I Like Lace + Some Thoughts on Race ... Double Feature!

What can I say, I like lace. Sometimes simplicity is where it's at. What else is where it's at? This David Bowie ode to mysterious girls like me and you.

Obnoxiously Seeking Susan: Check. I was trying to look as obnoxious as possible here, and I'm pretty sure I succeeded.

Acid wash denim and lace, a match made in sartorial heaven. Also, check out my lace batwings. 

Yeah, I admit, in a lot of respects, I'm more of a trend-follower than a trend-setter. Ladies have been wearing black chemises under white lace tops since 1979 (that's a totally inaccurate wild estimate). This is a size large Guess brand lace top that probably belonged to an older woman who also wears cashmere sweaters and capris. That's fine, one day I will be that lady. Except for one thing. Cashmere's cool, capris are dumb.

Sometimes I wear vests. What's this one's story? I don't know, but the pattern looks like it's been inspired by (or is a copy of) an indigenous folk pattern. The brand is Central Falls, and ... the Internet will not help me out here, so this vest's story is your guess.

In the past, I said that one day on this blog, I would talk about gendered clothing material. Why is denim seen as masculine, and lace as feminine? Well, I sort of talked about the first part of that question in an earlier post. But the idea of broadly labeling a vest as "indigenous" or "ethnic" without identifying that ethnicity - yeah, I'm critiquing myself, how meta and post-modern of me - reminds me of something else I wanted to talk about.

And what's that? Cultural appropriation in fashion. (Boldface: making things super important since 1400-ish.)

Lately, I've been reading some of the anti-racist discourse in the style blogosphere (really, that's a word). And what struck me was a blogging backlack against cultural trending in American fashion, along with common threads of a debate on cultural appropriation.

This is a broad term, but the definition that these blogs focus on (and thus what we'll be looking at) is this: Cultural appropriation refers to a hegemonous culture taking on the symbols of a historically oppressed or minority culture. The oft-cited example of this is a white person wearing a Native American symbol, such as a Native headdress. Many of the blogs I've read take white (read: non-Native) hipsters to task for engaging in racial drag and, in doing so, performing unconscious racism - which, by the way, is still racism.

Hold up, says the devil's advocate. Isn't a lot of fashion based on borrowing and blending styles from other cultures? How do you decide, okay, this is paying homage to or showing a respectful interest in another culture, but this is an example of a hegemonous culture saying: Cute symbol, guys, lemme put that on a t-shirt/coffee mug?

No Doubt it's cultural appropriation: Gwen's bindi, circa 1990s.

These are actually fair questions, in my opinion. And I'll get to them in a moment. This skeptical side of the cultural sensitivity coin also argues that all clothes in the typical American wardrobe have been culturally borrowed, and so everything we wear has arrived at our closets through cultural appropriation. This line of reasoning acknowleges that every style of clothing has a cultural past - from jeans to cowboy vests to feather earrings to rosaries worn as necklaces - but doesn't go further. All of these items could be considered culturally appropriated, depending on the identity of the wearer. Sure. But as always, context counts.

Look at it this way: is a non-cowboy styling herself as a racial other by wearing a cowboy vest or jeans? I'm gonna go with A, definitely not. When American mainstream fashion borrows a style from a white American subculture (i.e., cowboys), this isn't at all the same as, say, an American wearing an Indian bindi as a fashion accessory. In that last example, the person with the bindi is misusing a symbol from another culture, exoticizing the other culture (or relegating it to kitsch), and in the process denying the symbol's original meaning. So, cultural appropriation becomes problematic when you plug it into this formula: majority culture/imperial nation dabbling in minority culture/colonial nation.

But of course, sociology is not math, and this topic is pretty fascinating (or at least I think so), because it always yields more questions. Some other questions to chew on: What are the implications of a non-Native person of color wearing Native costume? What does it mean when a punk wears a crucifix as jewelry - is this a form of cultural appropriation, too? Does my Norwegian sweater make me look fat? (Okay, maybe not that one).

If you've gotten the feeling that this is a pretty nuanced topic, then I've done well and I encourage you to read more about it. My intention here was just to scratch the surface, so if I've piqued your interest in the subject of cultural appropriation, read this article. On a related note, also check out this article on racial drag in high fashion.