Gender Fluid Fashion and the Androgyny Revolution

Traditionally clothes have been used as a way to identify gender. From the moment we are in our mother’s womb, she is given either pink or blue gifts depending on what she is expecting, through to school uniforms providing summer dresses for girls and blazers and shirts for boys, even in many jobs the work uniform that you are provided with categorises men into wearing a shirt and tie while other employers state that all women must wear high heels as a requirement for the role.

But fashion is fighting back. With the likes of Kanye West making skirts an essential part of his wardrobe and Jaden Smith modelling for Louis Vuitton in a dress, it seems the lines of these neat little boxes set out for us by previous generations are becoming increasingly blurred. It’s not just the clothes either; last year the world welcomed the idea of the first gender-flued model to walk on an Indian runway – Petr Nitka participated in the Lakme Fashion Week Summer/Resort 2017, bringing with them a huge sense of empowerment and social progression to the LGBTQ community.

So, what has sparked this sea change that is making tidal waves across the apparel industry? Fashion is never just created, it is born from social, economic, environmental and political movements. Much like the punk subculture brought to us through the frustrations many were feeling about the middleclass hypocrisy and neglect of working people struggling to survive, this gender-neutral trend can be tracked back to changes in gender roles and awareness spread by feminist and queer movements – ultimately building a society that is identity flued. Men who traditionally took on the role of the sole bread-winners of the family are now becoming stay at home dads, while we are seeing more women going into highly paid, powerful jobs.

It is important not only to recognise the social changes that have brought about this transformation but also the way in which we communicate. Social media has allowed us to experiment with our clothing and find more diverse ways to style ourselves. The street style culture, catapulted onto the screens of our smartphones and tablets through the power of social media, has not only empowered consumers to become much more accepting of different styles of clothing but has in fact encouraged them to find their own unique identity through what they wear.

Movements towards todays changes date back to the early 1900’s, where arguably the most influential fashion designer of all time, Coco Chanel, reshaped the way that women wore clothes. It was an era of change due to post-war circumstances, where fabrics were difficult to source and the roles of men and women had been drastically shifted. The high-end designer capitalised on this by introducing trousers into women’s fashion which were previously only worn for work. She was also the first designer to inaugurate jersey, a fabric that had largely been used just for men’s underwear – into her collections. This comfortable fabric was a juxtaposition to the uncomfortable corset style clothing that women had previously worn. But of course the most ground-breaking piece to Coco Chanel’s platter of revolutionary styles was the iconic women’s suit. The piece encompassed a collarless boxy wool jacket with braid trim, fitted sleeves and embellished buttons with a complementary slim line skirt. This outfit was ideal for the post-war women of her generation who were embarking on career path's in the male-dominated workplace.

Although it has been more acceptable for women to ignore the boundaries set out by gender in fashion, school uniform is an area in which these rules have remained stringent up until recent years. We are now seeing gendered uniform rules being scrapped by an increasing number of institutions. Schools are going from a ‘boys uniform’ and a ‘girls uniform’ to a ‘skirt uniform’ and a ‘trouser uniform’, allowing students to make their own decisions when it comes to how they identify themselves. This stems from a recognition of students rights who have, in the past, felt that they do not conform to the binary genders.

Recent years have seen big brands pushing the identity boundaries with Urban Decay appointing gender fluid model, Ruby Rose as their ambassador and retail giant, Zara, releasing an ‘ungendered’ line and of course John Lewis sparking controversy by introducing it's ‘gender natural’ children’s line. Even before that, Selfridges launched its Agender space – an area allowing consumers to purchase whatever fashion and beauty products they desired with no ridged guidelines to adhere to. It seems that for a while now, the line between male and female codes has clearly become increasingly extraneous within the industry.

Looking forward we can see that this is not just a gender fluid trend but instead an androgyny revolution. A recent study conducted by trend-forecasting agency J. Walter Thompson Innovation Group, showed that only 44% of Generation Z - the demographic unit born after the millennials - and 54% of millennials were reported shopping for clothing designed specifically for their own gender, pointing to a vast and growing selection of consumers that refuse to play by traditional rules of gender profiling. Androgyny in the fashion industry is a culture change that is here to stay and although some may be hesitant to see it as anything more than a marketing ploy, the social movement that it represents is surely something to be celebrated. As long as we continue to strive for equality outside of the dressing room, there is nothing wrong with continuing to fight the androgyny revolution in one of the most influential industries in the world.

