Plus

Plus

A fearless loss of femininity
By Carlton Samarajiwa
The word ‘fearless’ to describe a fashion show has more to it than meets the eye. The epithet holds the prospect of revealing not only the salient parts of the female figure but also the loss of lajja bhaya in what the advertisements referred to as an "electrifying show". It's all part of a cult in which fashion has to be sexy and sexiness fashionable.

Our understanding of femininity has been bruised by the onslaught of TV commercials, magazine and newspaper advertisements, posters and billboards of images that turn the feminine figure into a clumsy sex object. They assail us hour-by-hour, morning after morning, from one bus stop to another, depicting partial nudity as a powerful selling tool.

About fifty years ago eyebrows were raised at the advent of the bikini and the mini. Now, fifty years later, what is there left to raise, when female breasts are bared, uncorsetted, and only the tits are hidden from sight but only just -titillatingly? Incidentally, the brassiere industry is certain to bust as models, of whom there are now quite a few attractive young women, shed the inner garment that used to conceal their breasts. What eyebrows are there left to raise when thighs are bared almost right up to what Eve covered with a fig leaf? Not much clothing seems to be on in these times of garment factories that have given employment to thousands of languishing rural girls, who, in contrast, appear decently clothed -though not decently fed.

In the old days...
I am not being priggish. Who wants to be so? But we are only contemplating in our declining years -naively, though- over what has happened to the Sri Lankan woman, and her passion for fashion. She was known down the centuries for her modesty and passivity. She wore cloth and jacket and saree decorously, and young girls wore the lamaa sariya with a manthe as part of the blouse in front and a neriya at the back of the saree; they had a a functional importance - the manthe to provide extra cover for the breasts and the neriya, the posterior. And, at the village well, women wore the diya redda, the nearest to revealing the contours of the female figure. (The diya redda, incidentally, worn by his mother as she bathed, is reported in a Sinhala short story of yore to have been the sight that first stirred a young man's passion.)

Today, modesty has been replaced by a blatant vulgarity in dress, passivity by a ferocious aggressiveness in fashion. Change in mores and change in dress are too drastic to absorb when such change hits you in the eye in the streets and pavements, shopping malls and at workplaces, at bus halts and railways stations and inside crowded buses and trains, and not just at late night parties in five-star hotels and at discotheques and binges in karaoke bars and other such exclusive resorts of the rich.

How low can waistlines and hemlines and necklines get? How wide can the midriff get? How short can the distance between crotch and waist get? How higher can slits in skirts grow - on the side, at the back and in front? How tight can women's dresses get? In other words, how low can women go? Is there a law about sexually provocative exposure?

Food for thought
On one of those rare occasions that we hired a cab, the friendly but garrulous elderly driver went on and on without ceasing right up to our destination, making his salacious remarks and perceptive observations on what women are wearing nowadays. He not only spoke but also gestured gleefully with his hands and forced us to look at the bare-all-dare-all sights he was ogling along Galle Road - Sri Lankan women of all shapes and sizes dressed in clothes that hardly merited the name because to clothe is to cover one's nakedness.

We were shown Sri Lankan women in Colombo wearing hipsters. There are, according to an article by Rebecca Tyrrel in The Telegraph, three types of hipsters: "skimmers" which skim the hips, the "so lows" which come just below the hips, and the "way lows", which show as much as you can possibly get away with.

There is also a range of jeans called "Bum Couture", which exposes bum cleavage, just as the low neckline exposes breast cleavage. Lee Cooper, the UK jeans label, is reported to have launched a range called "hipothesis" that exposes the hip because, according to fashion research, this is the most sensual part of the female torso. The traditional knickers will not help and have been replaced by the G-string and the thong. In France, teachers are trying to deal with a fashion craze among teenagers to expose their midriffs and wear thongs designed to peek out above low-cut trousers. Paradoxically, France is also protesting the headdress worn by Muslim women.

Unhealthy situations
One wonders how women squeeze into clothes that are so tight. They pose a health hazard. According to Dr.William Dickey, a gastroenterologist, tight clothes have led to a new condition among women known as "designer dyspepsia" because they increase pressure on the abdomen. That creates a problem in getting rid of acid and increases the tendency for the stomach contents to go backwards into the gullet. Constraining trousers, Lycra shorts, constricting belts and "hold-in" underwear and tights are all to blame for indigestion, trapped wind, belching and heartburn.

Posing along the catwalk and walking the streets in states of semi nudity must be giving our girls a sense of empowerment and assuredness, as a former employee of the disgraced Enron empire said after posing naked for Playboy, along with other girls who had lost their prestigious Enron jobs. "I did this Playboy shoot as a payoff to myself," she said.

The question is why do our Sri Lankan girls take the catwalk wearing nothing more than a nine-inch wide wrap around to cover their femininity? A subject for anthropological research, maybe. Yves Saint Laurent, the prince of French haute couture, designed clothes for women for forty illustrious years to make them radiant with beauty and elegance. "I have enabled women to gain access to a world which had been banned to them…I wanted to place myself in the service of women, to serve their bodies, their gestures, their attitudes and their lives," he said at his final fashion show in 2002, which marked his retirement from the industry. "The new world of fashion which is now only "design" is alien to me. Elegance and beauty have been banished," he lamented.

What some of our Sri Lankan women are wearing nowadays -"packaging" themselves for consumption - never became a burning issue for fundamentalist protest. But it should have been, alongside the protests against "unethical conversions" at least because something there is that is unethical in the outrageous attire of these women; it is a kind of unethical conversion from traditional attire to seductively low-cut and provocatively high-slit attire, enough to knock the socks off the guardians of our indigenous mores!

Back to Plus