Rachel Phipps 2008

Yes, Fashion Activism!

I’ve written a couple of posts for the FBomb before now, and the first one was about feminism and the fashion industry, and, to be honest, opinions about it were really quite mixed – something I’d anticipated.

This post, too is about fashion, but I think it’s something that everyone can agree on. At least, I hope it is!

So…I run a website called British Style Bloggers (please don’t let the “British” bit put you off straight away, non-Brits!) and a little while back, we launched our Fashion Activism campaign, asking readers to help us prevent climate change because of the Copenhagen Summit. That campaign was such a success that we’ve decided to start a whole new campaign for the new year – a campaign of positive body image.

We’re not preaching the anti-anorexia line again and again like so many similar campaigns, because, to be honest, we think it’s been done before, and that people are beginning to ignore it. We want to make a genuine difference, by changing the way people see themselves, regardless of shape, size, race, gender, hair or skin colour… or anything else. We want people to be happy as themselves.

To make this work, though, we need as much support as we can get, from as many people and places as possible, and so I’m writing this today to ask you for your help. I’ve been overwhelmed by the support we’ve had so far – I even had six emails on CHRISTMAS DAY offering help and I haven’t even had chance to check the site’s analytics yet! – but for this to have as wide reaching an effect as we’d like, we need more support.

We’d like to create a campaign video, showing the world that every one of us is unique, and that everyone has something about themselves that they like, and something that they loathe. So, we’re asking you to do one of two things (or both) -
1) Send a photo of yourself that you really like - one that makes you feel really good about yourself, to us...
And/Or
2) Send us a short video clip which has not been uploaded to any video sharing site, including YouTube, telling the camera what makes you unique. Videos should be compatible with Windows XP (.wmv form, I think!)

If you’re even slightly inclined to help us, please please please click HERE or email ukstylebloggers [at] googlemail [dot] com (ukstylebloggers@googlemail.com) for more information…

Any help you can offer – any help at all – would be a wonderful blessing.
Happy holidays, and we look forward to hearing from you (regardless of where you’re from, I might add!)!

LoveLoveLove
- Amy and the whole BSB team -

the fashion industry: feminist or not?

I’m a fashion journalist. This is not, I’m guessing, exactly a great opening statement for a blog on a feminist website… Sorry.

The good news, though, is that I’m a teenage feminist fashion journalist and blogger at a genuinely morally good publication – and that my biggest inspiration in life is a (“grown-up”!) feminist fashion journalist at an equally morally good publication.

So, why am I telling you this?

Because I think that the industry I work in deserves to be cut some slack. I’m guessing that most young feminists look on it as a bit of a moral nightmare, because of the sexual and physical exploitation of models, and because of its blatant size-ism, and because it’s generally considered to be “a bit shallow.”

And yes, all of that is true.

But there is a good side to the fashion industry, there really is.

For starters, not everyone in the fashion industry is out to get the “regular girls” (by which I mean the girls who don’t fit into dresses seen on catwalks). Some magazine (admittedly mostly the online ones) such as Lipstick Royalty (the one I write for) and N.E.E.T. feature normal people, as well as young, up-coming writers, designers, photographers, and models, many of whom are making their mission in life to change the industry as we know it.
And then there’s this:

“It seems similarly anti-female to suggest that in order to be a true feminist, one is not allowed to have any vanity… Patriarchal society or not, everyone likes to look good…

Here, one suspects, lies the nub of the anti-fashion prejudice. Good God, women doing something – just for themselves? Spending their own money? Women making themselves feel good just for themselves…? Dear God, cover your eyes, think of the children!”

That’s an extract from the section on “Vanity, the joys thereof” in ‘The Meaning of Sunglasses’, a fashion book by the aforementioned “grown up” feminist fashion journalist, Hadley Freeman, of the Guardian and British Vogue… and I think she’s right. One of the in-built prejudices we have about the fashion industry is that it’s exploitive of women, and that it forces women to conform to standards that men find attractive…

But, generally speaking, almost every major player in fashion is female, from the editors to the bloggers, and to a lesser extent, the designers, too. And, I don’t know about you, but I wear what I wear for me. I don’t care what any male in my life might think. It’s his problem if he thinks I should spend less time in jeans and t-shirts, and more time showing him my legs. I’m not going to – and I tell this to my Grandad on a semi-regular basis (much as it pains me).

I think that we should happily embrace this industry; it’s essentially ours, anyway, and, well, I don’t know about you, but I think that a large dose of feminist opinion into it might be able to alleviate all of the major problems I mentioned, Size Zero, and the sexual exploitation of models especially.

A non-airbrushed photo of model Lizzie Miller.

Miller is a 20 year old model, and technically at a size 12-14, she is not plus sized. But in the world of modeling, she is definitely not the norm.

Glamour recieved an outcry of support for the normal sized model, and emails thanked the magazine for putting a woman with everyday, normal curves and rolls in the magazine.

And Lizzi is grateful, too. She says:

“When I read them I got teary-eyed!” she says. “I’ve been that girl, flipping through magazines trying to find just one person who looked a little bit like me. And when I didn’t find it I would start to think there’s something wrong with the way that I looked. When J. Lo and Beyonce came out and were making curves sexy, I started to accept myself more. It’s funny, but just seeing them look and feel sexy enabled me to do the same.”

This photo embraces Lizzie’s natural beauty, which is something that, in today’s media, does not happen often, as most photos are airbrushed. And it made me proud of my own body, being almost 5″4 and a size 12-14 myself. It reminded me that all women, no matter what, is beautiful in her own unique way. And, in today’s society especially, that is important. Because it seems to me that we live in a society that only feeds the lack of self-esteem that regular women feel day in and day out. It turns every day into a battle with ourselves over what to wear, what to eat, what to say, what to look like. A battle for self-acceptance, and self-love.

And, I know, at least, I am disgusted by this.

I am sick of living in a society that only feeds my negativity towards myself. I am sick of living in a society fueled by a media that favors sickly thin models over models who represent the “average” woman. I am sick of living in a society that tells me how to be.

This is, at least, a start, if nothing more. And I hope that this photo leads to more women embracing their natural beauty. So, I applaud women like Lizzie Miller, who are proud of the body that they have, because they are beautiful. They are here to remind us that we are all beautiful.