The Austerity Illusion

 

There are now just hours to go until the public will be taking to the polling stations and casting their votes for the general election. Tensions are running high and I swear to God if I hear Theresa May come out with a pathetic sound bite one more time I’m going to lose my shit and run through a field of wheat with a covfefe on my head.

The reason that these sound bites are so frustrating is because they hold about as much irony as when she said that the UK hasn’t done enough to tackle terrorism, when that has literally been her job for seven years.

Coalition of Chaos

We have heard countless times, members of the conservative party referring to a Coalition of Chaos, supposedly headed up by Jeremy Corbyn. How unthinkable – parties with opposing views joining together to run the country as an unelected Government! The fact is that we have already seen a coalition of chaos. 2010 brought us the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition, providing with us with David Cameron, our very own unelected Prime minister (they seem to have a habit of doing this). During their five years in power, the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition embarked crippling austerity, causing the start of unimaginable chaos to our public services. The parties introduced the following austerity measures;

The bedroom tax; aimed at low income/unemployed families - according to the TUC, this affected a total of 31% of all working age families in the social rented sector. They also slashed Legal Aid, the top rate of tax was cut from 50p to 45p, we saw Sure Start centres from across the country being shut down (612 in just four years) [site 4children], the Sure Start Maternity grant was also abolished - costing low income mothers £500 and hitting the poorest the hardest, education maintenance allowance for 16-18 year olds was snatched from the hands of the poorest students attending further education, the armed forces were cut - creating a loss of thousands of soldiers, as well as the RAF losing hundreds of helicopters and planes, Child Trust Funds were totally abolished, we have also seen huge numbers of changes to benefits. Child benefit was frozen for a total of three years, inciting a cumulative loss of £1,000 to families with two children, families receiving working tax credits saw a rise in the number of hours they had to work from 16 to 24…the list goes on, including cuts to GP surgeries, Remploy, Youth Centres, local council funding, local parks, police, buses, education, income support, youth employment and support allowance, prisons, public sector pay, mental health.

Basically the coalition government slashed everything they could get their paws on, if I were to list it all in detail it would take up the full blog post, however you can find all the information here.

Strong Economy

Two years on, now with a Conservative government in power and we are still seeing violent austerity across the country. We are being told that we must live within our means and that these measures will create a ‘strong economy’ (you know, that thing they have been promising us for seven years but we are yet to see).

Wrong.

The conservative government displays public spending in the same way as managing a household income. When you are tight on money you make savings through cutting out luxuries; you stop shopping at Sainsbury’s and go to somewhere like Aldi, you decide not to take that holiday that you’ve been planning, you cancel your gym membership – because who are you kidding? You never go anyway.

Cutting back on luxuries works well as a way to survive when you are low on money. The fact is that this logic is not transferrable to government spending and austerity is not about cutting down on luxuries – it is about cutting vital public services that help the majority of people living in this country to thrive.

By cutting funding to education, the poorest children are unable to gain the knowledge and skills that they so desperately need for the future. By cutting spending on mental health services we see individual’s health deteriorate, often resulting in a loss of employment, then housing and sometimes a loss of their own lives. By cutting benefits we see more people pushed into poverty and therefore further from the jobs market, more reliant on our underfunded NHS, more reliant on our underfunded social care services and more reliant on underfunded local authorities.

Do you see a pattern here yet? Circa 100,000 children fell into relative poverty in 2015-16, showing a year on year increase of one percentage point. Not only that but people with disabilities have had to withstand the worst of our government cuts, many of whom have literally had their human rights violated as a result of austerity. Between 1st April 2016 and 31st March 2017, The Trussell Trust’s Foodbank Network provided 1,182,954 three day emergency food supplies to people who literally could not afford to eat. Of this number, 436,938 went to children.

The Tories boast that they have created record numbers of jobs, yet fail to mention the record rise of in work poverty under their leadership; the Nuffield Foundation found that the risk of poverty for adults living in working households rose by more than a quarter (26.5%), from 12.4% to 15.7%, during the ten year period 2004/5 to 2014/15.

The fact is that there is nothing strong about one of the richest countries in the world having literally hundreds of thousands of citizens who can’t afford to feed themselves.

