The Look of an Empowered Woman
I don’t know how many decades have passed since the fight for equality between men and women started. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) made a mark of Feminism in history with the publication of her Vindication of The Rights of Woman in 1792, but some scholars have traced feminist ideas way back, centuries before Wollstonecraft publish what would become one of the “cookbooks” of feminine empowerment.
What I do know is that feminists around the globe, both male and female, haven’t given up on their efforts to realize a world where men and women could be treated equally with equal respect for their rights, without any sexist prejudice contaminating their interactions. But clearly, making a global, radical cultural change isn’t as easy as 1, 2, 3.
University academics and NGO-activists aren’t the only ones who are concerned with feminine empowerment. Artists, too, express their awareness and concern for the issue via media that they master. Even in the fashion industry, which sometimes thought to be exploitative towards women in general and discriminative towards certain race and body type, there are designers who genuinely feel the urgency of empowering women.
Take Miuccia Prada, for example. For her PRADA Fall/Winter 2006 collection, Prada created head-to-toe looks that were clean, almost without print or any playful embellishment. The domination of black and other hues of dark color stripped the models of their innocence and cheerfulness. At that time, Prada said she was tired of being sweet, so she decided to project in her collection a woman who is politically-aware and takes social issues seriously.
Three years later—in the face of multitude of problems like world-wide economic crisis, large-scale environmental damages, and seemingly endless political turmoil around the globe—Prada takes these issues seriously again with her Fall/Winter 2009 collection. (In between the two Fall/Winters I’ve mentioned, Prada had dazzled the fashion world with metallic turbans and micro-skirts, fairy prints on cheongsam tops, intricate laces on what could’ve been Prada’s vision of 21st century Hausfrau, and unzipped pieces that are now taking women to an exciting age of primitivism.)
For Fall/Winter 2009, the looks embrace similar ideas to those in 2006: feminine empowerment, expressed via monotony of dark hues, very minimal prints, and embellishments that have the faintest taste of femininity. As was the 2006 collection, the clothes look ready for boardroom meetings, courtroom dramas, and all those hardcore orgies of strategic idealism in the House of Representatives (something that rarely occur in Indonesia).
But the 2009 look is more brutal, though. And by “brutal”, I mean brute, uncivilized. The 2006 look portrayed women who are still willing to converse, debate, and retain some patience in waiting for a political institution to morph into its desired form. Those traits are lost in the 2009 look. The models who walked down the PRADA runway got their hairs frizzed-up and their skins paled-down, picturing women who are ready to burst when faced with another moral pretense. Cannibalism was all I could think about when I first saw them on the internet. Prada had probably realized that the present days are tougher than three years ago, so the look must be stronger without any trace of fragility that others (men?) could exploit to break a woman.
But does it really have to be so?
When Hillary Clinton backed out of a cover photo shoot for the February 2008 issue of US Vogue over concerns she would look to feminine in designer outfits, Anna Wintour (US Vogue’s Editor-in-Chief) criticized her by saying that “the idea that a contemporary woman must look mannish in order to be taken seriously as a seeker of power is frankly dismaying. This is America, not Saudi Arabia.”[1]
Inspired by that remark, I feel the urgency to address an important question to Prada’s 2006 and 2009 creations and to the notion of “feminine empowerment” in general: must a contemporary woman look mannish in order to be empowered and taken seriously? I suppose the answer lies within the look itself.
What is it about mannish look (on women) that instantly grabs others’ serious attention? Is it because of the stereotype that only men are capable to function in the public sphere and so are to be taken seriously? Perhaps, but that’s still not about the clothes or why women should look mannish. A reputable politician could easily turn into a laughing stock were he be seen by his peers wearing floral-printed shirt. That example suggests that look plays vital role in determining who would be taken seriously and who would be taken as a joke. So it’s not all sexual determinism.
I hypothesize that mannish look, which is almost always plain and simple, drives others’ attention away from the look itself (which has nothing to be focused on) to the wearer’s words (provided the speaker has crucial points to address). Whereas female clothes—with all its decorations, spectra of colors, and distracting skin-revealing cuts—traps others’ attention to the wearer’s body and much less on her words or brain (despite the other’s not being a total pervert).
Some female power-seeker are still fashion-conscious and won’t let go of their individual, non-mannish style (and they shouldn’t). But sometimes to counterbalance the distracting effects of their clothes and accessories, these women have to become mannish. They become difficult, cold, bossy and domineering, traits that are often attributed to men. While these women’s looks keep them women, their mannish attitudes only got them labeled “bitch”.
Given all these symptoms of male-imitation, it is important to note that PRADA’s seasonal angry women isn’t the only version of power-woman the fashion world has to offer. Donatella Versace, for instance, is universally known for creating the look of confident women who are consciously vampy and willing to use their sex appeal. That’s powerful, too. After all, the notion of “power” doesn’t always imply anything brute and straight-to-the-point. Power could be exerted smoothly, paralyzing the target until its system collapse on its own.
If we take power to mean “an ability or capacity to yield some outcome”[2], then the answer is clear: women don’t have to look mannish to feel empowered and be taken seriously. If being empowered means being endowed with a capacity to yield some outcome, then being mannish is just one among several options. Women could be and feel empowered and able to exert influence to get what they want by dressing-up to their best. Just because one relies on one’s brain doesn’t mean one has to neglect one’s look. However, one must remain conscious of one’s autonomy, of one’s decisions, of how one presents oneself, and of one’s responsibility for the consequences of one’s own decisions.
Every woman should have the prerogative to decide for herself whether she wants to be mannish, vampy, or something else. She should be able to decide whether she wants to attain power with her brain, her tits, or something else. Only individuals who know what would work for each of them. True empowerment comes when one could decide for oneself and be responsible, especially to oneself, for one’s decisions.
- Adhi Putra Tawakal -
[1] Mesure, Susie. January 20, 2008. “Wintour goes Nuclear over Hillary’s Snub to ‘Vogue’”. The Independent.
[2] Audi, Robert, ed. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 727.
