Author INTERVIEW

Vanessa Friedman

Originally printed in Compass, August 1, 2018.

It’s a story well known to us in our present climate — when a comment meant to belittle or contain a certain group flips upside down on Twitter and becomes a battlecry of expression. New York Times chief fashion critic Vanessa Friedman was so inspired by the opposing response to President Donald Trump’s limited view of how women should appear at work that she created “Dress Like a Woman: Working Women and What They Wore,” a collection of 300 images from Abrams Books with a forward by best-selling essayist Roxane Gay. Turning the pages, readers will find a collage of time and place, unified by the theme of persevering women: a worker in a garment factory in Bangladesh, an art conservator at the Louvre, Elizabeth Warren on the Senate floor, Lady Jane Wellesley racing cars in the ’70s, pearl divers in 1950’s Japan, and members of the American Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps in 1940s Paris. 

Friedman spoke with Compass in anticipation of  her appearance at The Hotchkiss Library of Sharon’s Summer Book Signing on August 3. 

Alexander Wilburn: Can you tell me about the political inspiration for this book?

Vanessa Friedman: Well it’s largely a picture book  because it seemed the visual answer to that question was the most convincing. It was all inspired by the social media reaction to the reported statement the president had made early on his administration that he believed every woman in his White House was to, quote, “dress like a woman.” It was just so striking, and inspiring but also very substantive I thought — the reaction that was happening when women started posting pictures of themselves at work online to make the point that that phrase could mean so many different things. That women can dress however they want.  

AW: There’s something interesting that happens when conservative leaders inadvertently start a movement, like “She persisted,” or “Binders full of women.” 

VF: What’s nice I think is that it allows us to publicly recognize a truth that probably everyone knows, but that isn’t often articulated because it’s part of the general and historical progression of life. Which is, the way that women have existed in the workforce, and all the different roles they’ve played, and all the different professions they’ve been part of.

AW: Looking through the photographs I felt like there were images I should have seen before, but hadn’t. It was almost like an alternate history than what children are taught in the classroom.

VF: I think it’s history that you don’t consider in specific, because it’s always part of a larger story, which is as it should be. It’s part of World War II, or it’s part of the Sexual Revolution, or it’s part of the ’70s, or the story of NASA. We’re not taught the history of women in the workforce, although we could be. It’s just that it’s a different prism onto the story of the 20th and 21st century.

AW: You’re pulling from the past, but the images make such an impact in the present because we’re more visually oriented than ever.

VF: We’ve become an increasingly visual culture because of the rise of technology as social media as a means of communication. The role that image and appearance plays has become evermore important and really does function as the first line of communication and identity politics. So the uniforms we all wear and the choices we all make about what we put on our bodies are evermore freighted and assessed and judged. That has always been true, but in the middle of the last century people really largely communicated through writing as opposed to picture. The fact that President Roosevelt could hide that he had polio — you could never do that now. It’s extraordinary to imagine that. Now we see this with Melania Trump and what she wears. Anything you wear as a public person in a public space immediately becomes a potential topic of discourse or identifying characteristic. You know, semiology, to be decoded.

AW: Clothing and the role of First Lady has always gone hand in hand. Well, since the latter half of the 20th century.

VF: Well, Dolley Madison was a famous clotheshorse. But certainly since The Kennedys, which was the first television presidency.

AW: Do you see that as something positive, something regressive, or somewhere in the middle?

VF: My feeling is that this is just reality. Malcolm Gladwell wrote about it in “Blink,” as soon as someone sees someone they make a judgment about them, and it happens in 30 seconds. Ideally you can recast that judgement, or rethink it or change it, but it’s a human instinct. Everyone does it. If you are in a role that requires you to be in public, often not speaking, it’s to your own advantage to use whatever tools are at your disposal to manipulate perceptions to your own ends. When it comes to women in the workforce, often what their image is telegraphing is membership in a group, whether they’re a factory worker or in the armed forces, or breaking the glass ceiling in the white-collar workforce with suits that somewhat resembled men’s suits. So you have to think about the messaging you’re sending with your clothing, whether you’re a private citizen at a job, or a First Lady … at a job.

AW: The Trump Family often seems to have somewhat “off” messages when it comes to their clothing.

VF: Although, when you think about it, Trump has had great success with his baseball caps.

AW: Oh, that’s true.

VF: That was a very effective piece of sartorial messaging, and raised him a fair amount of money too. With Mrs. Trump, I think she’s using her clothing in a slightly different way, and it’s a slightly opaque messaging to most of us. It’s like she’s engaged in a long conversation that she is a part of, and we are privy to little snatches of it. Because we’ve missed all that’s come before and after, everyone is confused about what’s she saying.

AW: On another political stage is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has had a large presence this year additionally with the documentary this summer and the awards-season film to be released. What is it about her “dissent collar” that’s made it such a piece of iconography?

VF: What she showed through her dress, and through her writing and thinking, is the ability to have an independent mind and identity while remaining politely part of a group. That’s the extraordinary thing about the Supreme Court. An amazing thing to many was her friendship with [Antonin] Scalia, who was intellectually in a very different place than she was. But they were able to do what is increasingly rare in our world, which to respect the other’s opinion without sharing it. The collar, that she put on a uniform that was genderless, becomes a signature, and it becomes a symbol of all the other things she stood for, enfranchising equal rights. By adopting that signature other people were able to pay homage to her, and one of the nice things about clothing is that it allows you do that.

This interview has been edited and condensed.