How fashion became a freedom and power metaphor for women

I was attending a get-together at one of my friend’s recently when I noticed that she had very many pairs of shoes.

Her inspiration was clearly Imelda Marcos. More worryingly, though, was that she had lots of glossy magazines in her house, many geared towards fashion.

My other (very intelligent) friends were rightfully mortified. Isn’t an interest in fashion an admission of a vacancy in your cranium?

Isn’t fashion a collective con that preys on our insecurity? We all know that models are collectively vacuous and singly boring, especially the male ones.

Working as a living clothes hanger must do unmatched damage to a man’s sense of worth.

My friend is also intelligent, so why did she like clothes so much? I know better than to chide women on the ampleness of their wardrobes. It never ends well. She came out guns blazing and chided us for our ignorance.

A woman can have a bounteous wardrobe and acquisitive habits and maintain other interests and generally be well read, she explained before treating us to a mandatory reading from the book of women-can-have-all.

FLOWER GIRLS

She then mocked our slavish following of La Liga and the English Premier League (all the men in the room had advanced statistics sites bookmarked on their phones that they imagined gave them insights beyond what the hoi polloi have access to).

For some reason, it is acceptable to make fun of women who love their clothes, but men who love their football are off limits, despite football clearly being the more infantilising option.

Women who love fashion participate in it every day with every dress. Men who love football are spectators clinging on to bits of cloth and proclaiming their allegiance, but can never get into the main act. They hardly ever play football. Who were the mugs?

Step into Nairobi CBD and you will discover that public space has been turned into an open-air boutique.

Pavements are packed with bundles of second-hand clothes, stalls stuffed with the fruit of the loom. There are shops selling shoes, with endless come-hither calls blasting through speakers. You can’t go hungry selling women reach-me-downs, one stall owner told me.

The message I seem to get from walking around Nairobi is that women have gone shopping.

More than any other activity, it is the acquisition of clothes that defines them. Perhaps this sartorial elegance is a metaphor of women exerting power and choice in the only areas that are free to them.

Most religions are instinctively hostile to women in Kenya despite women making up the majority of the congregations.

The Pope calls for more women in the boardroom but would not let them get to the business end of the altar.

All these charismatic charlatans healing us seem to be men, and Parliament had to rig the women in — and even now they only play a supporting role.

GRIM STATISTICS

Poverty has a sex in the country, and it is female. Women do worse economically (the average woman’s income stops growing in her 20s while her expenses increase, according to a recent survey).

Women-led households are on average poorer than male-led ones despite the number of female-headed households increasing.

In Homa Bay, female-led households are the majority, which means nutrition, health care and education will be a challenge.

Also, although the rate is going down, women still undergo privation and violence. This past fortnight I read about two men who slaughtered their families before killing themselves.

The news was stuffed in the county pages because murder-suicide isn’t top-left-of-the-front-page stuff, so it is squeezed into the and-in-other-news-from-the-counties section.

Men may be improving in their treatment of women, but, collectively, too many of us still kill too many of them. A friend with whom I disagreed over the figures has challenged me to collect the numbers of women and children who are murdered by the men in their lives and report back in six months.

It isn’t going well.

The police numbers for homicide do not delve into these horrendous acts of uxoricide and filicide, yet, as one woman confessed to me, women feel that they exist within the close margins of mortal violence whenever there are men around them.

ALL IN

Should, however, the answer to life’s many indignities for women be to pour oneself into the latest fashion trends?

The fashion industry seems to only want to leverage women’s lack of confidence to make money. Clothes are a metaphor for whom we are. More importantly than how others see us, they are how we see ourselves.

Clothes are, to most, more than just seams and stitching; they serve the role of a peacock’s tail, constantly telegraphing the mood, disposition and place in society we want to be. Men are also catching up and buying dressing tables.

Dressing for dressing’s sake is boring. If it was about utility we would all dress in large unisex sacks that kept us warm. Women will be judged for how they dress and their appearance anyway, so why not make the best of a horrid situation?

