The Sartorialist

As a fashion blog enthusiast, I can spend hours aimlessly cruising sites ranging from Bryanboy’s wildly flamboyant androgyny, Fashiontoast’s penchant for beautiful vintage mashed with modern high/low pieces, and The Sartorialist’s all-encompassing, diverse street style. For the exorbitant amount of time I can waste perusing seemingly pointless outfit posts, it was refreshing to read Silverman’s insightful discourse, and to view fashion and lipstick, leather jackets and pants, as objects of critique, not merely as objects of consumption. Exploring the inextricable network of cultural and historical contexts that fashion carries, it was more than reassuring to read that clothing, as ornamentation is more than just a vain mode of self-fashioning but rather, “one of the most important cultural implements for mapping its erotogenic zones and for affixing a sexual identity”. But what I enjoyed most was that Silverman never quite settles for a simplistic, clear-cut argument. It was Silverman’s paradoxical claim that struck me as especially interesting, that while dress may affix a gender distinction or the prevailing attitudes of its cultural context, fashion as “imaginative dress” challenges much of the pre-existing values and traditional “gender demarcations”. Again, she also realizes that contestation, especially in challenging gender distinctions, is not so simple. In addressing the persisting question of whether fashion is feminist, Silverman acknowledges the “heterogenous nature of feminism” in that feminism will never evolve to have “a single identifying form of dress”. Interestingly, contestation often manifests in Sliverman’s idea of “The Great Feminine Renunciation” – a reaction against those very associations of female narcissism and exhibitionism. For one, she gives a reason why it’s more intriguing than strange to see blogs on the rise with boys feminizing their ensembles and pushing past females in the next-level department.

In her final remarks about retro, her sophisticated take on thrift-shopping was enough to reaffirm anyone’s love for all things vintage. In her eloquent digression, she attributes the “transformative potential” of retro. Tracing the juxtaposition of flapper dresses from the twenties, fitted suits from the fifties, the androygynistic styles from the sixties, she bestows vintage clothing with the unprecedented ability to transgress “vestimentary, sexual and historical boundaries”. In this way, Silverman values vintage clothing as an extension of the multifaceted nature of our identities -- it's a thought that'll resound me with me the next time I find myself sifting through dusty racks and old, moth-eaten sweaters.