Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
But the fashion world hardly needed a marketing expert to tell them baby boomers were aging. The explosion of frills in 1987 wasn’t simply a misunderstanding; it was an eruption of long-simmering frustration and resentment at the increasingly independent habits of the modern female shopper. “What’s the matter with American women?” a French fashion designer snapped at John Molloy, the author of Dress for Success, while he was touring design houses in the mid-’80s. “They don’t do as they’re told anymore. We tell them how to dress but they just don’t listen.” Or, as Lacroix would complain later, “[W]ith the women’s-lib movement at the turn of the ’sixties [and in the] ’seventies, women became less fashion conscious,” and so many affluent female customers deserted couture that “Arabian princesses and classical dowagers remained the only customers.” High Femininity was an attempt to command liberated women’s attention with a counter-attack. As fashion designer Arnold Scaasi, one of High Femininity’s leading architects, explains it, the new fashion edict “is a reaction to the feminist movement, which was kind of a war.”
The mission of Lacroix and his fellow designers was to win this war, to make women “listen” and rein them in, sometimes quite literally. At a Lacroix fashion show, the designer trotted out his “cowgirl” model, bound and harnessed in a bridle rope. It was not enough that women buy more clothes; they had to buy the clothes that the couturiers told them to buy. Designers wanted to be in charge of “dressing women,” as the Council of Fashion Designers of America phrased it, in its 1987 tribute to Lacroix.
What happened in 1987 had happened before, almost identically, in the 1947 fashion war. Women who had discovered pants, low-heeled shoes, and loose sweaters during World War II were reluctant to give them up in peacetime. The fashion industry fell into a “frightening slump,” as Time described it at the time, with orders shrinking by as much as 60 percent. And women only rebelled when French designer Christian Dior unveiled the “New Look”—actually an old late-Victorian look—featuring crinolined rumps, corseted waists, and long ballooning skirts. More than three hundred thousand women joined “Little Below the Knee Clubs” to protest the New Look, and, when Neiman Marcus gave its annual fashion award to Dior, women stood outside waving placards—DOWN WITH THE NEW LOOK—and booing the man who believed that waists wider than seventeen inches were “repulsive” on a lady. “Let the new look of today become the forgotten look of tomorrow,” labor lawyer Anna Rosenberg proclaimed, and her sentiments were widely shared. In a poll that summer, a majority of women denounced the Dior style.
The women’s declarations, however, only strengthened the designer’s resolve to silence them. “The women who are loudest,” Dior retorted, “. . . will soon be wearing the longest dresses. . . . You can never stop the fashions.” By the end of the ’40s, after a two-year promotional campaign by retailers and the fashion press, Dior won out. Women were wearing the New Look, albeit a toned-down version. And they were obeying Dior’s order that they wear corsets capable of shaving two inches from their waist; in fact, bustiers that reduced the waist by three inches were soon generating sales of $6 million a year.
In every backlash, the fashion industry has produced punitively restrictive clothing and the fashion press has demanded that women wear them. “If you want a girl to grow up gentle and womanly in her ways and her feelings, lace her tight,” advised one of the many male testimonials to the corset in the late Victorian press. In the last half of the 19th century, apparel makers crafted increasingly rib-crushing gowns with massive rear bustles. And ridicule from the press effectively crushed a women’s dress-reform campaign for more comfortable, sports-oriented clothing. The influential Godey’s Lady’s Book sneered at such “roomy and clownish apparel” and labeled its proponents dress “deformers.”
When the fashion industry began issuing marching orders again in the ’80s, its publicists advanced a promotional line that downplayed the domineering intent and pretended to serve women’s needs. Like the other contributors to backlash culture, fashion merchants latched on to the idea that contemporary women must be suffering from an excess of equality that had depleted their femininity. In fashion terms, the backlash argument became: Women’s liberation has denied women the “right” to feminine dressing; the professional work outfits of the ’70s shackled the female spirit. “A lot of women took the tailored look too far and it became unattractive,” designer Bob Mackie says. “Probably, psychologically, it hurt their femininity. You see a lot of it in New York, trotting down Wall Street.” Women have realized that they are “beginning to lose some of their feminine attributes,” fashion designer Arnold Scaasi says. “Women are fighting now for their own individuality”—by “going home and dressing up.”