Magic Money Tree, Magic Money Tree, Magic Money Tree

On the BBC Election Debate, the night that our Prime Minister Theresa May went missing, we heard Amber Rudd squealing about Labours ‘magic money tree’. Throughout the campaign we have seen this phrase banded about – probably a tactic used to avoid the fact that the Labour manifesto is fully costed and has the backing of 120 economists from across the globe, while the only figures that appear to be in the Conservative manifesto (in the words of John MacDonnell) are the page numbers.

“There is no magic money tree!” we hear them scream, “We can’t just find this money from nowhere! We have to build a strong economy to afford such luxuries as money that allows people with disabilities to live independently and…you know…eat.”

Funny that, because it seems that there is quite a large sum of money floating around.

In March, the conservatives managed to implement their inheritance tax cut, meaning that couples who pass on homes worth up to £750,000 pay no inheritance duty. Not only this, but by 2020 even homes up to £1million will be exempt from the tax. According to figures from the House of Commons library, this measure will cost the taxpayers £1billion over the next three years, while only benefitting 26,000 of the country’s richest households – and I can guarantee those are not the ‘just about managing’ that Theresa May loves to speak about.

We have also seen a huge tax cut for high earners by pushing up the threshold for paying the 40p rate of income tax, we have seen a reduction in corporation tax and cuts to capital gains. They implemented the new ‘lifetime ISA’ which means that wealthy parents are now able to open tax free savings accounts for their children, deposit up to £4,000 a year and gain £1,000 of tax payer money as a bonus. On top of this they have allowed people with spare rooms, houses or flats to get a tax break on the first £1,000 a year they make renting them out online, not only benefitting people with extra properties but encouraging them to let them out on a short term basis rather than long term.

The fact is that austerity does not work. The method has been widely discredited by economists. Back in 2012, the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) chief economist, Olivier Blanchard, said that although his organisation never bought into the notion that austerity would actually boost economic growth, the IMF now believes that it massively understated the damage that spending cuts inflict on a weak economy.

But why would our Conservative government continue down the path of austerity if it is doing nothing but pushing thousands of people into poverty and taking away any hopes for decent employment? It’s not like they are too stupid to realise what is happening. They aren’t doing it just because they hate poor people, people with disabilities, mental health needs, single mothers and everyone else who is losing out. Nor is this an accident. This is a very well planned out dismantling of our welfare state and it is happening because it widens the gap between the rich and the poor, it strips the pockets of the most vulnerable and in return, lines the pockets of the most wealthy.

I was going to go into a more detailed answer to this question but I think from today’s events and the headlines printed across our right wing mainstream media, it is very clear. The priority of the Conservative party is to enhance the interests of the ruling classes. The majority of our main stream media which happens to be owned by billionaires will continue to push austerian messages to keep this government in power, meaning that they can keep getting those juicy tax breaks.

Austerity is not just about cutting spending, it is also very much about privatisation of publically owned services. Conservative values mean that they are ideologically opposed to having a public sector. By privatising and selling off our public services, capitalism prospers, shifting the priorities of these services from serving the public to generating profits. Cue: zero hours contracts, low pay and restricted worker’s rights.

Is it any surprise that in 2015, the Conservatives signed their biggest private deal on our NHS - £780million to be exact – to private firms, half of which have ties to the party.

For the Many

Whatever the result tomorrow, we can take a glimmer of hope from this election. Not only has Theresa May’s car-crash of a campaign been highly entertaining to follow; starting by basing all promotional materials around May herself, rather than the Conservatives as a whole, presenting herself as a ‘strong and stable’ leader, followed by her refusing TV debates, avoiding the general public at all costs and basically imploding during questions given by TV audiences.

The real hope that we can take from this campaign is the excessive support that Jeremy Corbyn has harnessed from previously disillusioned voters. People from all walks of life coming out and backing him. The most vulnerable in society finally finding a voice in politics. The anti-austerity message that has finally been brought to the table.

Even if we lose tomorrow, this campaign has touched so many people and it won’t be forgotten by them. They will continue to vote and they will continue to hold our government to account. During Corbyn’s time as leader he has forced the Conservatives to make huge U-turns on policies that would have had a detrimental effect to the poorest in our country, with the backing of new voters, he or whoever takes his place, can and must continue to do this.

Social mobility on this level has never been easy and if Corbyn were to win it would be the most monumental change in political history dating back to the war. We must take his campaign as a victory and we must make a promise to ourselves and each other that we will continue to fight, for the many, not the few.

