Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  While the fashion press, of course, declares its “trends” long before they reach the consumer, in Lacroix’s case, the leading industry trade paper, Women’s Wear Daily, would take fashion forecasting to a new extreme. It declared Lacroix’s first “baby doll” line a hit two days before the designer even displayed it at the Paris show in July 1986. As it turned out, the female audience that day was less than impressed by the onslaught of “fantasy fashion” on the runway by Lacroix and fellow designers. As Women’s Wear Daily remarked, with more irritation than insight, reaction from the society women in attendance “seemed cool;” and even when one of the couturiers issued a “call to a less self-important way of dressing,” the front-row ladies “failed to heed” him. But the lackluster reception from the ladies didn’t discourage the magazine, which hailed Lacroix and High Femininity in another front-page rave the next day. FASHION GOES MAD, the magazine’s banner headline announced with self-induced brain fever. Lacroix has “restored woman’s right to outrageousness, fun and high spirits.”

  But was Lacroix offering women “fun”—or just making fun of them? He dressed his runway models in dunce caps, clamped dogcollarlike disks around their necks, stuck cardboard cones on their breasts, positioned cabbage roses so they sprouted from their rear ends, and attached serving trays to their heads—the last touch suggesting its reverse, female heads on serving trays. Then he sent them down the runway to tunes with lyrics such as these: “Down by the station, Early in the morning, See the little pufferbellies, All in a row.” Women’s Wear Daily didn’t celebrate Lacroix’s High Femininity because it gave women the right to have “fun” but because it presented them as unspoiled young maidens, ready and willing to be ravished. John Fairchild, the magazine’s publisher and the industry’s legendary “Emperor of Fashion,” said what he really loved about the Lacroix gown was “how you can see it in the middle of lavender fields worn by happy little virgins who don’t want to be virgins.”

  With Fairchild’s backing, Lacroix was assured total adulation from the rest of the fashion world. The following July, three months before the stock crash, he unveiled his first signature collection at a Paris show, to “rhythmic applause” from fashion writers and merchants. Afterward, retail executives stood in the aisles and worked the press into a lather with overwrought tributes. The president of Martha’s predicted, “It will change every woman’s wardrobe.” The senior vice president of Bloomingdale’s pronounced it “one of the most brilliant personal statements I’ve ever seen on the runway.” And Bergdorf Goodman’s president offered the most candid assessment to reporters: “He gave us what we were looking for.” Thus primed, the most influential fashion writers raced to spread the “news.” Hebe Dorsey of the International Herald Tribune charged to the nearest phone bank to advise her editors that this was a development warranting front-page coverage. The next day, the New York Times fashion writer Bernadine Morris nominated Lacroix to “fashion’s hall of fame,” declaring, “Like Christian Dior exactly forty years ago, he has revived a failing institution.”

  The rest of the press quickly fell into line. Time and Newsweek produced enthusiastic trend stories. People celebrated Lacroix’s “high jinks” and the way he “jammed bustles up the backside.” And the mass media’s infatuation with Lacroix involved not only his hyperfeminine clothes but the cult of his masculine personality. Lacroix, who stocked his own wardrobe with Ralph Lauren lord-of-the-manor wear, was eager to market an all-brawn self-image: “Primitive people, sun and rough times,” he informed the press, “this is my real side.” Stories on Lacroix were packed with approving allusions to his manly penchant for cowboys and matadors. Time offered this tribute from a fashion commentator: “He looks like Brando; he is pantheroid, catlike. He is sexy in a way that is absolutely not effete.” His swagger, and the press’s enthusiasm for it, spoke to the real “crisis” fueling the backlash—not the concern that female professionalism and independence were defeminizing women but the fear that they were emasculating men. Worries about eclipsed manhood were particularly acute in the fashion world, where the perception of a widespread gay culture in the industry had collided in the ’80s with homophobia and rising anxieties about AIDS.

