Capitol Hill Barbie is back y’all. We heard some people were talking smack about Ann Taylor and first of all, how dare they. Writing in the Atlantic, Cintra Wilson claims that D.C. fashion is “terrible” and “patriarchal.” *Insert eye roll gif* So we thought our first post back should pay tribute to the staff assistant uniform in all its glory. Wilson claims that the iconic Ann Taylor uniform is oppressive and even “alarming.” Girl, stay in your lane.
Wilson confuses safety with oppression. Uniforms are integral to societal cohesion and formulating identities. Yet even so, they can be a foundation for free expression and counter-cultural expression (think Scorpio Rising, leather jackets signifying biker culture).
Look, Cintra, can we call you Cintra? We get it, D.C. isn’t New York, or L.A., it is our nation’s Capital. Definitely not the fashion capital. No, D.C. has the burden of being a second home to allllllll the Senators and Congressmen, making it the biggest super nerd circus outside of CERN or Silicon Valley. People in power wear uniforms: CERN has white lab coats; Silicon Valley has the Steve Jobs black turtle neck and dad jeans; D.C. has the blue blazer. We recognize that these are notoriously male environments. The Ann Taylor uniform empowers women to join the blue blazer Old Boys Club.
These people, our lawmakers, our movers and shakers, they are not the most stylish bunch. We know that. They know that. (They are so desperate for fashion influencers they have turned to the President’s teenage daughters for guidance -- Malia, Sasha, call us, we would love to feature you.) They come from the heritage of powdered wigs and long black robes.
George Washington *~Fashion Icon~* 1777
Why are you penalizing them for it? Who hurt you? We’ve all tried to fit into a too-small Ann Taylor number and been bitten by an unmoving zipper; that is no reason to damn the entire enterprise of pencil skirts.
Overwhelmingly the response to this article was defensive, because though short-sighted, at the beginning of her article, Wilson did make a few decent points and poked at a gaping vulnerability. Specifically how the aforementioned patriarchal heritage and hegemony plays out through what women wear to work. She makes such a compelling introduction!
In Washington, D.C., there is an excruciatingly narrow margin for acceptable female dress; all women, no matter how attractive or plain, no matter how many postgraduate degrees they have, or how well they fly fighter planes, walk an inescapable fashion tightrope. Their style will fall into the binary categories of either “dowdy” or “slutty”; there are virtually no fashion grey areas.
Preach, girl. Love a good madonna/whore binary take down, yes.
Wilson continues, and starts to lose her way:
My shorthand for the look was always “capitalist burqa” or “corporate office submissive”: cubicle-wear of so-so quality for the single girl in her late twenties whose self-esteem has been almost beaten to death by the beauty-industrial complex, and whose decent education has been punished with a thanklessly demanding office job.
...burqa? Submissive? Wilson sounds like she saw the 50 Shades of Grey movie in the K street Loews theater, encountered a prissy lobbyist in the bathroom and decided to write an article gleaned from all her newfound D.C. expertise. And then back to her reflexive hatred of Ann Taylor:
The Ann Taylor ethos rubs me the wrong way for the same reason I don’t like white women singing “Summertime” or winos drinking cooking extract: Too much vanilla will make you go blind. But the brand is the retreat position for the schizophrenic D.C. work environment, where female sexuality is both an asset and a liability.
Woof. “Too much vanilla” -- Head meet desk. The point of wearing Ann Taylor is that it is a uniform. It is iconic. A la Matilda Kahl, a New York art director who wears a white silk blouse and black pants to work every day. The trend toward deploying a utilitarian, call it vanilla, approach to dressing is in fact gathering plaudits for its efficiency.
And since Wilson seems keen on throwing burqas into the conversation, let us take a minute to appreciate wearing actual burqas and the niqab for security and freedom. Take for example one of 2013′s Best American Travel Essays from the perspective of Colleen Kinder, a white woman, donning a niqab in order to “beige out” in a Cairo market. It is easy as western white women to jump to the conclusion that women who choose to cover themselves are oppressed. I would be slow to make the assertions that Wilson assumes about the relationship between submissiveness and the burqa. Other cultural codes of fashion practice are not water-cooler punch lines. Wilson assumes that women don these uniforms without any agency of their own.
