ABSTRACT
It has become unpopular since the 1980s, when post-structuralist thinking began to dominate in universities, to point out that fashion re¯ects and serves to maintain female subordination. In work of a postmodern persuasion fashion tends to ¯y free from its material, political underpinnings. The political forces that affect what constitutes fashion at any time, such as sexism, capitalism, classism and racism, disappear. Instead fashion is celebrated as a free spirit, something that enables everyone, and particularly women, to exercise choice and creativity, to express their identities, transgress boundaries. Thus even feminists who write about fashion seem to fail to notice that whatever changes take place in fashion there are always differences written into what women and men may wear. These differences enable the sex class of women to be distinguished from that of men and, in recent decades, turn a full one-half of the human race into toys to create sexual excitement in the other half. In this chapter I argue that fashion design in the late twentieth century became particularly misogynist through the incorporation of pornographic and sadomasochist imagery, nakedness, corsets, black leather and vinyl, even blood and injury. I ask why fashion designers are so predominantly male and gay, and examine their role in this process.
