An Ignoble Experiment: Gloria Steinem Knew Why Clothes Matter

By Zoe Sottile, CNN

Welcome to the latest edition of Big Style, a portal to a world where clothing meets culture. This week, CNN features reporter Zoe Sottile looks at the style legacy of Gloria Steinem, who died this week at 92.

 Have thoughts, questions or feedback? Reach us here: bigstyle@cnn.com 

Mentioned in this issue: intellectual pin-ups, Annie Leibovitz, corsets, Niki de Saint Phalle, second-wave feminism, bell hooks, statement belts, Anna Wintour.

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WHAT DOES A FEMINIST LOOK LIKE?

Steinem in 1990 in her New York City apartment, a three-floor brownstone that became a meeting ground for writers and organizers. (Courtesy Barbara Alper/Getty Images)

One of the best-known early images of Gloria Steinem — cinched into a strapless satin Playboy Bunny outfit, ears on, softly smiling, platter in hand — ran alongside the magazine piece that made her famous, a first-person exposé of exploitative working conditions at the Playboy Club in New York City.

“A Bunny’s Tale,” where she wrote that working in the club felt like “being hung on a meat hook,” broke Steinem into the New York media world. It was also, she later said, “personally and professionally a disaster. In the short term, it was much harder to get assignments, and in the long term it’s been used to ridicule me.” Even the editor’s introduction to the article is objectifying. It cites, among Steinem’s other qualifications, that she has the attributes “of an ex-dancer and beauty queen.”

Conventional beauty can get you places (into, say, the Playboy Club), but it can also become a trap, and it can reduce women to nothing more than pretty faces. Steinem told Interview Magazine an editor once handily dismissed her by saying, “We don’t want a pretty girl, we want a writer.”

Steinem was 28 when she published a first-person investigation of the grueling conditions waitresses faced at the Playboy Club. (Courtesy Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

To be a pretty girl and a writer both? It gets you called “the intellectual’s pin-up,” as Leonard Levitt wrote of Steinem in Esquire the same year she cofounded the National Women’s Political Caucus.

Steinem said that it wasn’t, in fact, until she became a public feminist that she remembered being thought of as good-looking — which she took as “a comment on people’s expectations then of what a feminist would look like.”

Seemingly despite herself, Steinem became a style icon, the face of second-wave feminism. She was thrust onto magazine covers, dorm posters and T-shirts. When asked about her style, Steinem usually spoke in terms of practicality. The curtain of long straight hair shielding her face and the aviators were “a way of looking at the world without the world looking at me,” she told Teen Vogue in 2011 (and she really was nearsighted). Steinem spent the ’70s in mod miniskirts, bell bottoms and her staple turtlenecks. As she grew older, her outfits coalesced into a kind of uniform, like a more chic Steve Jobs. As she put it, wearing all black made it easier to match different pieces, while a statement belt slung low across her hips and jewelry sourced from her escapades around the world helped break up different looks.

She also spoke about style, crucially, as a tool for autonomy — the same throughline that defined her work on reproductive justice, voting and economic rights. “Fashion in the past meant conforming and losing oneself,” she said in “Gloria,” a 2011 HBO documentary. “Fashion in the present means being unique and finding oneself.” In a world where women’s bodies are politicized, so too is the freedom to dress and display them as one pleases.

Steinem described the distinction between fashion and style: "We said fashion is what other people want you to look like and what the designers put out there, what the color is for the year. Style is your own personal unique expression." (Courtesy Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Big glasses and long hair were central Steinem tenets. (Courtesy Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

It can feel tiresome when the media, and the world writ large, home in on the clothing choices of politically active women. Men rarely get the same scrutiny — maybe because they have fewer perceived stylistic choices in the first place, or because their bodies don’t read like political symbols.

But even as far back as her Playboy investigation, Steinem was highly attuned to the political valence of clothing. The Bunnies, she noted, had to pay for the upkeep of their shiny costumes and could be fined for wearing too-low heels or for serving customers with runs in their tights or unkempt tails.

In the image of Steinem in the Playboy Bunny uniform, she looks beautiful, at ease. Underneath the satin surface, the corset’s zipper had left welts on her skin. Her feet swelled so much from long hours in heels that she couldn’t put on sneakers, she wrote. The Bunnies’ clothing was inextricable from their poor working conditions: underpaid, objectified and exploited.

For Steinem, the yearslong journey of feminist activism started with those costumes: when she asked who has to wear certain garments and why. She understood clothing matters. So maybe it’s no surprise she became a style icon. She used the political tools available to her, all while maintaining a sharp sense of self.

A STYLISH LIFE

“I think we all choose to dress ourselves according to our taste, to people we admire, a little bit what the fashion is going on, and for freedom," she said earlier this year. (Courtesy Getty Images)