ABSTRACT
In observing the dress codes both within and outside the academy, at meetings, conferences, meetings and any gathering advertised as ‘feminist’, it has been possible to chart, over the past two decades, the emergence of new perspectives in the gradual proliferation of different styles. It would, of course, be simplistic merely to observe that, as the second-wave feminism of the 1970s splintered and fragmented, so the different strands that emerged within feminism established their own dress codes, homogeneity duly becoming heterogeneity. Nor would it be correct to assume that a feminist condemnation of fashion belongs completely in
the past and that there is now some relaxed, postmodern, third-wave consensus. Rosalind Coward writes in Our Treacherous Hearts: ‘if anything, the concern with appearance, body shape and desirability seem to have grown’ (Coward 1992: 154).
