Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society claimed the American writer Mark Twain. And who could blame him? Whether as a matter of protection, decency or honour, (your choice) the human being has always covered himself. And as of this moment, between us and the others, a little big world that we call “fashion” has interfered. A “second skin” that has so much to say to those who meet us, who always takes the initiative, to say something, to saw who we are, where we come from… but especially what “kind” of people we are!
In its history, therefore, the body has always been hidden and, therefore, also the “detail” that divides society into men and women: the sex. If being physically a man or a woman is hidden, the task of communicating one’s sex has been assigned to how one dresses. This therefore becomes the mediator between the biological and the cultural, between the individual and the alter, but especially between the sex and the gender. This “second skin” allows the passage from the construction of the biological body to the social definition of the body itself, process that shapes the individual individualities according to the hegemonic view of the gender. Pieces of inorganic matter are injected of cultural values that determine the kind of clothing, socially imposing a type of man’s clothing and a type of woman’s clothing.
Oh women! Open your closets of pleated skirts, designer handbags and pink sweaters. And you men! Get depressed looking at the boredom that are your wardrobes, crammed with jackets, ties and darned socks. So this far, everything is normal. Let’s try to reverse things.
Oh women! (I admit my difficulties in giving these examples in this context because women’s fashion has always played with the boundaries between genders). Take care of your moustaches and remember: that tracksuit will never betray you! Oh men! To go to the office it’s not always necessary to wear a 15 cm heel. Learn how to be happy of an 8cm heel as well. Oh and never forget… Always wear a bit of mascara, remember! Are you smiling? Or are you even just thinking about a smile? There you go. This is a wake up call. It’s a signal that indicates that there is something grotesque happening.
These examples can make us understand how our body is nothing but a “writing surface”, a medium through which they are placed in relation to cultural meanings set out there, outside of us, without us.
As the queer philosophy of Judith Butler, we are all “ex-static” individuals, we are “outside of us”. Following this theory, our “I” is placed externally to the subject that we are, in a world of complex rules that change historically. And consequently, all that determines that the human is defined a priori, even the way one dresses. Currently we can argue that there are no laws that prohibit the use of certain clothes, or the exchange of clothing between the two genres. But despite this, there are non-written laws on the subject of clothing that tend to penalize, in more of less direct ways, choices that are placed outside what the cultural matrix has determined to be “normal”. See the case of the suicide of Andrea Spezzacatena, “the boy from the pink pants”, a victim of bullying because of what he was wearing. Or the story of Cameron McWilliam, who committed suicide after facing hostility from both his mother and society because he wanted to wear “feminine” clothing. And these are only two of an impressive amount of violence, but mostly denials of identity linked to a “misuse” of clothing.
The gender is the result of a cultural interpretation of sex, and with it also of clothing. These two go forward hand in hand in the binary path that wants to build the masculine and the feminine. In this view, the clothing becomes a tool of control to keep everyone in place. But if clothing is the first object to be genderdized, then it’s exactly with this that one could start a revolution, first a visual one and then a substantial one, against the binary aesthetics’.
Call me a revolutionary dreamer, naïve, irrational… as you want! But I firmly believe that each of us, with one’s body, with one’s clothing and with one’s own presence could become a rambling manifesto denouncing the imposition of an identity stability a priori, but above all the impossibility of self-determination. Because fashion is not silent. Fashion is active. Fashion is politics. And it’s there, ready to convey the affirmation of the human. Indeed, the plurality of the human.
