First of all, the history of fashion seems to be inextricably linked on the one hand to the history of gender and sexuality and on the other to wider socio-political developments. Indeed, fashion has been used throughout the centuries as tool of both oppression and liberation, and in many cases this distinction seems quite blurred from our historical standpoint. Sometimes, a garment, such as the corset, becomes a symbol of women’s oppression aiming at literally restricting a woman’s sexuality and body into a super tight definition of morality and decency, a way of putting women in their proper place in the context of heteropatriarchal society with high regulated and unequal gender roles. Other times, a piece of swimwear, such as the bikini, is not only a ‘revealing’ (whatever the hell this means and whoever the hell gets to define) piece of swimwear but also a demand for bodily autonomy and self-determination, a defiance of ‘man’-made moral codes and societal expectations, a material locus of political contestation in the public space of a beach always already marked as male-dominated. Furthermore, the accounts we have presented so far narrate the fashion history primarily from the perspective of the UK and the USA reproducing inevitably the problematic cultural post-colonial hegemony of these two countries. In this case, the geographical scope of these accounts is far from an innocent choice, but rather is an implicit compliance with the conceptualization of fashion as a ‘western’ phenomenon mirrored nowadays to the huge share European and USA-based fashion houses or brands have in a globalized market where fashion products are cheaply manufactured in 'under- or developing' countries with no respect to either environmental, human or workers’ rights but designed and marketed in 'developed' or rich ones where potential clients with purchasing power reside.

Secondly, as we have alerted our readers to this fact many times before, fashion history like any other history is exactly this, a his-tory, that is a history written by and for men. This translates into a specifically masculinist historiographical sensitivity, a male gaze that reads the archives and the historical data in order to interpret them in a way that aligns with a masculine way of giving meaning, narrating, inhabiting the world, and ultimately wearing a piece of clothing. This inevitably leads to a perception of clothing merely as a material object isolated both from its socio-historical context and the living embodied and embedded experience of actually wearing it on the part of women. Also, these histories are narrated in a way that takes for granted and thus contributes at further naturalizing a strict gender binarism according to which the body of a person detects their gender and there are only two opposite and complementary genders, men and women. In this context, intersex, trans and other gender non-conforming bodies are left out of fashion’s shiny picture that models its product on gender-conforming bodies in an underwear or swimwear market highly divided across gendered lines.

This phenomenon is closely related to another implicit cultural logic pointed out by feminist and queer critics for quite some time now, a rationale worth unraveling if we are to understand the intimate relationship between gender and femininity, the third feature all the historical accounts of fashion we presented in this blog seem to share. This phenomenon is no other than the commonplace assumption that fashion is feminine preoccupation, something that concerns almost exclusive women or those who are identified with femininity, that is gay men, especially effeminate ones. In the majority of the historical accounts on fashion, the so-called women’s fashion is presented disproportionally relative to men’s fashion which in many cases is but a footnote. Even the very notion of fashion seems to be feminized as something superfluous, bodily, narcissistic, performative, inauthentic, and vain. According to Simone de Beauvoir, author of the Second Sex published in France in 1949, the feminist existential philosophical treatise whose ideas on the social and historical constructed of gender had greatly influenced the political tenets of the Second Wave of Feminism, women are the other of the men who hold the position of the same. Moreover, this gender binary is analogous to the binary between body and mind, an intellectual heritage of the somatophobic and sexist intellectual tradition of Enlightenment. To put it simple, while masculinity is all about a disembodied spirit or intellect which gives men privilege access to a transcendence of their socio-historical embeddedness, femininity is defined as trapped inside a body, as immanent to itself unable of such transcendence of women’s limiting grounding to a bodily reality.