All Dressed Up And Nothing to Show

BY Lyndal Walker

I think I’m probably supposed to be outraged that the Western world is full of teenagers wearing images of Marxist hottie Che Guevara on their t-shirts when they don’t even know who he is. I guess I should feel at least smarmy about the fact that there are kids wearing Ramones tees who don’t know who they are either, right? But I’m just so deeply unsurprised. Any notion of authenticity in fashion seems rather naïve to me.

Even before Kurt Cobain shot himself (despite insisting in “Come As You Are” that he did not have a gun), I just wasn’t convinced that anyone much was telling the truth. Those we were most supposed to trust – politicians, priests and parents – would appear to be the biggest liars out. I really want to believe in the truth but that seems wildly superstitious. In fashion, though, everyone lies and it’s an arena where you can definitely get away with it.

It’s precisely the moratorium on the truth in fashion that allows you to play out some identity options. You get to wear camo without accidentally shooting yourself in Iraq, or the head. You get to be a 50s housewife without being on Valium. You can look like a hooker without getting genital warts.

Beyond that, the House of Reps is not the only place that lying can be politically productive. Seemingly superficial fashion can actually do quite a lot to shake up some of the bigger issues. Mods, who were typically working class guys, lied to us through their clothes by dressing as decadent dandies. By doing so they challenged sartorial expectations and class divides.

In the 90s, skater girls were re-appropriating sexist language and boldly getting around with terms like ‘slut’, ‘pussy’ and ‘hussy’ on their tiny-tees. This was one step further: they were not only putting these labels into question but also making them meaningless. If you were going to declare yourself a hussy, it could hardly be an insult.

Now it seems that dressing like a hussy is your obligation. In fashion, you’ve got to be constantly on your toes; and if you’re lying through your clothes, you need to be telling new lies all the time. Fashion is a great location for questioning meaning but just as a Marxist revolutionary can be turned into a decorative motif, reappropriation can be reappropriated. Next thing you know, the look of the season is ‘sex object’. I can roll my eyes knowingly about this but it does actually give me the shits that objectification is being dressed up (or undressed) as ‘getting in touch with your sexuality’.

To question this would have me labelled a prude, and that I am not. It’s time we reclaimed that too. My next fashion lie will have me getting around in a nice button-up shirt with ‘wowser’ neatly embroidered on it. It will piss off the wowsers, the sluts and, most importantly, the pimps who are flogging this undignified apparel.