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No Sweatshops no Photoshop

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The new Birdsong Studios Summer Collection. Our bespoke Alma Print, screen printed onto hand spun, hand woven Khadi cotton.

~

We've collaborated with poet, producer and mental health spokesperson Charly Cox to create a super limited edition tee.

£1 from each t-shirt sale goes to MQ, funding vital research into young people's mental health.

The new Birdsong Studios Summer Collection. Our bespoke Alma Print, screen printed onto hand spun, hand woven Khadi cotton.

~

We've collaborated with poet, producer and mental health spokesperson Charly Cox to create a super limited edition tee.

£1 from each t-shirt sale goes to MQ, funding vital research into young people's mental health.

Welcome to Birdsong.

From migrant seamstresses to knitting grannies,

we connect women from worker to wearer.

Expect more from your wardrobe. No sweatshops & no photoshop.

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Birdsong - Expect more from your wardrobe

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The new Birdsong Studios Summer Collection. Our bespoke Alma Print, screen printed onto hand spun, hand woven Khadi cotton. ~ We've collaborated with poet, producer and mental health spokesperson Charly Cox to create a super limited edition tee. £1 from each t-shirt sale goes to MQ, funding vital research into young people's mental health.

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In the post-World War II excitement of mass production and being able to buy things again, we simply stopped caring who we gave our money to. We stopped being citizens and started seeing ourselves as consumers. And when it comes to compulsive shopping, this has affected women in particular. There’s a reason the bored, shopping addict housewife is such a cliché.“It comes from a void,” reasons Orsola. “If you think about it, women have been culturally subjugated for such a long time, so it tends to be the female who is more impulsive. We tend to do the over-eating of the chocolate. We have a cultural void to fill. Because ultimately we’ve been subjugated and relatively ignored and we want a way to be noticed. And we tend to do it in excess.”

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http://eco-age.com/create/

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The only period-proof underwear. Because every person with a period deserves peace of mind. Learn more!

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Teen Vogue

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Brands just can't get enough of "Femvertising" these days. Whether it be an ad, a new collection, or a slogan on a T-shirt, the empowerment of women is a trend that generates a lot of revenue. While we can't argue against the value of any kind of feminist message, we also can't help but feel a little miffed. With so many inequalities left unresolved, like the "pink tax," the pay gap, sexual harassment, and violence against women, it's hard to believe feminist puns splayed on T-shirts make a positive difference, especially when we consider the varying degrees of inequality experienced by women around the world.

Brands like Feminist Apparel, responsible for shirts with slogans like "cats against catcalling" and "cinnamon rolls not gender roles", have come under fire for profiting from the cause. The brand's CEO, Alan Martofel, is not only a cisgender, white male, but in an email to Buzzfeed in 2014 he claimed that he didn't know about feminism until 18 months before creating the brand. This type of situation is an example of the dangers of the feminist message in fashion; people who don't understand the issues can profit from it. If feminism is commodified, are we moving even further away from equality?

If a clothing company decides it wants to represent women's rights, it should not only spread word about the cause, but also help it. Think about Diane von Furstenberg, who always encourages her models to "Be the woman you want to be," and who hosts the DVF Awards to support women who are fighting for women's rights.

A feminist brand should not have to announce that it's feminist; it should inherently be it. By catering to real women, considering what they want, and not restricting them in size or style, a brand can truly make a difference in the way the world views them and how they should look. And sure, if all other criteria are met, a feminist slogan couldn't hurt.

These 12 clothing brands and designers perfectly reflect the partnership between feminism and fashion not only because of their leading women, but because of the ways in which they strive to represent what women want.
The Trollsen Twins are writers and stylists from Montreal, Canada. Follow them on Instagram Links to know: www.trollsentwins.com and our Instagram @trollsentwins

Japanese designer Chitose Abe worked at Comme des Garçons for eight years in the '90s under the legendary Ms Rei Kawakubo, during which she also helped in the creation of Junya Watanabe's first collection. When Abe had her first child, she realized how restricted the choices in fashion were for new mothers. Soon after in 1999, she created Sacai, a brand that combines strength and femininity in stylish high end sportswear. In an interview with AnOther magazine, Abe described the brand as catering to "women who want to feel empowered by clothes but still don't feel the need to wear a power suit."
Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Rodarte

Sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy are the talented American designers behind Rodarte, a brand that's already a household name despite the fact that they only made their start in 2005. After showing their first collection, which included only 10 pieces, they were featured on the cover of Women's Wear Daily and attracting the attention of Anna Wintour. If that isn't a good sign, we don't know what is. The sisters have since established themselves as two of the industry's top influencers and creators, leading the way in trends and heading huge collaborations like their fall 2014 Star Wars collection.
Getty Images

A small Etsy shop, Femininitees features white shirts with hand-embroidered sayings like, "Pizza over patriarchy" and "You owe me 21 cents." With five percent of the proceeds going towards National Organization for Women, you get a cute and funny shirt and fight for your fellow woman in the process.

