Blazer

Women on fire

Link to the spanish version

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I adore a blazer, but I particularly adore a woman wearing a big blazer. A few months ago I stumbled upon one painting by Frida Kahlo called Self Portrait With Cropped Hair. I was deeply moved. In it, Frida is wearing an oversized suit and crimson shirt, she is sitting on a chair, her legs half open and her hair cropped, strands of it fallen around her. In the painting we can read “Si alguna vez te quise fue por el pelo. Ahora que estás pelona ya no te quiero” (If ever I loved you, it was because of your hair. Now that you’ve cropped it, I don’t love you anymore), which is a popular poem with Spanish (or Latin American, it’s not clear) origin.

Self Portrait With Cropped Hair, Frida Kahlo 1940

The story around the painting, dated from 1940 is that she painted it after her divorce from Diego Rivera. Frida is wearing what looks like one of her ex’s suits and shirt. In it, she portrays her sadness and trauma, but also a sense of freedom and agency. I love the way she looks at us from the painting. Apparently, it was also during this time that she vowed to become financially independent of Rivera by selling her paintings. One of the things that feel more powerful in this painting is the fact that she is wearing a suit to mark her independence, instead of her usually colourful, heavily decorated skirts and tops and red lips.

I did not know this painting, and when I recently found it I felt instantly drawn to it because one of the moments in my life in which I felt completely free and myself was when I cut my hair really short and started dressing like a boy, in particular, wearing oversized blazers. Looking at Frida Kahlo’s painting I totally understood: the suit, the hair, the verses, it is such freedom. While researching for this piece i found an interesting piece of information about the history of the blazers, there are quite a few theories about their origin, but the common thread was that it was originally used by fraternities of men, one of those used a fiery red one. So blazer comes from the word ablaze -to be on fire-. How serendipitous, that for a long time, for a woman to wear a blazer also signified that she was fiery independent, that she was ablaze in a way.  

Ever since I was child I was a girly girl, I loved a dress, a bow, pretty shoes, etcetera. I posed in pictures breaking my hip like a minisize adult model at 7.  As a teenager my body developed curves all over it, I had long blondish hair that I bleached and I went everywhere in high heels. I loved it, I was a woman! Soon enough though, I saw the downside of it, getting more attention that I could handle and plenty of situations in which I was downright objectified. It was a fixture in my life that often people celebrated my sexual appeal as if I wasn’t there. In all truth, I didn’t feel particularly attractive and something felt off, but I couldn’t really put my finger on it. Years later I came back to Madrid. I was recovering from a hard period and looking for new ways to express my real self, as this extra feminine thing had been keeping me hostage for way too long, but I still didn’t know what it was that I was looking for. By this time I was already very interested in mens ‘s fashion and I had always felt drawn to people that had androgynous looks and personalities, but with such deeply engrained femininity I felt that androgyny was out of bounds for me. 

Left, guess which one is me at 7. Right, me at 19.

One day while experimenting, my friend Ara cut my hair very short, leaving the blonde out of the equation for good and me looking like someone else. My body had changed again during this period, I had lost a lot of weight and therefore all my bothersome curves were gone, I started wearing masculine styles more confidently. Suddenly it all fell into place, I fell into place, finally feeling real and in peace. All it had taken for me to regain my sexuality, my sense of agency and my power was to move to the opposite side of the spectrum and adopt some external symbols of masculinity.  Dressing with the big shoulders, the square hips and the sleeked dark short hair allowed me to explore the things about me that felt beautiful and sexy to me for me, not society.  And it felt good!

Finally, our society is thankfully transitioning into a world where gender roles, power and sexuality are not defined anymore by what we wear, and sometimes we forget how fast this shift has happened. In time I have come to find a balance in which I can be as masculine or feminine as I like without having to rely on adopting specific codes of dressing and I fluctuate in my style with total freedom, but I can’t forget the feeling of possibility and joy of that period in which I blossomed into a boy in order to become myself.

Left me in my thirties, right, me today.

Today, my hair is not short anymore but I still own and use more than 20 blazers regularly, and I often have to check myself because that’s the piece of clothing that I can never get enough of. I’ve been reflecting about what it is about a blazer that we love so much. On the one hand, they are everywhere, so much of a trend they’ve become; boxy, cinched, cropped, oversized, fitted or slouchy. It is, fashionista or not, a fixture in our wardrobes. Recently though, menswear has evolved and men seem to have let go of it while women find it inescapable. Do women love blazers because they offer comfort and refuge from the over analysis that their bodies endure on a daily basis? Or maybe because a blazer always looks good, professional and interesting? They are a symbol of status, but whereas for men they can represent the uniform that has historically taken much of their individuality away, for women it does the exact opposite.

It is interesting that many of its surges in female use have happened in parallel to women’s liberation; Coco Chanel created a suit in tweed (previously worn exclusively by men) to rid women from flimsy, unpractical and overly decorative clothing, so that they could drive, work and practise sports in freedom, then Yves Saint Laurent in 1966, together with the 2nd wave of feminism designed Le Smoking, making the trouser suit fashionable in mainstream terms, in the 80s, power dressing was everywhere, marking the beggining of women’s access to corporate management roles, and today, with the 4th wave of feminism, we can’t seem to be able to live without them. As much as it may cringe us, every time things have to change we reach for the blazer.

A design by Coco Chanel from the 20s, Le Smoking by YSL 1966, Melane Griffith in Working Girl 1988 and Balenciaga FW16

This recent blazer craze started by Demna’s Balenciaga for its fall 2016 collection paving the way for brands like Wardrobe NYC, Aeron or The Frankie Shop to inundate our feeds via the cloned influencer girl and the rise of minimalist fashion. 

Apart from the milestones, though, today I wanted to celebrate my icons, the women who dared to be their fiery selves and dress however they saw fit, paving the way for us, men or women, to do the same. Hail the Blazer Girl! 

Annemarie Schwarzenbach

Marlene Dietrich

Catherine Hepburn

Patti Smith

Grace Jones

That’s the story this week, misfits! Enjoy your Saturday and do wear something that sets you and everyone on your way on fire.

Love

Patty