ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that fashion design in the late twentieth century became particularly misogynist through the incorporation of pornographic and sadomasochism (SM) imagery, nakedness, corsets, black leather and vinyl, even blood and injury. It suggests that fashion is based upon sexual difference and that the misogyny expressed in fashion has been escalating in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Until the 1990s this was a common feminist understanding of fashion amongst feminist activists and theorists. The chapter examines everyday beauty practices such as lipstick wearing and depilation that contribute to the demonstration of women's difference/deference. Masculinity and femininity, the behaviours of male dominance and female subordination, cannot be imagined without each other. In gay male culture an individual man can enjoy an oscillation between 'butch' masculinity and a degrading form of femininity for sexual excitement.
