Director Feltri,
Dacia Maraini in the Corriere considers it “disturbing” (a term beloved by the left) that skirts are coming back into fashion because this “subtly suggests a return to traditional femininity”. Aside from the fact that she evidently has nothing else to worry about, the question is: if Kamala Harris wore a skirt, would she vote for her? Because you have to understand that these are indeed crucial questions. Or maybe not?
Roberto Bellia
Vermezzo with Zeal (Milan)
Dear Roberto,
for me what is truly disturbing is that skirts have become fashionable garments for men, as I often find out by looking at images of some fashion shows. In short, unless you live in Scotland, a man with a skirt, trinkets in the wind and hairy legs sticking out from under the flounces should not be seen around. Personally, even the simple idea of it gives me goosebumps. The problem is that today more than ever we have also made fashion something ideological, abandoning good taste, annihilating style, abdicating class and elegance. Sloppiness and ugliness predominate in both the male and female wardrobes. In fact, calling it a “wardrobe” is generous, I would say to rename it with the expression “garbage dump”. There you can find ripped jeans, rags that barely cover the erogenous zones and the most intimate recesses of the human body, low-quality fabrics, especially synthetic, highly flammable and smelling of plastic.
Feminists, who believe that emancipation lies in the item of clothing, namely trousers, considered masculine, are perhaps somewhat confused in their ideas and are the same ladies who have made the battle for feminine declinations an essential issue of feminism itself. Today, a woman who wears a skirt should therefore be considered “not emancipated”, yet in the Sixties it was the miniskirt that became a symbol of women’s liberation and intolerance and rebellion against certain social and moral rules. I believe that freedom is wearing a skirt, whether short or long, without being judged for this as nostalgic for patriarchy or for a traditional femininity incompatible with equal rights. A woman must be able to choose the clothes she prefers and with which she feels most confident and comfortable without the risk of incurring judgments, criticisms and labels. Indeed, neo-feminism is now an emblem of superficiality, even stupidity, it is a race to affirm not freedoms but the most foolish and banal thoughts that can be born. A lady can be master of herself even if she wears a skirt, just as she can be submissive and dependent despite wearing trousers.
And why continue to insist on this narrative of terror, that is, the one according to which in Italy there is a recrudescence of fascism and racism and also of machismo? It is totally false.
That the choice of skirts is not a symptom of a mentality of subjugation and subjection of the female to the male is also proven by my aunt Narcisa, the freest and most emancipated woman I have ever known, and she was so in an era in which girls were barred from many possibilities. Aunt Narcisa wore skirts, she had a very rigorous style, which I admired for its extreme Spartan elegance, and yet she was the principal of a school, she never married to keep her freedom intact and she did in life everything she wanted and liked.
Aunt Narcisa would have laughed if she had known and heard the schizophrenia of this modern feminism, she would have gotten goosebumps at the distortion of certain nouns and she would never have given up on her skirt in order to adapt to a superficial feminist model, which measures a woman’s freedom based on what she has put in her wardrobe.