Has your period ruined too many cute pairs of underwear to count? So has ours. Named one of Time Magazine 's "Best Inventions of 2015", THINX is absorbent and leak resisting underwear that will keep you spill proof all day long. According to their website, 100 million girls don't have access to tampons, pads or any kind of period supplies. This means that a lot of them are forced to miss school, which sometimes leads to them falling behind or even dropping out. The underwear is designed by women in New York and made by women is Sri Lanka, who also receive a supplementary education and training while on the job. Not only that, but a portion of the proceeds goes to AFRIpads, a business in Uganda that employs women in the creation of reusable period supplies for local women. The underwear comes in a boy short, a high waist, a thong and more, and is capable of holding up to two tampons worth of liquid. Go ahead day one of your period: do your worst.

Want more Teen Vogue? Like us on Facebook to stay in the know!
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12 Clothing Brands Perfect for Wearing Your Feminism on Your Sleeve

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These brands are perfect for wearing your feminism on your sleeve - or your skirt, your pants, etc., etc.

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In recent years, a body of critical scholarship has emerged that interrogates the discourses of ‘new’, ‘sexy’, and ‘girlie’ feminisms. BUST magazine (1993–) has become emblematic of ‘girlie’ feminism, a form of ‘third-wave’ feminist engagement that revalues activities and interests traditionally associated with femininity, such as knitting, fashion, and make-up. In 2006, the magazine's fashion issue aroused controversy for its inclusion of a fashion spread devoted to ‘fashionable feminists’. Taking BUST's fashion issue as a case study, this article contextualizes BUST's particular take on fashion within both a broader history of feminist perspectives on the politics of dress and the negative backlash against feminism that gained particular strength during the 1980s. It argues that BUST's fashion issue is an ambivalent text that offers, on the one hand, a homage to feminism's ‘past’ and, on the other hand, a rather simplistic view of that history. Finally, this article considers the critical debate about BUST's fashion issue by feminists online. It asserts that, while BUST may offer a simplistic version of feminism conceived of as individual lifestyle choices, the online debate demonstrates that readers frequently engage this material in complex and nuanced ways.

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Karl Lagerfeld's Flim Flam Feminism

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In 2006, Susan Faludi returned to the seminal feminist book that made her name, Backlash, and wrote a new prologue for the 15th anniversary: "In the years since feminism's revival in the early 1970s, American women have sped across so much ground that we can scarcely recognise the lives our grandmothers lived ... Yet as women near the finish line, we are distracted.

"We have stopped to gather glittery trinkets from an apparent admirer. The admirer is the market place, and the trinkets are the bounty of a commercial culture, which has deployed the language of liberation as a new and powerful tool of subjugation."

Which brings us to the Chanel ready-to-wear show in Paris this week, which, depending on your perspective, celebrated or co-opted feminism.

"Feminist But Feminine!" "Boys Should Get Pregnant Too!" "We Can Match the Machos!" screamed the placards held aloft by the cheering models. Just typing those slogans makes me laugh, like reading fridge poetry after the toddler's been at it: "Boys Are Bad!" "Yay Girls!"

Chanel is generally too big to bother with silly little things like trends. But the clothes in the show this week echoed the placards' unashamedly superficial take on feminism, with many of the models wearing baggy trouser suits and oversized, Gloria Steinem-like spectacles. Because that's how feminists look, you know. They look like the 1970s.

Karl Lagerfeld, the creative director of Chanel, is, he suddenly claims, a feminist. He is also a self-publicist par excellence. The fashion industry is built on image-making and attention-seeking and no one - no one - in the whole business does it better than Lagerfeld, a man who affects enormous, lofty erudition and yet spends his time making Barbie dolls in his image. And I'm not using the term Barbie dolls as a disparaging description of models - I mean actual Barbie dolls.