However, the fact that a woman’s depth cannot be completely expressed by the sum of her clothes and appearance means that no matter how much money she invests in her dresses, she will never be satisfied by what she chooses to cover herself in.

Personal accoutrement is a sport everyone has to take part in. Even if you dislike all the dictates of fashion; you somehow must cover your genitals, at least when you are in public.

So you have to decide whether you are in it to win it or you want to be bad at fashion. Even when you refuse to make a decision on what you want to wear, you will still be judged as having made a decision.  

FEEDBACK: On how to decongest Nairobi’s perennially clogged roads  

YOU ARE WRONG:

Waga, I would like to disabuse you of the mistaken idea that “increased demand will mean services can be bettered”. Take the slum at the end of Lunga Lunga Road, for instance. The demand for public transport here is absolute as there are no roads for private cars. However, a casual look at any of the Outreach Sacco vehicles that serve the area shows that their condition cannot be any worse. How NTSC continues to license the vehicles is one reason that comparing any traffic-related issue in London with the same in Nairobi is a very bad idea. Samuel Owiti

HOW RIGHT YOU ARE!

Waga, every Monday I read your wags with a lot of interest; they’re always thought provoking!

Your article on Nairobi’s traffic congestion is again very good and, if you don’t mind, I would like to make a few additional observations.

I’m an old mzungu and remember that in Europe in the ’70s we had exactly the same problem of a very fast-growing number of cars on the roads. It led to unbelievable scenes, which we have not even seen yet here in Kenya.

For example, traffic in Paris once came to a complete standstill in a gridlock that took several days to unravel.

Because cars couldn’t move any more the drivers just abandoned them in the middle of the road because all were stuck bumper to bumper.

For many years the municipal authorities in European cities created more and more roads, parkings and by-passes, but these did not solve the problem at all. Finally, some sanity returned and the problem was approached from a different angle, as you rightly pointed out.

Traffic jams can only be solved by making it prohibitively expensive for private vehicles to enter the city. People can only access the city by means of public transport, trams, subway, buses, taxis, etc.

The amazing result of that process is that many big cities in Europe have become finally very attractive, with lots of recreation areas.

Of course we all know that there is a serious lack of reliable, clean, safe and quick public transport in Nairobi, but as you said, we have to create the demand. Most people would prefer to arrive quickly and safely by public transport to town instead of wasting their time in a traffic jam. So what is needed is a new approach.

A big obstacle is the prohibitive cost of developing a fast urban transport railway system because the cost of procuring land for such rail-roads is extremely expensive. But why not go underground?

Digging tunnels is not that expensive, in particular because the rocks below the surface of Nairobi are not very hard and are easy to drill, but still strong enough to stand on their own without a lot of reinforcement.

The big gain would be that no land has to be appropriated by the government at very high cost, as everything below ground level belongs to the Government. The tunnels would have to be dug at about 20 metres below the surface.

A sensible approach would be to follow the main roads, such as the main artery of Mombasa Road-Uhuru Highway-Waiyaki Way.

Other main roads like Jogoo, Ngong and even Thika could also be done this way. I’m convinced that one day this is going to happen.

Peter Ndongo 

THIS MIGHT WORK:

Waga, you are spot on the decongestion measures the city needs to adopt.

Removing roundabouts does not solve the problem that the roads within the city itself are already jammed. Even introducing graded interchanges would mean extra parking space for city motorists as they try to cram into the congested roads in the city limits.

Rapid mass transport offers the best alternative to the mayhem in rush hour traffic. But this must be coupled with bus-only lanes and an advanced central control system.

In addition, charging high parking fees within the city would make one think twice of using one’s vehicle for a home-to-work journey.

Mathias Gaitho 

KEEP LEFT:

Waga, here’s a simple suggestion to end traffic jams in Nairobi: make the extreme left lane continuously flowing by ensuring all vehicles on that lane turn left at the next junction.

Caesar Mendez 

YOU NAILED IT!

Waga, you have nailed it. You have given good ideas but who is there to implement them? Not even you, I know. If there is way this message could reach the governor, then it should! But if it ever does, you will be confused with someone who is interested in the gubernatorial seat!

Atandi Edwin