Similarly, why not look at the intention that can go into “beiging out” in an office and professional environment? Why is it submissive? Why are female uniforms couched in sexual innuendo or linked to oppression, while male uniforms are standard and unremarkable? Why must a woman's style be rebellious and counter culture to win the respect of fashion moguls.
Wilson’s arguments against the uniform could be persuasive if they were not subsequently lost in a stream of consciousness narrative that went on to attack society wives, socialites, and Republican administrations in an all-inclusive, indiscriminate net.
The next recipients of Wilson’s snark are a small segment of our sisters in style. Wilson hones in on those plagued by the expectations of ladies who lunch. The Georgetown elite. Her most prescient pull-quote-sound-bite-self-indulgent-almost-interesting remark:
There is an indulged weakness evident: The ideal-society wife is made into a streamlined, luxury toddler.
In her over-broad attack on all-things-female DC, she pivots from discussing women overburdened by work relying on flavorless fashion, to the wealthy presumably looking for husbands? So are we to believe that all the young women working on the Hill are future society wives?
We don’t get an answer, because by the time you recover from the motion-sickness of her drunken swerving from one social stratum to the next, she comes around the bend and crashes into political commentary bashing the Bush Administration and their torturous regime of “Peter Pan collars” (*adjusts tinfoil hat* -- conspiracy!). While trying to recover from the whiplash of that impact, brace yourself, because the car is about to slip through the guard rails into the roiling rapids of First Ladies and the politics of A-list designers.
It is hard to know where to begin to address her mischaracterizations and caricatures, since they are so wide sweeping. If anyone is guilty of infantilizing the women on the Hill, I suggest Wilson take a hard look in the mirror.
Let’s see the receipts. Let’s get a good look at those”virginal Easter Egg” get-ups Wilson seems to think are a by-product of Republican power:
Here are the Bush Twins literally on Easter Sunday coming out of a church service at Fort Hood in Texas, 2005. Honestly, not that bad and similar to a lot of the styles we’ve seen on the Obama girls. Hardly Amish.
Pretty sure when Rihanna wore that dress everyone freaked out...
And honestly we’re talking about the 2000s. Just yikes. We all deserved better than that fashion. We’re also going to be bigger than pointing fingers at those who do actually look like Easter Eggs from time to time.
To conclude (which Wilson also neglects to do), here at Hill on Heels we believe that beauty is bipartisan. Fashion goes beyond party lines. Because truly the issue of DC fashion and its many interwoven nightmares of propriety, is and are a lot to bite off for an article advertising a sartorial book about a fashion road trip (that we will probably hate-read). Pseudo anthropological mockery doesn’t get you very far when you start to look at the women actually in the offices, instead of drawing from pre-established stereotyped cartoons you have in your head.
Despite what the likes of Wilson would have you think, pretty little collared button up things, and black skirts are not a prison to which ladies on the Hill have been condemned. Quite the contrary, they are a basic platform on which to begin, a firm foundation that allows for efficiency or nuanced self expression in all its many forms. Give me tights, give me scarves, give me arm candy, give me gorgeous blazers with perfectly cut lapels. Fashion is what you make it. That’s power. Wilson instead chose the easy and predictable narrative of female victimhood.
P.S. We did a little research on the current state of fashion in the district since Wilson seems to have forgotten to do so while flying by the light of her own biased observations. I will be the first to admit that I too have biases and predispositions, however I would like to think that when writing about a subject for a news organization one would try to gather as much information to discern the truth before throwing together a sloppy summary of personal assumptions.
A nice round up of fashion bloggers in the DMV from 2011 by The Washingtonian
2013 CBS local highlights five fashion blogs
And TIME, defending D.C. Fashion Week
We invite you, Carrie Bradshaws lost in Abu Dhabi super markets, to the congressional halls, to come and see behind the burqas.
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