On Mini-Skirts and Morality in Africa

A young woman modelling a mini-skirt 
with an African print: what's not to love? 
laviye.com

Someone wrote to ask why it is I often return to the topic of fashion which, in their view, is both besides the point and after the fact and thus, ultimately, an irrelevance. Surely, they say, there are far more important things to write about than shoes, mini-skirts and stocking tops.

Obviously, as a passionate exponent of a philosophy on the catwalk which is primarily concerned with a politics of style and the interplay between art and popular culture that fashion exemplifies, I don't agree with this. And so, here's another post that demonstrates how and why clothes are a crucial concern and the body - particularly the female body - remains a battleground around the world ...

Back in the sixties, the question of hemlines and morality in wake of the mini-skirt was an issue that exercised many minds. Nowhere more so than in Africa, where those newly in positions of authority saw Mary Quant's creations as fundamentally un-African and believed them to be yet another example of the West's corrupting influence, particularly on young, urban, independent women who were susceptible not only to fashion, but to feminism.     

Such women, who felt liberated by wearing mini-skirts and earning their own income, were branded as prostitutes and as witches who drained phallocratic society of its vital energy. They were subject not only to verbal abuse, but often serious physical violence.

In Tanzania, for example, the ruling party launched a campaign targeting what it regarded as indecent clothing. Gangs of youths patrolled the streets on the lookout for girls they deemed to be inappropriately dressed. Similar attacks on women wearing mini-skirts also took place in Ethiopia, one of which resulted in a riot that caused at least fifty people to be injured.     

In Malawi, meanwhile, president Kamuzu Banda, described mini-skirts as a fashion that was diabolic in origin and which he intended to completely eradicate from his homeland. Kenneth Kaunda, president of Zambia, agreed; citing the mini-skirt and apartheid as the two great evils.

One might have hoped that things would be different in Africa today. But, alas, with the increase and spread of religious stupidity - both Christian and Islamic in origin - things have, if anything, only got worse for those women who would otherwise love to show off their legs. Early this century, for example, idiots in Uganda called for a ban on mini-skirts worn in public, claiming that they were a dangerous distraction to (male) drivers. (To be fair, this is at least conceivable.)

More seriously, cases of women being stripped and beaten by gangs of men acting as both morality police and fashion critics continue to be reported in numerous countries including Kenya, Sudan, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Happily, groups of astonishingly courageous women have staged defiant mini-skirt protests in which they demand the right to dress as they please and to be afforded legal protection from violence.      

The irony, of course, is that the notions of deceny that are being defended are arguably more un-African than the alien fashions and other cultural expressions that are so feared. I would suggest that those gripped by a post-colonial determination to be free of foreign influence might want to conduct a genealogy of morals, rather than just dabble with dress codes ...     

Note: those interested in an alternative take on the politics of the mini-skirt in Africa might like to see an article from 2014 by the Kenyan blogger Owaahh: click here.

Eric Gill: On Trousers and the Most Precious Ornament

D. H. Lawrence wasn't the only weirdy beardy Englishman writing in the interwar period to be concerned with the question of masculinity and men's fashion, with a particular interest in trousers and the male member.

The artist, typographer, and sexual deviant, Eric Gill, also wrote on the vital role played by clothing within society and that most precious ornament, the penis, and I would like to discuss his thinking on these things as set out in an essay from 1937 which exposes a phallocentric sexual politics that makes Lawrence's look relatively limp in comparison.

Like Lawrence, of whose work he was a passionate admirer, Gill hated commercial and industrial civilisation. For whilst it encouraged women to "flaunt their sexual attractiveness on all occasions" and display the shapeliness of their legs and breasts with pride, it forced men to dress in a manner that suppressed their maleness of body and obscured their animal nature.

The protuberance by which a man's sex might be identified, is, says Gill, carefully and shamefully tucked between his legs and modern men are taught to regard the penis as merely a ridiculous-looking organ of drainage; "no longer the virile member and man's most precious ornament, but the comic member, a thing for girls to giggle about ..."   

The mighty phallus has been deflated and dishonoured. And not just in the West, but wherever machine civilisation has triumphed, with disastrous consequences for both sexes. For in a world in which men lose physical exuberance and assurance, women quickly lose all natural modesty. They start to parade around like shameless prostitutes in a desperate attempt to arouse the half-impotent male.

The only hope, says Gill, lies with those men who still retain something of the Old Adam about them; men who, like Oliver Mellors, despise commerce and industrialism; men who care about more about making love and waging war, than making money; men who refuse to commute to the office on the Tube each day in clothes that restrict their maleness and crush their balls.

