Fashion

Looks Like a Lefty

Fashion’s Grand History of Protest, Revolution, and Civil Rights

By Lynn Yaeger, Illustrations by Johnny Ryan

Even as you pull that flak jacket over your camo trousers and stuff a sequined sweater into your knapsack (there might be a dance party after the demo), even as you draw an A on your arm and circle it or tattoo meat is murder on your vegan-sleek tummy, the ghosts of progressive fashions past are cheering you on.

Every generation of rabble-rousers believes it has invented its own unique style and negotiated its own sartorial relationship with the larger world, but those activists who have gone before, on whose incendiary shoulders we proudly stand, also had their special ways of signifying to one another. Without saying a word, they were members of a larger movement.

The subject is far too vast to tackle in one little article, but as natty dressers around the globe prepare to suit up and carry the tumultuous messages of 2011 forward – from Occupy Wall Street to the streets of the Middle East and collective actions in the squares of Leicester, Tahrir, Red, and Pearl – it could be a fun exercise to take a moment to examine the outfits favored by our illustrious activist ancestors over the past 100 or so years.

Herein is a brief, deeply personal, resolutely nonexhaustive, highly abbreviated look at a century of great moments in our shared revolutionary sartorial history.



WOMEN WHO FOUGHT FOR THE RIGHT TO VOTE These valiant early-20th-century feminists, properly know as suffragists (suffragette is a derogatory term, invented by the right-wing press of the time), may have employed everything from hunger strikes to violent civil disobedience in their struggle for the franchise, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t have their own pristine fashion code. This included long white dresses enhanced with slogan-bearing sashes, which were frequently rendered in distinctive color schemes: purple, white, and green in England; purple, white, and gold in the US. There was even suffrage jewelry crafted in these hues, not to mention the famous Holloway brooch – a simple silver pin fashioned to resemble a prison gate, bestowed by the British Women’s Social and Political Union on suffragists who had done time in London’s Holloway Prison for their public dissent.		BEAT GENERATION “Add zest to your Tuxedo Park party... rent a beatnik, completely equipped: beard, eye shades, old army jacket, Levis, frayed shirts, sneakers or sandals (optional). Deductions allowed for no beard, baths, shoes, or haircuts. Lady beatniks also available, usual garb: all black.” Believe it or not, in 1959 New York photographer Fred McDarrah actually advertised this “Rent-a-Beatnik” service, a (one assumes) largely tongue-in-cheek venture that would dispatch a dissolute citizen of bohemia to your middle-class, middlebrow fete for a fee of $40 per night. And what would this emissary wear? If he were a poetry spouting, finger-snapping swinger, maybe a turtleneck and a beret; if a female existentialist were sent to liven things up, she would have perhaps sported a leotard with a pencil skirt or capri pants, free-form silver jewelry, and ballet flats. (Have a look at Audrey Hepburn in 1957’s Funny Face if you need proof of just how glamorous black tights and dance slippers can be.)



CIVIL RIGHTS Sometimes the connection between fashion styles and social protest is oblique; in other instances it mounts a soapbox of its own. In the case of the civil rights movement, the slogan “Black Is Beautiful” was a direct refutation of the racist ideas about style and fashion that white society forced down everyone’s throats, including the belief that there was such a thing as “good” (i.e., straight) hair. Like so many other examples of what leftists call false consciousness, this notion was rightly turned on its head: By the height of the movement in the late 1960s, a woman like the gorgeous activist Angela Davis (who, by the way, is still out there today – Professor Davis even visited New York’s Occupy Wall Street last October) was resplendent in high-waisted bell-bottoms, riding boots, denim jackets, and a legendarily humongous and stunning Afro. (So threatening was this coiffure that Davis was rumored to have smuggled a firearm in her tresses.)		THE PEACE MOVEMENT How does one sum up the fashion preferences of the 1960s antiwar movement in a few sentences? It was a decade of profound shifts, an era that began with helmet hair, girdles, garters, bullet bras, pillbox hats, and depressing little white gloves for women (worn even in the dead of summer) and ended with a miniskirted Bernardine Dohrn strutting on the floor of the Students for a Democratic Society convention wearing, in the recollection of then SDS president Greg Calvert, “an orange sweater and purple skirt, and while everyone else had ‘Stop the War’ buttons, hers said: ‘Cunnilingus Is Cool, Fellatio Is Fun.’” The decade saw the ascendance of conceits like fringe and tie-dye, when the freethinking students who took to the streets experimented not just with new political ideas but also by donning seemingly unlikely clothing combinations – army jackets over Victorian lace dresses worthy of suffragists, dashikis dancing with denim, men with the kind of long, flowing hair that hadn’t been fashionable in more than 100 years.

By Lynn Yaeger, Illustrations by Johnny Ryan 3 months ago More from this issue Like · Comment · Share Tags: fashion, activism, suffragettes, beatniks, civil rights movement, hippies, gay rights, women's liberation, punk, Occupy Wall Street