The Garçonne; Exploring Artistic Representations of Cross-Dressing.
As a female living in the 21st century Western world, the depiction of women in art has always been of particular interest to me. Recently I have been fascinated with the concept of gender and have been studying the work of Sadie Lee, who has produced a series of paintings orientating around cross-dressers and tomboys (1991-1996). For my own work, I have drawn much inspiration from Germany in the 1920s where the fashion for women was to exceed their previous stereotypical boundaries and dress, even behave, as men. My interest stems from a fascination with gender stereotypes (for example the colour blue and pink) and how individuals or counter-cultures react against them. Gender, as a fundamental idea organised around the opposition of male and female, is an especially controversial subject, particularly when individuals or groups of people express themselves as a combination of the two. These ‘androgynes’ are perceived by the rest of society as threatening a natural, moral and religious order in that they make the distinction between male and female difficult to identify. As a consequence, and in particular, women who dress as men, who therefore subscribe to a specific form of dress, claim male power as their own and subvert the traditional representation of women as inferior. The form and figure of the androgyne and the subversion of gender stereotypes is something that I am very much interested in, both as an artistic representation and an intellectual position.
The feminine ideal of the 1920s was a boyish figure; with no visible hips, bust or waist. Emancipated women had a stream-lined body, without curves, and a short, boyish haircut. This boyish style is what became known as garçonne or ‘tomboy’ and came about with regards to the First World War; with men out of the way, women were no longer made to think, feel or look like a woman was expected to, instead they had the ability to...