poiret and the Russian Ballet- led to “art deco” style: the S shaped figure turned into a cylinder. After the War, in 1925, came the revolution of short skirts and a new style: the solution fashion found to make use of the tendency towards a masculinity-femininity ambiguity in gender identity was androgyny (which, later on, turned into the unisex fashion in 1960-70’s). ... Actually, the features which are said to reflect androgyny have all -since the eighteenth century- been on the female side of the gender border: short hair, trousers, masculine shirts, cravats etc.