CITY Issue 53

CITY LIFE IN ROGUE Living the Good Life in the Big City Following Suit From Calamity Jane to Coco Chanel to Yves Saint Laurent, the ladies’ suit has changed as often as women’s status in society. This season, however, the look may finally leave menswear behind. By Elyssa Dimant “EVERYONE KNOWS THAT CLOTHES ARE SOCIAL PHENOMENA; changes in dress are social changes,” fashion theorist Anne Hollander once said, and one need look no further than the woman’s suit for proof. When Calamity Jane mounted her horse in her first pair of pants somewhere around 1870, the battle of the sexes had already begun, with women adopting elements of male fashion—trousers, ties, collared shirts, frock coats—to signify their equality. Two decades earlier, suffragette Amelia Bloomer shortened her dress skirt to a comfortable below-the-knee length, and tacked on a pair of Turkish trousers underneath for modesty’s sake. Though Bloomer was mocked by fashionable society, her efforts were partially responsible for the formation of the Dress Reform Association in 1856, and the notion of Rational dress. Mainstream society didn’t start acting “rational” until about the 1890s, when the bloomer pant had become wellestablished as a component of sport costumes, and the Parisian bouffantculottes, basically bifurcated skirts, had become fashionable for horseback riding. Paul Poiret, the self-proclaimed “King of Fashion,” was an early pantpromoting couturier, celebrated for the lampshade tunics and harem pants of his famed 1911 Sorbet ensemble, among many others. Poiret has been immortalized as a Modernist, the first designer to define “modern” women’s fashion by any combination of motifs traditional to menswear. Yet it was a woman, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, who manipulated the jersey knit of men’s military garb and underwear to create a standing icon of progressive fashion: her 1913 jersey suit. Chanel’s matching cardigan, sweater, and skirt suits served as the foundation for the early-20th-century moderne, with her cropped hair, shorter hems, newfound rights, and tanned skin. It is no coincidence that Chanel’s revamped suit, woven this time, with a boxy jacket and gold hardware, reclaimed its post as the uniform of the mobile woman in the late 1950s, after fashion had been monopolized by the full feminine forms and cumbersome decorations of Christian Dior’s New Look for nearly a decade. Chanel’s suits also paved the way for the vocabulary of separates—jackets, tops, pants, and skirts—that still defines today’s fashion. First heavily adopted in the 1970s, separates rose alongside the popularity of feminist icons like Gloria Steinem and the success of a young Yves Saint Laurent, whose suits embodied new sexual and social freedoms. Saint Laurent transformed the black jacket and bow tie of the American-born tuxedo to accommodate the voluptuous curves of his female clientele. The transposition of the masculine tuxedo onto the female form presented the formal suit as a symbol of androgenous sexuality. In the 1980s, the Giorgio Armani power suit wasn’t complete without those absurd shoulder pads, which served to emulate not only the fashions of the successful male, but his physique as well. More than any other fashion symbol, the suit, whether pant or skirt, tuxedo or bolero, represented women’s equality and empowerment in the last half of the 20th century. The male-adapted suit was both casual and, as a uniform, formal—but either way provided an opportunity for women to abandon the idea of decorousness, itself a notion that has historically been associated with femininity, and more potently, weakness and frivolity. The suit allowed us gals a way to be taken seriously, a way to leave our sexuality at the door in order to properly attend to business. But as much as these suits activated our roles as workplace and social equals, they also made us clones. Sure, we had the same choices as men in terms of two buttons or three, double-breasted or single, notched lapels or peaked, but where was the creativity, the exuberant personality, the playfulness and coyness and cleverness that defines us as individual women, and not as men? Perhaps fashion is finally addressing that flaw in the grander scheme of “modern” women’s fashion. Gone are the matching suits, the formal blouses meant to be revealed only in small part from beneath a shapeless blazer—they are a statement of an era passed. The suit is no longer defined by navy and black, white and ivory, bound buttonholes or pointed collars. The first look of Prada’s Spring 08 collection is a “suit” composed of short sleeve shirt and tapered cigarette pants, both emblazoned with the colorful compositions of stained glass as decorative as a Louis Comfort Tiffany window (above right). At Lanvin, Elber Albaz closed his show with a parody of his own uniform—a modified tuxedo with an oversize bow tie—that served as an easily dismissed punch line to the elegant dresses that had preceded it. Even Karl Lagerfeld, who has always paid homage to the classic Chanel suit, has abandoned that institution for jackets and skirts that are chicer as individual wardrobe items. His Spring 08 ready-to-wear collection speaks to the deterioration of the suit with a denim jumpsuit and traditional Chanel knit cardigan, but only shreds of Coco’s standard woven skirt applied across the top of the pants (above left). The intertwined rise of separates and suits has somehow left the suit in the dust as yet another developmental stage of the modern woman’s wardrobe, too associated with masculinity to be truly empowering to the fairer sex. As we walk into our cocktail parties, benefits, lunches, and, of course, jobs, we walk with dresses and jeans, swing jackets and miniskirts, informed by a history of accommodating menswear, yet—for perhaps the first time since we stepped foot into social, political, and economic spheres—we walk as women. 36 CI T Y

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CITY Issue 53

CITY Issue 53 Contents Letter from CITY Our Friends Action Wanted City Moment In Rogue Fast Food The Amused Bouche Fit Unnatural Wonders Paradise Found Gold Standard Parc Yourself Get Wet Naughty or Nice Raise the Roof Luxury Is... Bird of Prey Hardwear To Die For Twisted Sisters Basic Instinct Where To Buy It Socials Icon

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