Female doesn't necessarily mean feminist - or feminine - confusion over clothes styles, especially among feminists - The Last Word - Column

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 8, 1994 | by Suzanne Fields

Clothes make the woman, no doubt about it. The immediate attraction to a woman is not her resume (or her children), but what she's wearing.

Ask any woman - or any man. If she's wearing an Armani, she trendy, chic, expensive. If it's Guess? jeans, she's clearly sporty, follows the fads, is probably skinny (if she cares about how her pants look on her) and she doesn't care at all whether you read the label.

Miniskirts are for showing off good legs and decolletage is for showing off voluptuous curves above the waist. Men of the fifties still prefer a well-turned ankle or calf set off by a high heel, but today's college man is happy enough looking at his date's toes in sandals, even if they're Birkenstocks.

Fashion reflects behavior as well as aesthetics. Women gave up girdles because they were uncomfortable and as difficult to get on as to get off, but stylish jeans offer similar difficulties. Bras are back, but more for vanity than for modesty.

Women in the military look best in the Navy's knockout summer whites, but that look requires regulation stockings and shoes. The women at Taflhook who had their legs shaved brought disgrace to the uniform not only for their scandalous behavior but also for the disrespect they showed the uniform by hiking their skirts high on the thigh and abandoning their stockings.

Nothing focuses so much attention on the contemporary confusion in feminism than the changing fashions in what women wear. It's not so much that a woman is what she wears but that her clothes can make a statement counter to the expectations of others. Nobody knows the rules anymore. Ask any miniskirted girl who rails at the hardhat who whistles at her. Still, we've come a long way, baby, from the day that President Nixon chastised Barbara Walters for wearing pants.

From a fashion point of view, Hillary Rodham Clinton is a feminist for our time. She doesn't have a clue about what to wear, or when or why, and rarely shows any consistency about what looks good on her. In fact, the first lady looked most beautiful in the photos Annie Leibowitz took of her for Vogue, where a soft lens romanticized and glamorized her in a Donna Karan black evening gown. It was one of those rare moments when she looked exactly right for the occasion - a fantasy woman in the pages of a fantasy fashion magazine. Of course radical feminists were outraged. How dare she become attractive? And to men, too!

"With one dizzying leap, she went from someone who seemed to care nothing about her looks to someone who seemed preoccupied with them," observed Maureen Dowd in the New York Times. "She went from a frizzy-haired, bespectacled feminist who scorned makeup and bought her clothes off sales racks to an elaborately accessorized, relentlessly tonsorialized first lady."

Of course, it took a lot of time to get the hair frizzed and the granny glasses just right and to choose the politically correct, store-bought clothes. Anyone who goes shopping with a teenager knows how difficult it is to find just the right recycled and reconditioned grunge or creepy chic look," whether expensive from the major cheap from the thrift shop. Sloppy doesn't necessarily mean indifferent.

Most of us metamorphose in threads throughout our lifetime. As the first lady experiences clothes encounters of the deferred kind, she mourns not getting to wear both a Marine Corps uniform and more maternity dresses. She told female veterans that when she went to an Arkansas branch of a Marine Corps recruiting" office in 1975 to enlist a sergeant told her to go to the "dogs" - meaning the Army. In Warsaw, she told teenagers she yearned for a bigger family: "I wished I had as many children as Mrs. [Lech] Walesa, but I don't'." Since Poland's first lady is the mom of eight, we can assume that these aspirations, if that's what they really were, were never meant to coincide.

"Female doesn't mean feminist"' professor and writer Carolyn Heilbrun once snapped pejoratively. Of course, female doesn't necessarily mean feminine either. But one of the good omens today, it seems to me, is that the shrill, male-hating, dowdy feminists increasingly are outnumbered where it counts in the home, at work and in the pages of fashion magazines. Most fashions reflect an eclectic acceptance, a playful tolerance, an ability to be many different kinds of women, even a desire to please the eyes of men - suitable, so to speak, at the office, and sexy at the beach.

So, does anyone really care whether Hillary wears different kinds of hats? Probably not. But it's what she says while wearing them that creates the potholes she keeps running into. Besides, she lacks the "perfect" figure that made it easy for Jackie Onassis to be tres chic.

And if clothes really do make the woman, it's the first impression that we're talking about. It really doesn't make a permanent difference when the White House puts out a press release reporting that the first lady wore a two-piece fuchsia Noviello Bloom suit of a linen blend in Italy's Piazza Navona. Neither should it bother us that the Europeans made fun of her clothes. It's whether she can sell an unpopular health care plan that counts.