Skinny Jeans and Pumps

Commentary by Wanda

I don't consider myself a Fashionista but I like to have at least one or two items du jour each style season and I try to avoid all fashion faux pas, i.e. wearing white after Labor Day. This fall season the hottest trend is skinny jeans with pumps. My "liberated" mind can't help but deconstruct these fashion trends that have taken place over recent years - capri pants, full-skirted dresses, and now skinny jeans. Is there some subverted message being delivered by the industry- a return to days when women dressed like ladies, neatly put together, the Mrs. Cleaver prototype?

Any card carrying member of the Religious Right would say that those were the good ole days and eagerly spout propaganda how the world is in worse shape because mothers are not at home and supervising their children. The Religious Right states claims that children with at-home moms are far more well-adjusted than children with working mothers and they eventually become successful adults (this has been disproved - read the book Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner). Nostalgia is not an uncommon occurrence. At any moment,you can be overcome with nostalgia. For example, just last night I tried to squeeze into a pair of jeans I wore in 12th grade and dance to a Guy CD. But trust me when I left out the house last night I didn't wear those jeans. Sometimes its a good idea to hold onto some traditions, but determining what to let go of can be a slippery slope, especially for extremists. It appears that the fashion industry has picked up on what is happening within the debate on women's role in the public and private domains and built the latest styles on that discourse.

This autumn I will stroll (sometimes I've been known to strut) across campus alongside true Fashionistas who will model the latest styles in classrooms, the student union, and frat house parties. These young ladies won't give a second thought to the social implications of their wardrobe. Their outfits reflect a time for women when non-existent professional advancement, political and religious silence were the norm and they support on some subliminal level, an agenda to return women, to some degree, to those days. What's next? Will next year's Fall line include an apron, or acorseted underwear to be worn under all dresses, or maybe the industry might eliminate pants altogether and return all proper ladies to the Victorian era. I have to be honest, you will probably catch me in a pair of skinny jeans and pumps but I will wear them with great apprehension knowing that as 21st century woman and occasionally a slave to fashion, I am possibly one style season away from returning to an apron styled with a frying pan.

A Response to Skinny Jeans and Pumps
By Cantice

Wanda, Jesus Christ himself couldn't get you in an apron. And what would be the use, you said yourself you don't cook. What you do, you do well and you have impressively deconstructed another trend, a fashion trend in fact. For better or worse, I am that woman who you probably feel uncomfortable walking with, since I hardly keep up with styles and regularly commit my share of faux pas. Just yesterday I wore flip-flops to work. But while your analysis was on point, many of your subsequent inferences were off. I won't pick your conjectures apart one by one, but I will comment on a few of your notes of caution (namely your at-home-mom/traditional mom phobia) and add some opinions of my own.

To believe that a return to the fashion of the fifties means that a higher power or industry wants women to return to the roles and values they had in the 1950s is short-sighted, especially if the higher power is male. What man wants women to return to the days of no sex before marriage and separate sleeping quarters afterward? I haven't read Freakonomics but I bet I could guess what well adjusted and success mean to the writers. I don't believe that the Religious Right is as uncritical as you describe and I'm not just speaking for myself. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, PhD, a pioneer in feminism, lost friends when she, a Catholic, called for a return to a parent in the home. Her recommendation found in Women and the Future of Family was less a diatribe against the "New Woman" and more of a call for somebody, namely a parent, to begin to care about the well being of children. Doing the same thing and expecting different results is commonly believed to be the definition of insanity, so she calls for a radical shift, a return of the at-home-parent. In her estimation women tend to do the best job of caring for kids. The other evangelicals who respond in the book agree that kids need more care, their parents are the prime candidates to give it, and that the government could make it a little easier economically for them to do so.

Lastly, I don't believe that the Religious Right wants a flat-out return to the homemaker. After all, married folks are the ones who benefit from both parents working. What feminists on the left and the right are beginning to agree on is that individualism is breaking down at least the US American society. But, the idea that somebody (read woman) owes loyalty to someone (read children, family, men) is shocking to some (read "New Women").

So by all means, Wanda, wear your skinny jeans. I don't think you have to worry that subconscious thoughts of learning to cook will infiltrate your brain. And I don't think that those young co-eds with those full-skirted dresses are any less likely to raise them for their less than knights-in-shining-armor at the end of a first date.