Wednesday, March 12, 2014

"She looked like a ninny, dressed by rote, wearing what she thought made her look feminine rather than what suited her body and her job."

Behold: a man telling a woman not to dress for men. Jean Touitou, founder of the expensive French denim-and-more company A.P.C., thinks intelligent women who aren't dressed to his liking look like idiots... and somehow presents this as if it were a feminist observation. Women, he claims, dress in ways that "emphasise body parts that call out to men's sexual desire," which is wrong, he explains, because "these so-called sexy clothes are often hideous." Hideous... to him. And why on earth does she care what he thinks?

Women should dress for themselves, and eventually for other women, and only then maybe also for a handful of men. But they must step out of this outrageously sexed-up hell of signifiers; if they don't, this junk will make them lose their self-respect. 
Does he not see the irony? A man saying that women shouldn't dress for men? Or is he including himself in the "handful of men" women might aim to please? "I advocate understatement," he writes, which... I get that his business is selling gamine-menswear clothes, but is this some kind of political position? Does the Guardian want some kind of feminist hear-hear? If so, I'm afraid I won't oblige.

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