For Gill, if modern man is to be emancipated and remasculated, then he must throw off his trousers and refuse to wear "cheap ready-made coats and collars and ties". Instead, he should don a dignified long robe, like an Arab; or a kilt, like a proud Scotsman, sans pants, allowing his penis its natural freedom of movement and chirpiness: I'm out there Jerry and I'm loving every minute of it!

Not - we should note in closing - that Gill wants men to make a spectacle of themselves and expose their nakedness; indeed, the last thing he wants is for men to become sexual exhibitionists flaunting their masculinity like modern women flaunt their femininity by wearing short skirts and make-up. He just wants us all to admit that the question of clothing - like that of the human soul - is of great importance and deserves the most serious consideration ...

Notes 

Those interested in reading Gill's 1937 essay can do so by clicking here. 

The Seinfeld episode in which Kramer discovers the joys of going commando is Season 6 / Episode 4: 'The Chinese Woman'. 

On Modest Fashion (Or OMG! I Agree with Julie Burchill - Again!)

The Dolce and Gabbana Abaya and Hijab Collection (2016)

I suspect many of those currently promoting modest fashion know full well that this is essentially a euphemism for clothing that is compliant with Islamic rules governing what a woman should and should not wear in public; or, more accurately, what parts of her body she should or should not be allowed to expose.

Clothing, in other words, that collaborates or knowingly flirts with an oppressive and misogynistic form of theocratic stupidity. Designers, fashion editors, and celebrities desperate to be on trend are all implicated in this shameful and cynical game that combines cultural cringe with cultural appropriation in the name of cultural diversity and the new femininity.  

As Julie Burchill writes, women who have previously "plunged it down to there, slashed it up to here and left no part of their bodies unscrutinised for years" are dressing in a way that suggests they have suddenly discovered not only modesty, but religious piety too!

Now, just to be clear: as a Nietzschean, I love stylish, elegant women who understand that Truth does not, in fact, love to go naked and so carefully avoid exposing too much flesh. Having said that, I don't want to see women and even very young girls covered from head to toe and very much doubt that a burka can be chic, no matter who designs it.

What's more, like Burchill, I have a problem when the concept of modesty is used aggressively to shame women into modifying their behaviour and, clearly, when used within the context of clothing, "the word implies, by default, that any other form of dressing is immodest, that is, tarty, exhibitionist and 'wrong'".

It's at this point that the craze to cover up "goes beyond the whimsy of fashion" and becomes rather sinister; an insidious attempt to persuade women that there's something courageous and liberating about surrendering their freedom. But there isn't. And those Western women who decide to conform to this trend - including those Muslims who talk about rediscovering their cultural heritage or identity - are unwittingly lending their support to those men who would cover their flesh in order to strip them of their autonomy and their dignity.

As Burchill wrote in an earlier piece: "Modesty be damned. If you've got it, you've got every right to flaunt it." And, arguably, in this new age of puritanism and Islamism, one has a feminist duty to do so. Zarathustra says: don't be demure - live dangerously and be brazen!

Notes

To read Julie Burchill's Daily Mail article on modest fashion (28 June 2017), click here. 

To read her piece in The Guardian on modesty written five years earlier (23 Sept 2012), click here.

To read the post in which I agreed with Ms Burchill for the first time, please click here.  

Torture Garden

I'm not a great lover of fetish fashion as it has developed within the BDSM community: it's a little too black, too shiny, and too tied to old-fashioned notions of sex and power for my tastes. And, as so often amongst those who pride themselves on being queer and looking extraordinary, there's a surprising conformism and rubbery-sameness amongst the kinky crowd. This became clear after a visit to Torture Garden (TG), the world's leading fetish venue.

The owners and founders of TG, Messrs Pelling & Wood, like to portray it as an achieved utopia wherein people are free to play, perform, and experiment with practices that challenge norms of social and sexual identity - which they are, just so long as they adhere to the club's strict dress code: No jeans! No trainers! No natural fabrics! 

Of course, it's not street wear or casual clothing that really threatens the TG aesthetic. Rather, it's the kind of inexpensive fancy dress worn by fun-loving girls on a hen-night. Pelling & Wood understand how their up-market fetish business risks being made ludicrous by a bawdy counter-aesthetic that delights in exaggerated bad taste and self-mockery. Thus, whilst they insist that TG's dress code strives to avoid narrow limitations and is primarily in place to encourage "individual imagination and diversity", they nevertheless concede that it ultimately serves to protect the club's status as "edgy and avant-garde".

As good capitalists, Pelling & Wood might want to see their business expand and sell as many pairs of latex knickers to as many people as possible, but they also need to protect their brand image. And so they bemoan the fact - without the slightest hint of irony - that as the fetish scene becomes more mainstream "there has been a commercial element creeping into sections of the crowd".

