Halloween 2001, I, a graduate student, was dressed as Simone de Beauvoir at a very fancy party in New York City. Graduate studies don’t usually match with the word fancy, but thanks to my “fashionable” crowd of friends I’ve always found myself in interesting situations dreaming of the late 50s and 60s, thinking New York and writers might have been at their best, think Harper Lee, Truman Capote, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath working at a magazine after winning a contest...

Needless to say I spent the entire evening explaining my costume and to my regret even who Simone de Beauvoir was. Was I the only one to think writers had a very specific style, a fashion of their own? Or did the collective image of women writers having to demonstrate their mind skills over their body still prevail? To make it sound modern: would Zadie Smith need a stylist? After all, history was full of fashion forward male writers such as Oscar Wilde.

If Simone de Beauvoir had such a recognizable style, almost an identity uniform, how did the other brainy women feel about clothing? Would we look at them and think of them as fashion icons? If Givenchy wasn’t twirling around Sylvia and preferred Audrey, what did it say about this unbreakable stigma? The very one Sylvia’s contemporaries were questioning. Think Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex and Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique. Is writing “unfashionable” because it needs to be so, for credibility?

When we were young, somehow Little Women by Alcott didn’t look half as mind drilling as it looks to me now. I can’t but not leave out of my memory the chapter in which Meg, now a young bride, learns how to cope with her devouring desire for a cute new hat. Women writers were certainly talking about trends, but shall we say they were using it in words rather than clothes. Fashion is a means for seduction, not only in a sexual level but at a global one: to seduce society, our surroundings, the people, and it is undeniably tied to women expressing themselves creatively. The Duchess of Devonshire very well teaches us the strength a woman’s style holds in the world.

However, I have to indulge here in a crucial issue: the love-hate relationship women writers have with fashion. At a very modest level I can relate to that feeling, if Truman Capote could do both, to this day I certainly feel we haven’t made progress when it comes to taking women writers seriously. Call it a personal fashion critique. Somehow the idea that if you write you must look at your worst because you have no time to wash your hair and pick out an outfit seems to keep grounds.

Among many of the mind troubling situations she must have dealt with, Sylvia Plath felt the imposing etiquette of womanhood and its unnerving weight on a writer's shoulders. Forever feeling left behind as a writer, suffering from it, not being taken seriously where men were leading the way, Sylvia was one to conform and break free. From a distance her attire looked as polished as any model from a 50s women’s magazine. Women magazines... Somehow a long time ago the publishing industry decided that we, women, could only read about fashion and concern ourselves with our little hats. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, but if the industry decided to break free from this conditioning, maybe our women writers would dare to dress in fashion without fearing for their credibility.

To this day, when I open Vogue and compare it with L’Uomo Vogue’s valuable content,  I can’t but help feeling cheated. It was okay when I was 10, but now it isn’t anymore, I don’t need the drawings to understand.

Here I quote and hope to deliver the angst Sylvia Plath felt towards this issue, the Bell Jar:
“We had all won a fashion magazine contest, by writing essays and stories and poems and fashion blurbs, and as prizes they gave us jobs in New York for a month, expenses paid, and piles of free bonuses, like ballet tickets and passes to fashion shows and hair stylings at a famous expensive salon and chances to meet successful people in the field of our desire and advice about what to do with our particular complexions.”

Text by Acelya Yonac