Anyway, Lagerfeld's explanation for his sudden burst of feminism - an unexpected one, to be sure, from a man who once said that Pippa Middleton's face displeased him, and she "should only show her back" - was as adorably meaningless as his ridiculous placards.

"I don't see why every human being is not on the same level, especially in my business," he mused after the show, before then thinking fondly, and with an apparent total lack of irony, on the good old days: "Today, everything is forbidden. Political correctness killed everything!" Talking beaucoup de baloney est très chic, n'est-ce pas?

No one has ever turned to Paris fashion week in search of a clear feminist message. I covered the shows for this paper for eight years, and while it is extremely easy to defend fashion itself on a feminist level, the fashion industry, and in particular the fashion weeks, are about as feminist as a fruitcake. The only message that can be gleaned from Chanel's silly show is that feminism is currently trendy - and this is something that plenty of feminists don't like.

Before we get into all that, let's take a moment to marvel at just how quickly we have got here. In under a decade, feminism has gone from something that was barely discussed in the mainstream to being clickbait for news media sites and an easy way for celebrity culture to make itself look relevant.

Feminism is now - to the astonishment of anyone who loyally stuck with it when it was parodied as something for humourless sorts in boiler suits - fashionable. And so, of course, it has been commercialised.

High street outlets and online crafting websites sell feminist jewellery so you can express your feminist credentials and simultaneously show off your accessorising skills. Win win!

Where once celebrities shied away from describing themselves as feminists, now they clamour to claim the label, saying that simply existing in the public eye is a feminist act: "[I've realised] that I've been taking a feminist stance without actually saying so," the formerly feminism-phobic Taylor Swift told the Guardian last summer.

When the history of fourth-wave feminism is eventually written up, one of the defining images will be of Beyoncé standing in front of a glowing sign proclaiming "FEMINIST" at the MTV Video Music Awards.

Another will be of the Chanel show, with its messages of inclusivity and empowerment coming from an industry with a hilariously limited idea of how a woman should be.

Some feminist commentators have objected to all this, and I understand why. If feminism is fashionable now, they say, that just means it will be unfashionable later, right? Yes, it does - and that's just fine with me, if it means we can all stop discussing the merits of Karl Lagerfeld's feminist credentials.

But this kind of "tokenistic" feminism is harmful, others, such as Annie Lennox, cry. Personally, I don't see much to be gained any more from adjudicating over who is or isn't allowed to call themselves a feminist. If Taylor Swift suddenly likes the term, she can be my guest. This kind of flimflammery does no more damage to feminism than bootleg versions of the Barack Obama Hope poster did to the American presidency. There are so many bigger threats to gender equality around the world - government policies, restricted reproductive rights, FGM - than showboating from a fashion show.

Remember Faludi's warning: these are mere "glittery trinkets". The stuff of substance will endure.
Topics

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Karl Lagerfeld's flimflam feminism won't hurt the real thing | Hadley Freeman

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In 2006, Susan Faludi returned to the seminal feminist book that made her name, Backlash, and wrote a new prologue for the 15th anniversary: "In the years since feminism's revival in the early 1970s, American women have sped across so much ground that we can scarcely recognise the lives our grandmothers lived ...

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Spring-Summer 2015 Ready-to-Wear CHANEL Show

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More on http://chanel-news.com/-spring-summer-2015-rtw Full film of the CHANEL Spring-Summer 2015 Ready-to-Wear fashion show that took place on September 30th, 2014 at the Grand Palais in Paris.

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http://www.harpersbazaar.co.uk/fashion/fashion-news/the-language-of-fashion-justine-picardie

http://thefashionactivist.tumblr.com/post/31455558388/the-suffragettes-and-their-fashion

http://www.redletterpress.org/feminism101.html

http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2015/oct/08/suffragette-style-movement-embraced-fashion-branding

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For the protests were sparked off in 2011 by a Toronto police officer who suggested in a talk on campus rape that if young women were to remain safe, they should “avoid dressing like sluts.” The two young women who co-founded the movement instantly took up his phrase and used it against protectionist elders. Here we find yet another area of conflict around dress and display—the new use of the semi-naked female body for protest, for a different kind of “empowered” display. The Slutwalk protests saw their members scantily dressed, to make it very clear that it is

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“Porn chic” has also been analyzed in more populist volumes. American journalist Ariel Levy describes in her book Ranch Culture how she came to question her own ultra-liberal ideals around women’s right to dress and behave as they please;

Is it a rebellion of the hundreds of years women have been made to cover up, constrain themselves and be demure, pure and non sexual?"