Continuing, in a paragraph that betrays the full extent of their snobbery and moral allegiance to the principle of the Real, they declare:

"This looks shit and makes TG look shit ... If you have the bad taste to wear ... cheap and cheesy fancy dress please go somewhere else, we don't want you at TG! ... We want the diversity and the fun, but we want authentic costumes that are real ... not cheap fancy dress copies."

www.torturegarden.com

They further warn that Dress Code Staff will ensure that everyone inside TG is dressed "appropriately at all times". What this means is forget about wearing whatever might turn you on and just make sure your outfit conforms to the aesthetic and commercial ideal of the owners - or watch out for the fashion police!

Clearly, Pelling & Wood need to lighten up a little: they should, if you like, smile and say cheese. For as long as they remain faithful to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, TG will remain a haven of art school pretension rather than superficial delight.  

In Memory of St Sebastian

The artist and punk-dandy Sebastian Horsley may no longer cruise the streets of Soho, but he continues to haunt my imagination and memory. I miss seeing him sat outside a cafe on Old Compton Street, or strolling along the Charing Cross Road in one of his lurid and ludicrous suits, stovepipe hat, and wide-collared Turnbull & Asser shirts. He was one of the most beautiful and courageous men alive. And he remains so in death. 

For whilst Sebastian never quite mastered the art of painting, he certainly mastered the far more difficult art of dying at the right time. Some die too soon: most die too late. Or so Zarathustra says. But the individual of genius always times their exit to perfection. Thus at the very moment his life became dramatized on stage, Horsely took his leave. He knew that once his persona had become a pure piece of fiction - a role that could be performed just as well, if not better, by actors other than himself - then there was really no need to hang around. It was time to get his coat.

To scorn the thought of one's mortality in this manner - to insist, as Sebastian always insisted, that death doesn't really matter (that it's not the end of the world) - is also to refuse to take seriously all those other judgements of God that weigh down and make gloomy.

And it is precisely this refusal of moral seriousness which so irritates the ascetic idealists who hate dandyism and have no patience with characters such as Horsley. For as long as fashion is concerned only with clothes, bodies, and hairstyles, then there's no problem. But once its playful and perverse indeterminacy begins to affect (and infect) the essential world of values, then there's panic on behalf of those who take these things and themselves very seriously indeed.  

Horsley recognised that what most alarms about dandyism is the fact that it repudiates models of depth. That it is, as he once wrote, a lie which reveals the truth and the truth is we are what we pretend to be. He also knew he was a preposterous and vulgar figure with no social status or role whatsoever: just a futile blast of colour, in a futile colourless world. One of the damned, if you like: but it's better to go to hell well-tailored, than to heaven in rags.

   

Revolt into Style

In an age of terror and impending global catastrophe, there is nothing for it but irony, indifference, and insouciance. What we really don't need right now is a greater degree of earnestness. For fanaticism is always marked by its moral sincerity and is, as Wilde pointed out, the world's original sin: 'If only the caveman had known how to laugh, history might have been different'.

The central argument of any philosophy on the catwalk must surely be that what matters most is that we look good, live dangerously, and love fate; pouring scorn upon all those who fail to recognise their own dullness. D. H. Lawrence provides us with our manifesto:

"It is time we treated life as a joke again, as they did in the really great periods like the Renaissance. Then the young men swaggered down the street with one leg bright red, one leg bright yellow, doublet of puce velvet, and yellow feather in silk cap. 

      Now that is the line to take. Start with externals, and proceed to internals, and treat life as a good joke. If a dozen men would stroll down the Strand and Piccadilly tomorrow, wearing tight scarlet trousers fitting the leg, gay little orange-brown jackets and bright green hats, then the revolution against dullness which we need so much would have begun. ... But it takes a lot of courage to sail gaily, in brave feathers, in the teeth of a dreary convention."  

                                        - 'Red Trousers', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (CUP, 2004), p. 138.

This sailing gaily in brave feathers and the refusal to care is what I understand by the phrase 'revolt into style' - a transpolitical revolt that teaches us to become superficial out of profundity and to appreciate how both society and self are ultimately founded upon cloth, not nature.

Fashion, above all else, is a passion for artifice. This, coupled to its love of empty signs and cycles, is what most alarms the puritan in his grey suit and sensible shoes and not so much its overtly erotic element. For in our culture, tethered as it is to a principle of utility and meaning, the fact that fashion is futile and pointless - and prides itself on such - means that those who like to dress up and mess up are always going to be branded immoral. 

Thus the young man cruising through Soho in brightly coloured clothes for no reason in the middle of the afternoon may well be sexually disconcerting to some people, but this is secondary in comparison to the outrage he causes because of his perceived flippancy, flamboyance, and aristocratic disdain for the world of work.

Ah Sebastian, I miss you!