Want to buy or sell something? Check the classifieds
  • The Fedora Lounge is supported in part by commission earning affiliate links sitewide. Please support us by using them. You may learn more here.

Sex and Suits

Fletch

I'll Lock Up
Messages
8,865
Location
Iowa - The Land That Stuff Forgot
It's a gloss - a survey - but a perceptive one, and probably a unique one. Even at this late date, it's still not quite the Done Thing to treat men's and women's clothing as equals in cultural meaning.

Hollander has a very telling point about the 30s being an era of graceful simplicity - clothes that moved well and took on pleasing poses and attitudes. She's a little offbase about "the postwar era" all being uniform, though. Women had to come to terms with the New Look and men the Bold - both of which passed pretty quickly.

After that, she's right, there was a conformism, and individuality "lost caste." But first, we had to shed some of the elegance of the 30s. I think it looked a little too much to Europe, and to old centers of power - which now meant military and bodily power, not just financial and political power as before.

4288286281_cbea8af158_o.png

Marlene Dietrich, 1932.
Not a tomboy, and this is not drag - she's fully and desirably female in these man's clothes.
Not too many women could pull that off. Not even Katharine Hepburn, I don't think, not like this.
Men and women could take a cue from her in sureness and style. I think they still can.
 

BinkieBaumont

Rude Once Too Often
4288286281_cbea8af158_o.png

Marlene Dietrich, 1932.
Not a tomboy, and this is not drag - she's fully and desirably female in these man's clothes.
Not too many women could pull that off. Not even Katharine Hepburn, I don't think, not like this.
Men and women could take a cue from her in sureness and style. I think they still can.
[/QUOTE]

"You are born naked, after that everything else is Drag"
 

Forum statistics

Threads
108,995
Messages
3,072,338
Members
54,039
Latest member
GloriaJama
Top