In its desperation, the industry began to contradict its own time-honored conventions. Fashion’s promoters have long rhapsodized that femininity is “eternal,” rooted in women’s very nature; yet at the same time, they were telling women that simply wearing the wrong set of clothes could obliterate this timeless female essence. This became the party line, voiced by merchants peddling every garment from poufs to panties. “We were wearing pinstripes, we didn’t know what our identity was anymore!” cried Karen Bromley, spokeswoman for the Intimate Apparel Council. “We were having this identity crisis and we were dressing like men.”
But the only “identity crisis” that women faced when they looked inside their closets was the one the ’80s fashion industry had fabricated. The apparel makers had good reason to try to induce this anxiety: personal insecurity is the great motivator to shop. Wells Rich Greene, which conducted one of the largest studies of women’s fashion-shopping habits in the early ’80s, found that the more confident and independent women became, the less they liked to shop; and the more they enjoyed their work, the less they cared about their clothes. The agency could find only three groups of women who were loyal followers of fashion: the very young, the very social, and the very anxious.
While the fashion industry’s publicists helped provoked and aggravate anxiety in aging baby-boomer women by their relentless promotion of “youthful” fashions, they certainly weren’t going to claim credit for it. Instead, they blamed the usual culprit—feminism. The women’s movement, they told fashion writers over and over, had generated women’s sartorial “identity crisis”—by inventing a “dress-for-success” ideology and foisting it on women. This was an accusation that meshed well with the decade’s conventional wisdom on women and the fashion press gladly bought it. But it was just another backlash myth. The leaders of the women’s movement had about as much to do with pushing pinstripes as they did with burning bras.
FROM HOUSEHOLD RAGS TO GRAY-FLANNEL STITCHES
“You must look as if you’re working, not playing,” Henri Bendel’s president instructed women readers in a 1978 Harper’s Bazaar article titled “Self-Confident Dressing,” one of many features at the time advising women to wear suits that projected “confidence” and “authority.” “Dress for the job you want to have,” Mademoiselle told readers in its September 1977 issue. “There’s a clothing hierarchy paralleling the job hierarchy.” Its September 1979 cover story offered a “Dress for Success Guide,” promoting gray flannel suits and fitted tweed jackets for “the woman who is doing something with her life.” The well-tailored suit, the late-’70s fashion press had uniformly decreed, was the ideal expression of women’s rising economic and political aspirations.
The fashion press inherited these ideas not from the women’s movement but from the writings of a male fashion consultant. John T. Molloy’s The Woman’s Dress for Success Book became an instant hit in 1977, remaining on the New York Times best-seller list for more than five months. The book offered simple tips on professional dressing for aspiring businesswomen, just as his first work, Dress for Success, dispensed clothing advice to men. That earlier book, published in 1975, was hugely popular, too. But when the fashion media turned against “dress for success” a decade later, they directed their verbal assault so
lely on the women’s edition.
A former prep school English teacher, Molloy turned to the study of women’s business dressing in the mid-’70s for the money. Corporations like AT&T and U.S. Steel, under federal pressure to hire women, were funding research and seminars that made them look like good equal opportunity employers. Unlike the High Femininity merchants, who determined fashion trends based on “feelings,” Molloy actually surveyed hundreds of people in the work force. He even dispatched research assistants to spy on the dressing habits of corporate men and women and, in a four-year study, enlisted several hundred businesswomen to track changes in their dress and their career.
Based on his survey results, Molloy calculated that women who wore business suits were one and a half times more likely to feel they were being treated as executives—and a third less likely to have their authority challenged by men. Clothing that called attention to sexuality, on the other hand—women’s or men’s—lowered one’s status at the office. “Dressing to succeed in business and dressing to be sexually attractive are almost mutually exclusive.”
