Porno-chic clothes doesn't empower

 A lovely voice, a toned dancer, the perfectly turned tines of a fork or a marvellous chunk of religious statuary — it was all equally excellent.
Part of that was loving fashion, and for many years I bought into all the standard defences of fashion, including the ones that contradict each other. That it takes just as long to put on a dowdy jacket as it does a natty one. That fashion is simply uplifting, fun, meaningless, not to be analysed. Or, conversely, that fashion is wearable art, beautifully crafted, a taste of genius combined with the feel of great fabric. That the purchase of three classics means you needn’t buy a dozen bits of tat. Perhaps there is a hypocrite in the heart of every artist, an idealist whose intellectual arguments against the bogus primacy of beauty dissolve in the delight felt when they behold it.

There were also a range of feminist defences. Many of the West’s greatest designers in history, from Madame Grès and Vionnet to Jeanne Lanvin and Coco Chanel, have been women. Chanel in particular is an outstanding genius; without her, neither women nor men would have unstructured fine-knit jersey, dance-style separates, or the notion of ‘classic’ styles and palettes. The Chanel No 5 perfume bottle is iconic for a reason. While men’s supposedly natural hobbies and cliched preferences are not sneered at, female interest in fashion is deemed contemptible.

Exploitation
To express horror at the sexualised tackiness of women’s fashion, to say that certain styles demean women, is to blame women for their position in an anti-woman society. There is no such thing as ‘dressing like a slapper’, or whatever the going insult is. Women are treated like dirt, stalked, harassed, assaulted, raped, in all countries and in all societies, regardless of what they’re wearing. And, finally, bickering about women and fashion, women and style, women and surfaces, is simply a way of avoiding talking about the real issues, the real hatreds and obstacles that keep women in such utter abjection.

This year, however, beauty betrayed me. It began with a silly article I saw in a major fashion magazine. It was about eyebrow shaping. Until that moment I had not realised that eyebrows required shaping, and that the beauty industry had developed a range of ways of taking women’s money in return for this service.
More astonishingly, women were falling for it. Then came an encounter with a newspaper fashion editor whose writing I have long admired. She dodged all my questions about the predation, abuse and sexual harassment that female models experience and eventually sighed that when she went to fashion shows she looked only at the clothes, and that “the girls themselves may as well be pieces of meat without names. They’re there to make the clothes look good.”

Worth
So, a human female is worth less than a piece of cloth. I noticed just how much of what is sent down the catwalk makes women look simply cartoonish — and how women unthinkingly follow whatever is in fashion, regardless of whether it is comfortable to wear. Wearing stupid tiny porno-chic clothes and shoes which are not foot-shaped may feel empowering, but it is not. Racing up and down the high street buying trash made by starving kids to enrich the men who own the major retail companies is not ultimately satisfying.
If we want to see the futility of the beauty ideal we need only look at the way the most beautiful women in the world are treated. They’re treated like dirt, in some of the most openly misogynistic industries in existence. Terrorising oneself about beauty, weight or looks, obsessing about tiny details, developing oneself as an object from a very young age, are diversions on the way to emancipation.
“One must suffer to be beautiful,” is the ultimate masochist mantra, the pathetic bleat of an utterly subjugated woman. In the fervent rush towards beauty, a woman develops self-hate — and bunions.

The Guardian