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Two points of view:

•People should be able to wear whatever they want without being judged or deemed provocative.

•What we often aspire to is dictated by society pressuring us to dress in a certain way in order to be accepted, deemed beautiful.

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Today it is arguably the “sexy” rather than the most “stylish” celebrities who have the most power within the clothing—if not the fashion— industry.

This new “alternative” system, the “sexy” system, has its own sources of inspiration and, significantly, its own body ideals, which are quite different from that of high fashion. The celebrity body emulated in the alternative system is curvaceous, with a pronounced bosom and long limbs, which are invariably bared and often perma-tanned;

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Does feminism matter today?
What are the current issues surrounding gender equality?

•He for She

•Equal Pay

•The abuse of women

•Right to Education

•Right to Drive

•Right to vote – Saudi Arabia, Vatican City, United Arab Emirates

•Tax on sanitary products

•Difficulty in women having careers and children, prejudice.

80% of garment workers are women so can fashion be truly feminist if the clothes produced exploit a female workforce.
These women have no collective bargaining power. They’re often forced to work extremely long hours, with little financial compensation. This is an area the Fashion Index (a survey of most major fashion brands' practices) picked up on, reporting their surprise upon finding that 30% of companies surveyed "do not have whistleblowing or confidential complaint mechanisms" in place for workers in their supply chain, or at least none that they mention publicly.

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The word feminism gets a bad press as many believe it’s about women being better than men.

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Why does Church Gibson call ‘Pornostyle’ the ‘fracturing of feminism’ (see essential reading)?

DISCUSS

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How has feminism used or rejected fashionable styles in the past?

EXAMPLES
Melanie Griffiths

in Working Girl (1988)

1980s  power dressing

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What does feminism mean to you?

Men, while benefiting from being the dominant sex, also have a stake in overcoming the restrictive roles that deprive them of full humanity.

Recognition of  inequalities by others

“The advocacy of women's rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes.”

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How do you feel about Chanel’s appropriation of feminism slogans in the S/S 2015 show?

•Is fashion in itself anti-feminist?

•Slim beautiful models all the same size, with a pressure to be thin.

•Magazines telling us what to wear and what is fashionable

•Living up to an impossible ideal if what is considered feminine

Is it just a fad,  because protesting is cool?

Are the models taking it seriously?  Look at the slogans, what do they say?

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But to deny fashion its right to join the discussion about feminism seems to me to be unfair (even, dare I say it, repressive). If self-expression through what we wear is part of how we represent ourselves to the outside world – whether in dungarees or pinstriped suiting or something else entirely – then why not allow for a degree of playfulness? And if clothes are a way of hiding the body, they can also be paradoxically revealing: of emotion, whimsy, insecurity, status, even subversion. Consider the political and religious inferences of wearing black – from puritanical Calvinists to Italian fascists to Left Bank intellectuals – or the myriad connotations of red (Catholic cardinals, Russian revolutionaries, fairy-tale heroines, scarlet women).”

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Can Fashion and Feminism co-exist?

Pornification of fashion: Using fashion to objectify womens physical appearance.

Sexualisation of popular culture which is endorsed by celebrity

“It should be noted that this look is confined to young women; there is no masculine equivalent”

Glamour model look

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Feminism in its basic concept is about equality, about not being judged by your gender and not being discriminated because of it.

So what role does fashion play in highlighting gender differences, creating stereotypes or championing equality and empowerment.

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Coco Chanel herself, who never identified herself as a feminist, despite the fact that she designed clothes that liberated women from the strictures of corsets and hobble skirts, and in doing so, became an icon of female independence from the moment she set up her own business in 1910.

Re-wrote the rule book

Had her own ideas about how women should look

Boyish, modest clothing with classic lines.

Trousers
Sorter hair cuts
Statement jewellery

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The official colours of the Pankhursts’ organisation (the Women’s Social and Political Union, founded in 1903) were purple, white and green, which were emblematic, respectively, of dignity, purity and hope;

Suffragettes liked to be depicted as feminine, in soft blouses and with their hair pinned up softly, to counter the stereotypes put forward by opponents that they were mannish or shrieking

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“The practice of dressing in a style intended to show that one holds an important position in business, politics, etc.”

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Church Gibson, P. (2014) ‘Pornostyle: Sexualized Dress and the Fracturing of Feminism’, in Fashion Theory, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 189-206.

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https://padlet.com/rachael_walker2/13zwdyugbi3w