Molloy’s motives were primarily commercial, but his book had a political subtext, as a primer for people disadvantaged by class and sex. A child of the lower middle class himself, Molloy addressed similarly situated readers, the “American bootstrap types,” as he called them, “whose parents never went to college” and who were struggling to “overcome socioeconomic barriers when they choose their clothes.” The author was also an advocate for women’s rising expectations—and urged them to rely on their brains rather than their bodies to improve their station. “Many women,” he wrote, “still cling to the conscious or unconscious belief that the only feminine way of competing is to compete as a sex object and that following fashion trends is one of the best ways to win. It’s not.”
When Molloy’s book for women became a best-seller in the ’70s, publishers immediately rushed three knockoffs into print. Retailers began invoking Molloy’s name and even claiming, most times falsely, that the clothing guru had personally selected their line of women’s business wear. Newsweek declared dress-for-success a trend. And for the next three years, women’s magazines recycled scores of fashion stories that endorsed not only the suits but the ambitions they represented—with headlines like YOUR GET-AHEAD WARDROBE, POWER! and WHAT TO WEAR WHEN YOU’RE DOING THE TALKING. At first fashion makers welcomed dress-for-success, too. They issued new ads offering paeans to working women’s aspirations—with, of course, the caveat that women could realize these objectives only in a suit. Apparel manufacturers had visions of exploiting a new and untapped market. “The success of suits has made the fashion industry ecstatic,” Newsweek observed in 1979. They had good reason to feel that way: women’s suit sales had more than doubled that year.
But in their enthusiasm, fashion merchants overlooked the bottom line of Molloy’s book: dress-for-success could save women money and liberate them from fashion-victim status. Business suits weren’t subject to wild swings in fashion and women could get away (as men always have) with wearing the same suit for several days and just varying the blouse and accessories—more economical than buying a dress for every day of the week. Once women made the initial investment in a set of suits, they could even take a breather from shopping.
Between 1980 and 1987, annual sales of suits rose by almost 6 million units, while dresses declined by 29 million units. The $600 million gain in suit sales in these years was nice—but it couldn’t make up for the billions of dollars the fashion industry could have been getting in dress sales. Matters worsened when manufacturers raised their suit prices to make up for the shortfall—and women just started buying cheaper suits from foreign manufacturers. Between 1981 and 1986, imports of women’s suits nearly tripled.
“When this uniform is accepted by large numbers of businesswomen,” Molloy’s book predicted, “. . . it will be attacked ferociously.” The fashion industry, the clothing consultant warned, may even yank the suits off the racks: “They will see it as a threat to their domination over women. And they will be right.”
REQUIEM FOR THE LITTLE BOW TIE
In 1986, U.S. apparel manufacturers cut their annual production of women’s suits by 40 percent; the following year, production dropped by another 40 percent. Several large suit manufacturers shut down their women’s lines altogether. The sudden cutback wasn’t inspired by a lack of demand: in 1986, women’s purchases of suits and blazers jumped 5.3 percent. And this reduction wasn’t gender-blind. In the same two years, output of men’s suits stayed the same.
Soon, department stores phased out the executive-dressing wings that they had opened for professional women in the late 1970s. Marshall’s shut down its Careers department; Carson Pirie Scott closed its Corporate Level division for women; Neiman Marcus removed all coordinated women’s business suits from many of its stores. Paul Harris Stores switched from women’s career clothes to miniskirts (and promptly lost $5.6 million). And Alcott & Andrews, the store that billed itself as a female Brooks Brothers when it opened in 1984, began stocking ruffled dresses. When Molloy toured its New York store in 1987, he couldn’t find a single suit. (Two years later, Alcott & Andrews went bankrupt.)
Fashion writers buried the dress-for-success concept as eagerly as they had once praised it. “Bye-bye to the Little Bow Tie,” Mademoiselle eulogized in a 1987 article entitled “The Death of Dress for Success.” It was one of many such media obituaries, among them “The Death of the Dumb Blue Suit” and “A Uniform for Submission Is Finally Put to Rest.” As the latter headline (from the Chicago Tribune) suggests, these articles were now proposing that business suits, not unequal business status, posed the greatest threat to women’s opportunities. As a fashion consultant explained it in a Los Angeles Times feature on the same subject, “[The suit] shows you aren’t successful because you have no freedom of dress, and that means you don’t have power.” According to ’80s fashion theory, bondage lurked in the little bow tie—though not in the corset ties that were soon to follow.
