Fashion and Gendered Appearance - Essay Example

DRAFT Fashion and Gendered Appearance Fashion has brought many dynamics in our daily lives. More so, it generates significant discourses of ‘new’, ‘sexy’, and ‘girlie’ feminisms. BUST magazine launched in 1993 has an overall mandate to interrogate these discourses and evaluate the activities and interests that were traditionally associated with femininity. Aspects like fashion, knitting, and make-up define traditional femininity. Notably, the BUST magazine issue of 2006 addressed the ‘fashionable feminists’ by urging them to be a feminist or just dress like one.

This issue raised distinct views in the fashion world. Indeed, the issue portrayed feminism in a positive manner depicting it as fashionable and desirable against the common view in the mainstream media and feminist movements that portray it negatively. Ideally, there have been various feminist perspectives on the politics of dress and the negativity towards feminism but BUSTs fashion issue addresses the history and provides a solace to feminisms ‘past’. Indeed, there was a backlash against the US feminist movement.

The backlash influenced the depictions of anti-fashion feminists and BUST seeks to address these depictions with a view of generating an alternative view to feminism. In addition, there has been a feminist’s online debate about BUSTs fashion issue, which establishes that BUST offers a simplistic version of feminism which the readers applies in variant ways. However, we can derive from the article that the BUST fashion issue validates the mainstream feminists thought on the politics of dress.

More so, the BUST fashion spread depicts a version of feminism that affects the historical specificities and analyses of class and race. At the same time, the BUST fashion issue used journalistic craft traditions and promoted lifestyle feminism. Works Cited Groenevelda, Elizabeth. “Be a feminist or just dress like one’: BUST, fashion and feminism as lifestyle.” Journal of Gender Studies 18.2 (2009): 179-190.