Literature Review

Traditional societies which were highly conservative controlled women and limited their freedoms in almost every sphere of their lives, including the kind of dresses they wore. Women thus resorted to any form of expression or tool that they could use to speak and act against these limitations and infringement on their rights. Amongst the tools they used and continue to use today is fashion. The role that fashion has played in advancing the rights of women in the society has been widely debated and researched. Feminist have used fashion to advocate for women’s rights in different ways i.e. fashions that are deemed to promote women rights have been supported and promoted, while those found to demean women have been attacked and faced out of the market.. In her book, Glamour women, history, feminism, Dyhouse (2010) writes that before the politics of dress took precedence in the fight for women’s rights, feminists had focused on fighting for their rights and equal opportunities in other sectors of the society. Dyhouse goes ahead to note that when the feminist finally adopted the politics of dress, they started revolting against and attacking glamour in all its forms including beauty contests which they viewed as demeaning to women. A good example of revolts against beauty contests was seen in 1968 when feminist attack the Miss America competition in Atlantic City. During the revolt, they burned bras which they viewed as degrading to women and dumped them into Freedom Trash Can; they then crowned a live sheep as Miss America (Dyhouse, 2010). This act revealed the potential that fashion has as a feminist tool of expression on matters concerning women’s rights.

Another study by Betty Luther Hillman (2015) that looks at Dressing for the culture wars: style and the politics of self-presentation in the 1960s and 1970s, reveals that fashion was on the forefront in the feminist revolution of the mid-20^th century. She writes that women and the minorities such as the LGBTIQ community used fashion to as form of self-presentation, sexual expression and to fight for equal rights. Using fashion aspects such as dresses, and hairstyles, women and the sexual minority groups attacked and rejected the cultural norms and rules that they deemed to violate or infringe on their rights. In the book, Betty notes of how feminist riding on the motto “No woman can be free...until she loses her femininity” to encourage women to wear pants and miniskirts and adopt other hippie styles of self-fashioning as a form of express themselves and revolting against social norms that degraded them. The strategy of using fashion to promote feminist agenda was not only accepted amongst the women but also amongst men of that period. Betty (2015) notes of feminist leaders stating that "everyone should be accustomed to seeing long hair on men by now." This was a revolt against the social norms that expected only women to keep long hair and men to restrict themselves to short hair.

The impact of fashion in advancing women’s rights in the mid-90s is further confirmed by findings put forward by Paoletti, (2015) in his book Sex and unisex: fashion, feminism, and the sexual revolution. Paoletti notes that the mid-90s witnessed provocative fashion trends which helped in propagating the politics of gender and the sexual revolution. Her studies find that, using fashion as a tool, feminists and gays questioned, attacked, and dismantled gender stereotypes which had been used to stifle their self-expressions and their rights. She notes that the fashion industry too responded positively with designers across the world from Paris to Hollywood creating attires that imagined a future of equality and androgyny (Paoletti, 2015).

Recent studies also show that the use of fashion by feminist to advance women rights did not stop in the 90s but has been adopted by the modern feminist to advance and protect the rights of women. In their book entitled Fashion Talks: Undressing the Power of Style, Tarrant and Jolles (2012) notes that women continue to use fashion concepts to advance for women’s right in the society as seen with modern gender fluid clothes and accessories. They note that modern feminists also continue to attack cultural dresses such as hijab which in one way or the other entrap women self-representation and expression. Their study concludes that fashion can be used to shift the limiting boundaries of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and still avoid the traps with which fashion attempts to rein women in.

The findings from postmodern study by Marzel & Stiebel (2015) are in line with the results found by Tarrant and Jolles (2012). In their book Dress and ideology: Fashioning identity from antiquity to the present, Marzel & Stiebel (2015) established that to date, fashion still plays a huge role in communicating ideology, whether political, social or religious and has been in the forefront in advancing the rights and identities of the minorities. They point out at the modern fashion that aims at showing the beauty and celebrating the female body instead of hiding garments. Modern feminist have also not shied away from attacking fashion trends that they deem to be objectifying them through hypersexualized attires (Marzel & Stiebel, 2015). Feminists would promote fashions that they believe are championing their rights and turn against those that try to use them for commercial purposes. Feminist thus want to use fashion carefully lest their get duped into objectification in the name of empowerment (Tarrant and Jolles, 2012).