ABSTRACT

Despite the fact that the language of fashion shows strong patriarchal characteristics as it swings its focus around the female body-now emphasizing the bust, now the buttocks, now the legs or the waist, but always guiding the eye toward the eroticized areas-the meaning of fashion for women cannot be reduced to such political simplicity, nor can the pleasures offered to women by their own bodies be adequately explained by the giving of pleasure to the masculine other. The pleasure of the look is not just the pleasure of looking good for the male, but rather of controlling how one looks and therefore of controlling the look of others upon oneself. Looking makes meanings; it is

therefore a means of entering social relations, of inserting oneself into the social order in general, and of controlling one’s immediate social relations in particular. Commodities are the resources of the woman (or man) who is exercising some control over her look, her social relations, and her relation to the social order. The Madonna “wanna-bes” who buy fingerless lacey gloves are not buying the meanings these items would have, for instance, at a Buckingham Palace garden party-they are buying a cultural resource out of which to make their own meanings, to make a statement about their own subcultural identity and thus about their relationship to the social order. It is unhelpful to denigrate such a visual speech act by saying that it is pseudospeech or severely limited speech, in that the language of commodities only allows all the fans to say the same thing.