  With Lacroix coronated couture’s king, rival designers competed fiercely to ascend the throne. From Emanuel Ungaro to Karl Lagerfeld, they caked on even more layers of frills and pumped up skirts with still bigger bustles. If High Femininity was supposed to accent womanly curves, its frenetic baroque excrescences succeeded only in obscuring the female figure. It was hard to see body shape at all through the thicket of flounces and floral sprays. Dress-for-success’s shoulder pads were insignificant appendages compared with the foot-high satin roses Ungaro tacked to evening-gown shoulders. While a few dozen rich American women had bought Lacroix’s gowns from his 1987 Luxe collection, the designer was anxious to make his mark in the broader, real-world market of ready-to-wear clothes. His last effort while still at Patou in 1984 had failed miserably, after his designs proved to be too expensive for sale. This time, he approached the market strategically. First, in the spring of 1988, he put the clothes “on tour” at a select three stores, Martha’s, Bergdorf Goodman, and Saks Fifth Avenue. Then, that fall, having tantalized women with this fashion tease, he would ship ready-to-wear clothes across the country.

  In May 1988, big ads appeared in the Washington Post, courtesy of Saks Fifth Avenue, welcoming the Lacroix traveling show to town—and advising women to hurry down and place their special orders before the rush.

  “I GUESS THEY DON’T LIKE LOOKING SUPERFLUOUS”

  The day the Lacroix dresses arrive at Saks, five men in dark suits hover around the designer salon, supervising four elderly saleswomen who are easing the gowns from their garment bags, blue-veined hands trembling slightly as they lift the heavy crinoline-encrusted costumes to the racks. “Careful now, careful!” one of the suited men coaches whenever a hem threatens to touch the floor. A bell-shaped purple skirt is slipped out of its wrapper—$630. It comes with a top, $755.

  About noon, a delivery man drops off a video of a Lacroix fashion show, to be installed for shoppers’ viewing pleasure. The saleswomen gather around the TV set to watch the models teeter down the runway to the song the designer has selected for the occasion—“My Way.” One of the models is covered, head to toe, in giant roses and bows. “It’s ridiculous,” mutters salesclerk Mimi Gott, who is wearing a gray tweed suit. “Our customers are older people. They aren’t going to buy this stuff.”

  About one P.M., Pandora Gogos arrives at the salon, on the arm of her daughter Georgia. They are going to “a black-tie dinner,” and Gogos, who is “around seventy,” can find nothing in the stores to wear. “I’ve been shopping here since they opened up in the 1950s,” she complains, lowering her aching back into a chair. “Even in the fifties, I don’t think they were crazy like this. I’ve gone all over town—Saks, Garfinckel’s—and I can’t find a dinner dress. There was one at Garfinckel’s, a four-thousand-dollar jacket with a skirt up to here”—she reaches her hands to her throat—“nine thousand dollars!”

  Soon after, a Mrs. Barkin, a middle-aged woman, arrives at the designer salon to return a frilly dress concocted by one of Lacroix’s imitators. It is studded with huge flowers and a back bustle. “I just couldn’t wear it,” she says apologetically. Salesclerk Venke Loehe, who is wearing a simple Diane Von Furstenberg wraparound, gives her a sympathetic nod. “It’s the return to the fifties,” Loehe says. “A lot of our clothes now are like that. . . . But the classic look is still what’s selling best.” Mrs. Barkin decides on an exchange—she has a cocktail party to attend—and starts rummaging through the racks. She settles reluctantly on a dress with a pouf skirt; it’s the only evening outfit she can find with a lower hem. “I don’t know how I’ll ever sit down in this,” she worries.

  Back by the Lacroix racks, the only items that seem to be drawing interest are a plain overcoat and a tailored jacket. Mostly, women don’t even stop to look; b
y midafternoon, the salon has had fewer than a dozen visitors. The men in suits are wondering what happened to all the customers. “All that embellishment, the ruffles, lace and frills,” says a frustrated Lawrence Wilsman, Saks’s buyer of European designer imports, “women don’t seem to want that much. They seem to want quieter, more realistic things. They want clothes to be taken seriously in. I guess they don’t like looking superfluous.”

