an excerpt from Iris Marion Young's ' Women Recovering Our Clothes'
" feminine desire irigary suggests , moves through the medium of touch more than sight. Less concerned with identifying things, comparing them, measuring them in their relations to one another, touch immerses the subject in fluid continuity with the object, and for the touching subject the object touched reciprocates the touching, blurring the border between self and other. By touch I mean that specific sense of skin on matter, fingers on texture. But I also mean an orientation to sensuality as such that includes all senses. Thus we might conceive a mode of vision, for example, that is less a gaze, distanced from and mastering its object, but an immersion in light and colour., Sensing as touching is within, experiencing what touches it as ambiguous, continuous, but nevertheless differentiated .
When I "see" myself in wool it's partly the wool itself that attracts me, its heavy warmth and textured depth. Some of the pleasure of clothes is the pleasure of fabric and the way the fabric hangs and falls around the body. straight skirts with slits might give thigh for the eye, but the skirt in all its glory drapes in flowing folds that billow when you twirl. history documents the measurement of nobility and grace through fabric. Women have been imprisoned by this history, have been used as mannequins to display the trappings of wealth.
But feminine experience also affords many of us a tactile imagination, the simple pleasure of losing ourselves in cloth. We wander through yard-goods stores , stroke the fabrics hanging off the bolts, pull them out to appraise the patterns, imagine how they might be best formed around the body or the chair or the windows.
Some of our clothes we love for their own sake, because their fabric and cut and colour charm us and relate to our bodies in specific ways - because , I almost want to say, they love us back. These wool blended striped elephant bottomed pants that held a crease so well and flopped happily around my ankles. The green herringbone wool blazer I made with my own hands after the lining fell apart, I sadly gave it to my sister because the new lining was to small. The wine-red-print full-sleeved smooth rayon blouse, gathered at the shoulders to drape lightly over my chest. Many of our clothes never attain this privilege of the beloved , perhaps because our motives for having most of them are so extrinsic: to be in style or to give our face the most flattering colour, to be cost effective, or to please others. Some we love with passion or tenderness, though,
Misogynist mythology gloats in its portrayal of women as body decorators. We are trained to meet the gaze that evaluates us for our finery, for how well we show him off. we are then condemned as sentimental, superficial, duplicitous, because we attend to and sometimes laern to love the glamorous arts. The male gazers paint us gazing at ourselves at our toilets at our toilet, before the table they call a vanity. In their own image, the male myth makers can find only narcissistic pleasures. Outside this orbit of self reference , I find three pleasures we take in clothes: touch, bonding, and fantasy"
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