Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism - Hardcover

Scott, Linda M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1403966869 ISBN 13: 9781403966865

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005

Synopsis

Fresh Lipstick shakes feminist fashion down to its Birkenstocks.

Linda M. Scott wants to put an end to the belief that American women have to wear a colorless, shapeless uniform to achieve liberation and equality.

A pointed attack on feminism's requisite style of dress, Fresh Lipstick argues that wearing high heels and using hair curlers does not deny you the right to seek advancement, empowerment, and equality. Scott asserts that judging someone on her fashion choices is as detrimental to advancement as judgments based on race, nationality, or social class. Fashion is an important mode of personal expression, not an indication of submission. She demonstrates that feminism's dogged reduction of fashion to sexual objectification has been motivated by a desire to control other women, not free them. This push for power has produced endless conflict from the movement's earliest days, hindering advances in women's rights by promoting exclusion. It is time for the "plain Jane" dress code of the revolution to be lifted, allowing all women to lead, even those wearing makeup and Manolos.

Marching through 150 years of American dress history, Scott rips down feminism's favorite positions on fashion-from the power of images to the purpose of makeup. The illustrative examples-from flappers to Twiggy to body-piercing-are often poignant, occasionally infuriating, but always illuminating and thought-provoking.

With Fresh Lipstick, Linda Scott gives women the ammunition to settle the fashion debate once and for all. She challenges feminists to move beyond appearances and to return their focus to the true mission of the movement: equality for all women everywhere.

About this title

About the Author

Linda M. Scott has spent years researching media and women's issues. She is associate professor in art and design, communications, and women's studies at University of Illinois and research associate professor, Institute of Communications Research.

Reviews

In this strident, well researched and sometimes exhausting critique of the women's movement's strains of "antibeauty ideology," Scott, an associate professor at the University of Illinois, argues that feminist doesn't have to mean frumpy. It won't be news to post Sex and the City "do-me" feminists, but adornment, Scott insists, is a natural, inherently positive way for women to express their identities; fashion is neither the instrument of male oppression that members of the mid-19th-century anti-corset "dress reform" movement insisted it was nor the vehicle for sexual exploitation (or signal of antifeminist backlash) that some contemporary feminists suggest it is. Beginning with Susan B. Anthony's prudish rejection of stylish Elizabeth Oakes Smith at the 1852 Women's Convention, academic and upper-class feminists have consistently discredited women (especially of lower classes) who don't fit the mold, Scott argues. Scott's analysis extends to what she sees as today's antibeauty books and films (e.g., Naomi Wolf's TheBeauty Myth, Jean Kilbourne's Killing Us Softly movies), which she argues are hypocritical, reductionist and, at worst, classist. Scott is most convincing when she argues for the liberating capacity of fashion: "By ignoring the way that self-decoration expresses the human force of creative expression...[;] and by denying the strength these practices can bring at depression, dislocation, and even death, the antibeauty critique engages in cultural cruelty." But she sometimes falters, as when she glosses over the media and fashion industry's relationship to the very real danger of eating disorders.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1403966869
• ISBN 13: 9781403966865
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368