The Subtle Violence of Fashion Snark

A SYTYCB entry

I had a revelation recently as I was clicking through my favorite, guiltiest blog reads. I was blog-gorging on my daily heap of style snark and celebrity voyeurism and congratulating myself on my functional relationship, neat hair, and hip wardrobe of lace-up boots and retro sundresses, when it hit me like an Ugg boot to the face: I’m a mean girl. For all my feminist credentials and outward patriarchy-smashing rage, I am a sneering, self-righteous, slut-shaming, misogynist mean girl and if I’m singing a sisterhood Cumbayá of solidarity and free sexual expression I’m tearing girls apart for the clothes they wear—and I’m starting with celebrities.

Hundreds of magazine sections and blogs, many of them written by women, exist only to dissect the fashion choices of celebrities, sometimes applauding dramatic red carpet gowns but also berating women for clothes that are apparently ill-fitting, age inappropriate, too sexy or too modest. We complain about the fashion magazine’s post-production paring and smoothing of model’s bodies and their advancement of an emaciated ideal but we’re silent when tabloid glossies recruit D-list panels (or internet commenters, always a respectable bunch) to rip the jogging shorts or premiere gowns of actresses, when they propagate misogynist notions about female sexuality, weight, and expression with complaints about leg slits and “taste levels.”

I’m not crying any Swarovski tears for starlets in borrowed Balenciaga being named to the Worst Dressed List. But I do cringe at the language used to criticize their clothing, the covert body-shaming hidden in phrases like “frumpy,” “age inappropriate,” and “unflattering” and at the perpetuation of exacting standards of female self-presentation. The messages telegraphed in these photos and criticisms are clear and demanding and they transcend the rarified world of Hollywood. As fashion commentators polices the buffed bodies and catwalk clothes of female celebrities they are establishing rules for female dress in general.

When style commentators scoff at a starlet for flashing too much breast or for covering up too much skin, they are marking out a narrow acceptable range of female sexuality, the outsides of which are prudishness and sluttiness. There’s no better representation of the Madonna/whore binary in fashion critique than the E! television show Fashion Police’s “Starlet or Streetwalker” segment. During the segment a panel of hosts including Joan Rivers and Kelly Osbourne are presented with photos of women with blacked out faces and asked to guess whether the woman is a celebrity or a prostitute.

The segment is disturbing for a number of reasons: its trivializing of the violence and abuse of sex-trafficking and forced prostitution; its tacit endorsement of the exploitative patriarchal and capitalist systems that drive women to sex work and its shaming of those women; its branding of faceless women as “streetwalkers” based on nothing but their attire. And then there are the real life starlets, whose clothes are examined for signs of “whorishness” (normally platform heels, fishnets, and short skirts). The hosts often express surprise when a particularly “skanky” woman is revealed to be a high-profile actress and wring their hands at her overt sexuality, her flaunted body. But when the woman is a teen actress or a reality star—a Miley Cyrus, a Taylor Momsen, a Courtney Stodden—they laugh knowingly, delighted that these women have confirmed their deepest suspicions about their ‘morals’ and ‘taste’ by dressing like ‘whores.’

But while Joan and company gleefully shame celebrities for their revealing ‘slut’ clothes, they were equally concerned about the woman who was too covered up, dressed in a flowing black dress and leather jacket. “She’s not getting any guys. She’s not getting paid!” they shrilled. She was dressed too conservatively, apparently meaning she is frigid and unable to attract a man, and therefore a failure as a prostitute or a celebrity, but ultimately as a woman. It doesn’t matter that the ‘woman’ was actually Adam Lambert, out rocker and American Idol hasbeen (cue homophobic hemming and hawing). The panel believed the photo was of a woman and reacted accordingly, fretting about her clothes and their implication for her femininity, her sexuality, her marketability as hooker or starlet.

And fashion commentary doesn’t just police female sexuality and measure hem lengths to separate the prudes from the slags. It does so to supervise and erase deviant bodies, to minimize the apparent horror caused by a celebrity with wrinkles or love handles. When commentators berate a woman for failing to dress for her age of her size, for daring to wear a jean skirt or kicky cocktail dress post-menopause, post-partum, or pre-liposuction, they are defining the only ‘tolerable’ ways older or larger bodies can be seen. Fashion critiques demand sleeves for cellulite-pocked arms, modest gowns for baby weight, and matronly dresses for anyone with grandchildren and hips. The movie industry has, however slowly and stubbornly, broadened its range of faces, allowing women like Helen Mirren and Melissa McCarthy to become cult celebrities. But fashion blogs and magazine write-ups continue to police these alternative celebrity bodies, if not overtly through discussion about their wrinkles or weight than through pointed critique and concern about their clothing.

When gossip sites fret about Madonna’s risqué tour costumes and bum-baring antics, they’re not complaining about the marketing of music with the female body: they’re complaining about the marketing of music with a middle-aged female body. Katy Perry’s spinning cupcake breasts and Lady Gaga’s BDSM-inspired ready wear never inspire the ounce of the outrage Madonna’s recent MDNA tour attire has. When the woman is 53 years old and the mother of four—as the fashion moralizers continually remind us—flaunting her body is no longer sexy or profitable: it’s pathetic, desperate, tacky, vulgar. Piers Morgan, now apparently self-styled arbitrator of women’s fashion, dubbed Madonna’s onstage nipple slip the “most embarrassing, cringe-worthy, desperate moment in the history of music.”

Morgan and other critics seemingly take more offense at Madonna’s age and its mark—the veins on her muscular arms and slight sag of her G-strung derriere—than the nipple slip or strip tease itself.  Here is a media recoiling in disgust from the open display of a middle-aged body, the very same body it once so actively fetishized and marketed. Body snark is sublimated into fashion snark: as we gasp and giggle at Madonna’s cheerleading skirts and fishnets we’re mocking and effacing a non-normative female body. Or at least a non-normative body by Hollywood’s standards, standards that are rapidly becoming our own.

We may decry the power of men and their insidious gazes to dictate a woman’s wardrobe, but we’ve gladly handled that authority over to magazines and, in gorging on fashion snark, appropriated it for ourselves. This isn’t about “taste,” a slippery word that’s become a dog whistle for body shaming and sexuality policing. This is about tackling misogyny wherever it surfaces, even on the pages of our favorite catty blogs and glossy magazines.