Fashion industry, retailers and the challenges faced by the gender binary

August 4, 2014 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events

Comments Off

NEW YORK — As a transgender woman who began her transition about a year ago, Kylie Jack is still figuring out her fashion style, but she wanted one thing right away: well-fitting bras.

Friends recommended Petticoat Fair in Austin, Texas, where she lives. The lingerie shop is known for one-on-one fittings, but Jack was denied access to the area where professionals work privately with customers after being asked if she was an anatomical female.

Kylie Jack

This July 2014 selfie image shows a transgender woman Kylie Jack in Austin, Texas, who was denied personal service at a lingerie shop known for one-on-one fittings. The 39-year-old computer interaction designer left empty-handed and angry after being asked if she was an anatomical female. She took to social media to protest.

Jack, 39, a computer interaction designer, left empty-handed and angry. She took to social media to protest.

“It was unclear whether they had a consistent policy and I didn’t know what to make of it,” Jack said.

The owner later apologized.

A gender binary exists in fashion, and that’s a challenge for those who don’t conform. Masculine-presenting women are often destined for boys’ departments or bad fits, while people born male who transition or simply like to dress in femme clothes sometimes don’t know what to expect in sizing or from sales clerks.

“I was in Filene’s Basement in Chelsea, which is pretty much the gayest neighborhood in America, and I said, ‘Can I try on clothes here in the men’s department?’ and they said no. It’s not as bad as it used to be but it’s pretty persistent. There’s this radioactive line between the menswear department and the womenswear department,” said Susan Herr, founder of dapperQ, a site on masculine dressing for the LGBTQ community.

Online retailers catering to masculine presenters have proliferated as trans people enjoy a higher profile thanks to Laverne Cox of “Orange is the New Black” and other pioneers.

But mainstream fashion has done little to keep up with large-footed women, petite trans men, masculine-presenting lesbians or androgynous dressers in search of a decent, affordable suit.

At 5-foot-4 and 120 pounds, Gretchen Dukowitz is a lesbian who dresses on the boyish-androgynous side. Her style is casual and she doesn’t like shopping online. Her No. 1 go-to place is HM’s boys’ section.

“It’s always fun to see who will be there, whether it’s the moms buying for their kids or the lesbians,” she said. “But even in boys’ clothes, the fit is not right if you have any hips at all, which I kind of do. It pinches you in weird places. Even though you’re buying men’s clothing, you still have the shapes of a woman.”

Small designers are trying to fill the gap, but often at prices not everyone can afford.

In button-down shirting, for example, menswear is often oversized, tight in the chest or hips. Women’s tops may be too tight, too feminine or too short. The label Androgyny offers a signature fit with a “boob button” to minimize gaping, no darts, a slight hourglass curve at the bottom and a center box pleat in back for extra room through the chest and shoulders.

The cost? $125 and up to $150 for limited editions.

The toll is not always financial.

Pages: 1 2

Explore Archives: Fashion, Gender Identity, Laura Jane Grace, Transgender

Share and Enjoy

Tags: Lingerie Events Shows

Singer fuels backlash against manufactured ‘perfection’ in ads

August 4, 2014 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events

Comments Off

The culture of altering one’s digital image isn’t going away – it’s getting a boost. Beauty Mirror, a new app by ModiFace, allows users to edit their look instantly. As they look into the camera, users can enlarge the eye, make the skin look clear, reduce acne and make the face thinner.

It has gotten more than 18 million views and gone viral since it was uploaded to Vevo several weeks ago. “Try,” Colbie Caillat’s newest music video, is being lauded by many viewers for its message of accepting oneself. Its images of girls and women, including Caillat, going from glammed-up to barefaced, along with lyrics that urge women to “take your make up off / Let your hair down / Take a breath / Look into the mirror” are the latest salvo in the backlash against manipulated images of beauty in magazines and other media.

More celebrities like Caillat, researchers and companies are adding to the clamor for images of real beauty instead of contrived versions. Beyond mere discourse, a growing number of women are taking action to counter the practice of digitally altering photographs of girls and women to create flawless faces and altered body parts.

“Researchers and activists have been concerned about the impact of idealized images of female beauty for quite some time now – decades even,” said Renee Engeln, a psychologist and body image researcher at Northwestern University, where she directs the Body and Media Lab.

“What seems new is that anger about these images and their impact has started to go mainstream,” she said. “The concern is no longer limited to a relatively small pool of feminists and academic researchers. Thanks in part to the power of social media, what we’re seeing in the past few years is that examples of ridiculous Photoshopping can quickly go viral, as can a variety of more positive messages about body image and beauty standards.”

The effect of manufactured images should not be ignored, according to Engeln. “We have piles of empirical evidence documenting that exposure to extremely thin, highly airbrushed images of women is linked with depression, eating disorders, shame, and guilt,” she said.

Although women are aware that the images are manipulated on websites, magazines and television, the separation between fact and fantasy in photographs of women related to fashion and beauty is amorphous, according to researcher, Meredith Jones, a media and cultural studies scholar at the University of Technology in Sydney.

“Photoshopped images remind us that while it is easy to naïvely conceive of technologies of visual media (especially photography) as able to show actual bodies and objects, closer analysis reveals that rather than being able to represent fact, they create what we might call ‘reality-hybrids,’” she wrote in her paper titled “Media-Bodies and Photoshop.”

“These images/bodies are boundary-crossers,” she added. “Neither fully fabricated nor fully connected to fleshy life, they are part of two worlds.”

Sometimes, it takes personal experience with the dicey divide between what’s real and artificial to speak up, even if it’s in a song. In an interview with Elle.com, Caillat said the constant pressure to appear a certain way all the time became the catalyst for “Try.” The music video shows that her camera-ready look involves adding a tremendous amount of artifice and digital tweaking and that she’s just as comfortable with being makeup-free.

Like “Try,” John Legend’s “You and I” is an anthem on real-life beauty. The music video debuted last month and features a montage of women and girls of all ages, shapes, sizes and races. One part of the video shows a woman who undresses to show the aftermath of a mastectomy.

The attention and the image boost that a company gets for taking a stand against idealized portrayals of beauty have been lost on the fashion and beauty industries until recently.

Dove soap often was a solitary player in this realm for a better part of the past decade and has made money on its real beauty campaigns. Sales rose from $2.5 billion 10 years ago to $4 billion today, according to Advertising Age. This year, other fashion and beauty companies and retailers are entering the fray through advertising and marketing efforts:

• Bongo clothing is launching this month new fall ads titled “100 percent natural,” featuring Vanessa Hudgens, whose fashion photos are not retouched.

• JCPenney featured five mannequins with bodies based on real people in the windows of its Manhattan Mall location in New York last month.

• Aerie, the lingerie division of American Eagle Outfitters, announced this year that its ads of young women would involve “no retouching our girls and no supermodels.” One of its T-shirts has the slogan “Love me, don’t retouch me.”