All the anti-dress-for-success crusade needed to be complete was a villain. John Molloy was the obvious choice. The fashion press soon served him with a three-count indictment; he was charged with promoting “that dreadful little bow tie,” pushing “the boring navy blue suit,” and making women look like “imitation men.” When his book first came out, Molloy was so popular that newspapers fought to bid on his syndicated column, “Making It.” But with Molloy’s name on the fashion blacklist, newspapers canceled their orders. A major daily paper, which had initially approached Molloy about publishing the column, pulled out with this explanation: “The fashion people won’t allow it.”
The charges against Molloy were largely trumped up. In fact, Molloy’s book never mentioned the bow tie; it wasn’t even on the market when the book was published. His book did not champion navy suits; it recommended gray, which he believed conveyed more authority. And a whole section of the book was specifically devoted to advising women how not to dress like an “imitation man.” Dress for Success didn’t even endorse suits exclusively, as many magazine stories maintained; it suggested women diversify their professional wardrobe with blazers, tailored skirts, and dresses. The fashion press was attacking its own rigid version of dress-for-success, not Molloy’s. As Molloy himself points out, a shrewder garment industry might have capitalized on his formula. “My book recommended a wide variety of styles,” he says. “My prescription was not that narrow. It was the fashion industry that narrowed women’s choices. They became their own worst enemy.”
LACROIX: THE CLOWN WHO WOULD BE KING
With the suits cleared from the racks and Molloy deposed, the fashion industry moved to install Lacroix as “The King of Couture,” an exalted title in keeping with ’80s fashion obsessions about class. While Molloy spoke to the “American bootstrap types,” Lacroix addressed only the elite. He concerned himself with a class of people who didn’t have to dress for success. His female clientele, the ornamental ladies of American h
igh society, had already acquired their upper-class status—through marriage or inheritance, not a weekly paycheck.
Lacroix’s preoccupation with the top rungs of the income ladder fit perfectly the upscaling sales policies of the decade’s retailers. In the fashion equivalent of television’s “quality demographics,” scores of retailers turned their backs on middle-class women and courted only the “better-business” customers, as they euphemistically labeled the rich. Instead of offering a range of clothing choices and competitive pricing, they began to serve only the tastes and incomes of the most affluent. Instead of serving the needs of the many working women, they sponsored black-tie balls and provided afternoon tea service and high-priced facials to the idle few. “We made a conscious decision as a store a few years back to deal primarily with better-quality, wealthy fashions,” explains Harold Nelson, general manager of Neiman Marcus’s Washington, D.C., store, where 90 percent of the fashions were in couture or high-priced designer categories by 1988. “Gradually, we’ve been removing the moderately priced merchandise.”
Lacroix’s fashion gaze was ideally suited to the era in an even more fundamental way. For inspiration, he looked only backward—“I love the past much more than the future”—and primarily to the wardrobes of the late Victorian and postwar eras. In 1982, while chief designer at the House of Patou, he had even tried, unsuccessfully, to reintroduce the bustle. (As Lacroix explains this effort later, “I must say, [the] bustle emphasizes the silhouette a way I like very much.”) For the next three years, his five subsequent retro-tinged fashion shows fell flat, too; as he would say later of this period, he “suffered from being considered the clown of couture.” Nonetheless, he clung to these more “feminine” styles that had preoccupied him since childhood when, he recalled later, he had pored admiringly over late Victorian fashion magazines of corseted women and dreamed of being the world’s next Dior, an aspiration he had announced at the family dinner table one day. When he finally made it as an adult, he would dramatize this fantasy. He timed the grand opening of the House of Lacroix to coincide with the House of Dior’s fortieth anniversary.