  • • •

  THAT FALL, Lacroix’s full ready-to-wear collection arrived at Saks. A month later, markdown tags dangled from the sleeves. Department stores from Nordstrom to Dayton Hudson dropped Lacroix’s clothes after one season. “We needed to see a bit more that American women could relate to,” explained a Nordstrom spokesperson. And when Women’s Wear Daily surveyed department stores, the Lacroix label ranked as one of the worst sellers. By 1989, Lacroix’s design house was reporting a $9.3 million loss.

  FLOUNCING INTO WORK

  Maybe Lacroix’s poufs hadn’t won over the high-end shoppers who frequent designer salons, but apparel makers and retailers were still hoping to woo the average female shopper with the habiliments of High Femininity. To this end, Bullock’s converted 60 percent of its women’s apparel to a “1950s look” by spring 1987. And even more progressive designers like Donna Karan began parroting the couturier’s retro edicts. “There has been a shift in saying to a woman, ‘It’s okay to show your derriere,’” she told the New York Times. “I questioned it at first. But women’s bodies are in better shape.”

  For High Femininity to succeed in the ready-to-wear market, working women had to accept the look—and wear it to the office. The apparel makers could design all the evening gowns they pleased; it wouldn’t change the fact that the vast majority of women’s clothing purchases were for work wear. In 1987, for example, more than 70 percent of the skirts purchased were for professional wardrobes. Pushing baby-doll fashions to working women was also going to be a trickier maneuver than marketing to socialites. Not only did the designers have to convince women that frills were appropriate on the job, the persuasion had to be subtler; high-handed commands wouldn’t work on the less fashion-conscious working women. The designers and merchants had to present the new look as the career woman’s “choice.”

  “This thing is not about designers dictating,” Calvin Klein proclaimed as he issued another round of miniskirts. “We’re taking our cues from what women want. They’re ready.” “Older women want to look sexy now on the job,” the head of Componix, a Los Angeles apparel maker, insisted. “They want men to look at them like they’re women. Notice my legs first, not my appraisals.” One by one, the dressing authorities got behind this new fashion line. “Gals like to show their legs,” designer Bill Blass asserted. “Girls want to be girls again,” designer Dik Brandsma intoned. The lone dissenting voice came from veteran designer John Weitz, who said it was Women’s Wear Daily, not women, clamoring for girlish frocks. “Women change not at all, just journalism,” he said, dismissing High Femininity as “a temporary derailment, based on widespread insecurity. Eventually it will go away and women will look like strong decisive human beings instead of Popsicles.” But then, Weitz could afford to be honest; he made his money designing men’s clothes.

  Taking their cue from the designers, retailers unfurled the same “choice” sales pitch—and draped it in seemingly feminist arguments, phrases, and imagery. These constrictive and uncomfortable clothes were actually a sign of women’s advancement. As a publicist for Alcott & Andrews explained it, “Our woman has evolved to the point where she can really wear anything to the office that proclaims her femininity.” Bloomingdale’s, which dubbed its latest dress department for women “Bloomingdale’s NOW,” proposed that women try “advancing at work with new credentials”—by buying the department’s skimpy chemises and wearing them to the office. Like the designers, retailers claimed to speak for women, sometimes literally. “Saks understands,” a mythical career woman murmured in the store’s ad copy. “They give me the options. . . . Showing me that ‘going soft’ doesn’t have to mean losing your edge.” What was she pictured wearing to work? Shorts.

  The fashion press pitched in, too, as the same publications that had urged working women to wear suits if they wanted to be taken seriously now began running headlines like DRESSING CUTE EN ROUTE and THE NEW SUCCESS LOOKS: YOUNG AND EASY.Savvy told working women that “power dressing” in the ’80s meant only “flower power”—stud your waist with $150 faux camellias, the magazine advised readers, “if you’re intent on making a CEO statement.” Women could actually get ahead faster if they showed up for work in crinoline petticoats; DRESSING DOWN FOR SUCCESS, the Los Angeles Times’s fashion editors called it. The fashion press also resorted to pseudofeminist arguments to push prepubescent dressing: women should don party-doll frills, they argued, as an emblem of grown-up liberation—as a sort of feminist victory sash. Grasping for any angle, the fashion writers even tried invoking the Harvard-Yale marriage study. “A man shortage? What man shortage?” Mademoiselle crowed in its editorial for poufs and minis. “You’ll be dated up till next July if you turn up in any of these ultrahot numbers.”