 

Why the left must not quit and why now is not the time for Jeremy Corbyn to resign.

 

“In order to win an election, you must appeal to centrists and Conservative voters.” – a claim I have heard one to many times and one that inspired this blog post.

 

Following Labour’s defeat last week in the Copeland by-election, it is easy for supporters to feel disillusioned and even feel ready to give up. But for the left of the party, surrender is not an option.

One cannot compromise by moving to the centre when the aim is to achieve a left wing, anti-austerity government, for the simple reason that the centre does not represent these views and therefore, a centralist party will never achieve such aims.

 

When we look back at Ed Miliband’s failed austerity-lite manifesto, it is perfectly clear to see why Labour did not win the last election. It was a pendulum that swung between Tory policy and a failed attempt to mask such right-leaning proposals in an effort to try to keep left voters interested. Miliband suggested that his party would not radically depart from the Tory-led government’s austerity programme and stated that Labour would find a way of “doing more for less”.

In this instance we not only saw views and values of a centralist party – not representative of the left – but also saw an overwhelming election defeat. Those arguing that appointing a centralist leader with such policies will offer a quick fix to Labour’s problems clearly have not thought this all the way through.

When it comes to the idea of replacing Corbyn with a more ‘media friendly’, liberal leader for the sake of possibly winning more votes, it is important to ask ourselves – at what cost?

We are living in a society where, in the first half of last year, more than 500,000 three day emergency food parcels were distributed to people in crisis - over 188,500 of which went to children.

2016 also saw 200,000 more children living in poverty than the previous year, with figures reinforcing projections from experts such as the IFS and the Resolution Foundation that UK child poverty is set to rise by 50% or more by 2020.

 

Not only this, but just over the past week we have seen Conservative ministers introduce emergency legislation which denies 160,000 vulnerable people from receiving benefits that are rightfully theirs – this is following the UN enquiry that took place at the end of last year, which showed that austerity policies introduced into welfare and social care by the UK government amount to “systematic violations” of the rights of people with disabilities.

 

The government continues to cut our services in social care and the strain on the NHS continues to grow, at the same time as we are seeing it being sold off to private companies, piece by piece.

Taking all of these factors and more into consideration it is clear that being anything other than radical with our views and demands is nothing more than being complacent. The truth is that there is no quick fix when it comes to the fight for an equal, socialist society. What we need now more than ever is a mass increase in popular and industrial action – backed by the whole of the Labour party and by our trade unions - to hold our current government to account for their actions.

 

We need to fight to save our NHS from collapse, we need to fight to build more affordable homes and we need to fight for an environmentally conscious future. Now is not the time to back down, it is the time to step up.

 

We cannot allow Theresa May to use Brexit as a free pass to make a TTIP-like agreement, that may have a detrimental effect on our workers rights and public services, with the US or any other country for that matter.

 

We must aim for a future in which a left government possess the ability to nationalise various industries and services, while enforcing fairer pay and putting an end to the racist rhetoric that we have seen increase dramatically under this Conservative government as a result of their neoliberal policies. None of this will ever be achieved by compromising or by moving to a middle ground.

 

Even if one were to suggest that Labour must find a new leader in order to win the next election – who would take Corbyn’s place? Who is the magical, media-friendly candidate that will not only keep the thousands of people who have joined Labour under Corbyn but also win over the centre and take back the discouraged voters that have turned to the far right? All while sticking to the policies set out by Corbyn.

 

If anything, all a change in leadership would do is leave those who have found revival in politics through Corbyn’s policies feeling disillusioned and left behind, therefore causing significant damage to Labour’s growing following.

We saw the failure of Owen Smith and – dare I say it – Angela Eagle last summer when the pair took it upon themselves to challenge his leadership. Resulting in wasted time that could have been spent focusing on the crumbling of the Conservatives after Cameron’s resignation.

 

Whatever steps Corbyn makes, he will be portrayed as a weak leader by the mainstream media and opposing parties - as well as by some within his own  – especially if he were to step down from the party. That in itself would be a defeat of the left and the chances of the PLP replacing him with anyone that mirrors his views are slim-to-none. The only option that we have in this situation is to stand our ground and continue to fight. If we don’t stick to our morals, then what do we have left?

 

And for those that tell us that our views are not viable – that we have seen socialism attempted and in turn, seen it fail - we must ask them how many times we must see austerity fail before we seek another option?