Brainstorm+Ideas


 * (Lisa) Here are the things we came up with in class. Add anything else you might think of.**


 * Restraints (what's ok and not ok to wear, and clothes that restrict movement)
 * Body image/size
 * Gender expression
 * Children's clothing
 * wearing "sexy" clothing as a feminist, i.e. can you wear a mini-skirt and still be a feminist?

Outline for lesson plan: Quote or poem get into groups to discuss: how quote relates to readings Questions of comments on readings (general discussion) PP presentation give groups different discussion prompts Quick write

Here is a bunch of quotes and a few prompts:


 * Quotes**

I don't see how an article of clothing can be indecent. A person, yes. ~Robert A. Heinlein

The finest clothing made is a person's skin, but, of course, society demands something more than this. ~Mark Twain

Just around the corner in every woman's mind - is a lovely dress, a wonderful suit, or entire costume which will make an enchanting new creature of her. ~Wilhela Cushman

A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to want to take it off you. ~Françoise Sagan

Women usually love what they buy, yet hate two-thirds of what is in their closets. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they would mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking. ~Virginia Woolf

You have to have the kind of body that doesn't need a girdle in order to get to pose in one. ~Carolyn Kenmore

(The one below is just too funny to not share) She wore a short skirt and a tight sweater and her figure described a set of parabolas that could cause cardiac arrest in a yak. ~Woody Allen, Getting Even, 1973

High heels were invented by a woman who had been kissed on the forehead. ~Christopher Morley

Judging from the ugly and repugnant things that are sometimes in vogue, it would seem as though fashion were desirous of exhibiting its power by getting us to adopt the most atrocious things for its sake alone. ~Georg Simmel

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are. ~Quentin Crisp

To be a fashionable woman is to know yourself, know what you represent, and know what works for you. To be "in fashion" could be a disaster on 90 percent of women. You are not a page out of Vogue. ~Author Unknown

A part of this strangeness of dress is that it links the biological body to the social being, and public to private. ~Elizabeth Wilson

Although a life-long fashion dropout, I have absorbed enough by reading Harper's Bazaar while waiting at the dentist's to have grasped that the purpose of fashion is to make A Statement. My own modest Statement, discerned by true cognoscenti, is, "Woman Who Wears Clothes So She Won't Be Naked." ~Molly Ivins


 * Discussion prompts for “Girls Clothes in a Box”**

How does your background growing up affect how you dress today?

Leslie Minot says, “I was probably hearing my undergraduate advisor (a stylish dresser herself) reminding me never to interview in a skirt that might make its own decisions about how much of my legs to reveal. Feminine (i.e., subservient, off-balance, constrained?) but not sexual = ‘professional’ (i.e., upwardly mobile or upwardly mobile white collar) woman” (104/101). In your experiences, how has dressing certain ways for interviews or meetings affected the way that you were treated? If you feel that what you wore had no effect, why do you think that is?

Do you think that your clothing (or any important woman in your life’s clothing) is “girl clothing”?