  But no matter what argument the fashion promoters tried, women weren’t buying. A 1988 New York Times/CBS News poll found only a quarter of adult women said they had worn a skirt above the knee even once in the past year. Some women were becoming as vocal in their resistance as the anti-Dior protesters a generation earlier. “I will wear the new short skirts when men wear rompers to the office,” declared columnist Kathleen Fury in Working Woman. Nina Totenberg, legal affairs reporter for National Public Radio, exhorted female listeners from the airwaves, “Hold the line. Don’t buy. And the mini will die.”

  The retailers, saddled with millions of dollars of untouched miniskirts, were ready to surrender. The miniskirt has thrown the women’s apparel market into “confusion,” worried a spokesperson for Liz Claiborne Inc., “and we don’t see any indication that it is going to pass soon.” But the high-fashion designers—who make their money more through licensing their names than through actual dress sales—could afford to continue the campaign. So when retail buyers flocked to market to inspect the designers’ upcoming fall fashions for 1988, they found—much to their amazement—yet another round of ruffled and rib-crunching styles.

  “I THINK it’s really a trend,” Yvette Crosby, fashion director of California Mart, is telling everyone at the 1988 Market Week in Los Angeles, as she hands out copies of this season’s “Trend Report.” “It’s a more romantic and Victorian look, and I really believe it’s right for this season,” says Crosby. She wears a suit.

  The writers and buyers are crowding into the mart’s auditorium for the morning show, entitled “Thirty Something.” The program notes advise that these clothes are designed “for contemporary working women”—a necessary reminder, it happens. As the models revolve in up to five tiers of frills, huge bows bursting from hips and shoulders, it’s easy to forget that this is nine-to-five wear. To evoke a proper career mood, one designer has armed his models with briefcases. The gaunt young women trip down the runway in stiletto heels, hands snug in dainty white gloves. Their briefcases swing like Easter baskets, feather light; they are, after all, empty.

  At last, the models retire backstage and the fashion buyers are herded to the buying services’ suites upstairs. In the Bob Mallard showroom, the mart’s largest buying service, manufacturing representatives scurry hopefully into place. Mallard, who joined the business in the 1950s as a garment manufacturer in the East Bronx, surveys the proceedings with grim resignation; he has the leathery, bruised face of a fighter who’s been in the ring awhile.

  “Last year, the miniskirt was a disaster,” he says. “Froufrou was no big hit either. Women still want suits. That’s still the biggest seller.” But he knows his observations will fall on deaf ears back at the design houses. “The average designer goes to the library and looks at pictures in a picture book. Maybe he worries about whether the
dress is going to look good on the mannequin in the store window. That’s it. I don’t think he ever bothers to talk to a woman about it. The woman, she’s the last to know.”

  In the glass booths on either side of the long showroom corridor, Mallard’s manufacturing reps are doing their best to pitch the “new-romance” fashions to doubtful buyers. Teri Jon’s rep, Ruth McLoughlin, pulls one dress after another off the racks and holds it up to buyers Jody Krogh and Carol Jameson of the Portland-based Jameson Ltd. “Short didn’t sell last year,” Krogh keeps saying. “No, no, don’t judge by what’s on the hanger,” McLoughlin answers, a little peevishly. “We can ship it long. Now how about this?” She holds up a dress with a plunging front, cinched waist and crinolines. “I don’t know,” Jameson says. “Women will love it,” says McLoughlin. She is wearing a suit.

  “This is my best reorder,” says Joe Castle, a fast-talking Cattiva salesman across the hall. He waggles a ruffle-decked gown before a buyer with a blank order form. “It makes a great M.O.B. [mother of the bride] gown,” Castle wheedles. Sounding a bit like a Newsweek trend story, Castle tries this last argument: “Everyone’s looking for M.O.B.’s. More and more people are getting married.”