Fashioning Feminism: The Politics of Style in the Era of Women’s Liberation

The rise of the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s pushed to the forefront of public discourse questions of appearance and images. While the media perpetuated the myth of the “bra burner” as the most potent image of “the feminist” in this period, women liberationists’ style choices offered a more complex interpretation.

This paper examines the various approaches among feminists and their debates regarding the role of fashion in the movement and in promoting feminist causes, tracing how fashion and beauty culture became central to feminist politics in the 1960s and 1970s. Some feminists used fashion to emphasize their feminine sensuality, celebrating women’s power to assert themselves as sexual beings. Others abandoned gendered fashion attributes, adopting instead androgynous looks that expressed their gender critique of society and the capitalistic consumer market. Black feminists, many of them were activists in civil rights and Black power movements, also created their own version of feminist looks. Whereas feminists often disagreed over the proper strategy and image activists should adopt, this variety of looks and images presented a more complex and nuanced approach to fashion than in the media and public discourse, which often flatten the diversity of visual and fashionable expressions that feminists adopted. Whether they rejected beauty culture, wore minis, or adopted unisex styles, feminists and the women who supported them turned fashion into an important facet of how “the personal is political.” By exploring feminists’ fashion choices and approaches to adornment, the paper reveals the possibilities and limits that fashion offered feminism in this period. I argue that in their efforts, they made fashion a central site not only of feminist politics, but also of what it meant to be a liberated woman in society in a time of great social change.