"She could be a farmer in those clothes"

This reading response is going to be a bit more of a straightforward bringing together of one of the readings and last week’s screening...

The title of this posting, of course, comes from the scene well-etched into our collective memories where Ty first appears visually in the film’s screenspace and diegetically at the schoolgrounds of Beverly High. She stands garbed in a loose-fitting flannel, brown baggy jeans, a t-shirt with a logo more reminiscent of Hot Topic than ‘Calvin Klein.’ And, I have to give an irrelevant shout out to her blue denim-esque notebook, a familiar vestige from some of our childhoods that, like the one she dons, was so oft stained with Sharpee traces of boredom, friendship, fandom and crushes. But, the snarky Amber quickly frames Ty’s arrival within a spatial and temporal hierarchy. That she’s a ‘farmer,’ which clearly is to be read as a disparaging characterization, places her within a geographic imaginary where the rural and urban is an irreconcilable division. But it also smuggles in a certain assumption that she’s “behind-the-times,” or not “up-to-date,” with fashion’s lightning-speed trend cycles (we need only to think of Cher’s comment to Travis in a later scene: “Duh, that was so last season”). And, of course, these spatial and temporal mappings are inextricably tied to Ty’s alleged disconnection from a certain mode of femininity and desirability. I’ll get into what that ‘certain mode’ is in a second.

The aforementioned scene certainly bears relevance to Sarah Berry’s introduction. Her chapter, which I quite enjoyed, traces a general shift during the 1920s in the U.S. from a class hierarchy based on birthright to one based on, what Bordieu calls, a “symbolic struggle.” That is, the mass marketing of popular fashions allowed for American consumers to self-signify, through style and fashion, a class position different from one that might be determined by pedigree. This shift was particularly significant for women, who were leaving the home and entering the white-collar workplace where appearance was a critical component of the job’s requirements. Of course, as Berry primarily argues, the female protagonist-driven class ascension films of the 1930s proved crucial to this overall transition from “class-to-mass” marketing, as the movie screen “bridged the gulf between urban and rural merchandising,” at the same time that they demystified class hierarchies. As the quote from Hollywood-- Style Center of the World states, “The motion picture has annihilated space.” Berry refers to this “annihilation” later as a “democratization,” as any woman could now access and stylize themselves after popular female celebrities.

Indeed, Ty transforms from “farmer” to fabulous, from tomboy to feminine. And as the rural/urban division of the 1930s has since been re-mapped in new ways onto a suburban/urban distinction, she moves from a provincialism to a cosmopolitan, the screen serving as a “shopping window” for all of the accoutrements for a stylish metro- femininity. Knee highs = glamorous? But really, femininity bears critical ties to geography. Of course, as the films of the 30s did, Clueless critiques the make-over, as it does in the end produce “a monster,” suggesting that class mobility, femininity and fashion are more soul-sucking than rewarding. We remember the scene when Ty cruelly tells Travis, after his endearingly “inappropriate” display of body humor (he spits his gum in the air and catches it again), “Don’t the loadies belong on that grassy knoll?” We can think also think of this in comparison to the scene in which Cher, Ty’s style mentor, screams at Lucy because her Fred Segal shirt is still at the cleaners, which exposes the (often racialized, classed and gendered) “systems of support” that femininity requires, as we discussed last week. Moreover, and perhaps the most biting critique of the film, is that her re-styling does not exactly ‘democratize.’ Elton’s comment that he and Ty don’t ‘make sense,’ that their couple-dom doesn’t fit within a class logic where eros and social position are tied (a very different contention than that posited in Pretty Woman, to be sure) troubles the ease with which “class passing” is at times represented. Needless to say, when Berry speaks of women moving into the white-collar workforce and being able to signify class mobility, I think a consideration of race would maybe reveal this ‘symbolic struggle” to be a little less fluid than she makes it out to be.

Nevertheless, Clueless, Berry, and the other readings we encountered this week, offer a much more nuanced reconsideration of femininity and fashion than those with closer ties to second wave theories. We can’t just simply understand femininity, fashion and the mass market as oppressive and inconsolably patriarchal. Rather, there is a complicated, often contradictory set of processes at work. Fashion is the site of conflict. It is both prescriptive and pleasurable. In Clueless, it is both glamorous and monstrous. And I think this contradiction, this split is certainly a theme that runs through this week’s readings.