notoday&fasfem ring
And that moment arrives. You had an idea, a plan, a dream. You have already begun to make it happen, in real life or in your imagination. Doesn’t make big difference in which one of those. But here we are now, and bumps appear in your road. Things get harder, your feminine side, the softer one that helps you feel and create, is being bullied. You don’t need this. You ‘re thinking about giving it all up.
It is understood. No one wants to be treated like that. But you keep forgetting something. This side of you that feels like keeping you behind, is actually your super power. Malleability. Yes, you are malleable. Remember all you have been through. How many times were you told you should give up, that there’s little room for you here, that your sensitivity is a fault, your ideas a utopia? More than few.
But you are still here, aren’t you? You bend but you don’t break. Just change shape, get sculpted and polished and beautiful. Yet, your essence remains…
You are like a jewel.
We, Maria and Ioanna, are so much aware of this. We really know and get you. So we have decided to become a reminder for you. With a piece of silver. Maria sculpted it and Ioanna infused her symbolisms in it. And metal became ring. A ring to wear in your small finger, with your feminine power graven on it, made of silver, tough yet malleable.
To look down at it and remember. That we all are in this together.
Now move on…you ‘ve got this!
The notoday&fasfem ring has been created as a love song to femininity and with a strong belief in gender equality. So we have decided to donate a part of the money you will pay for it to Diotima Centre as a support to their cause.
* By donating to Diotima Centre, we help women and femininities, who lack the financial and social resources necessary to live a life free of gender-based violence.
** You can find the ring at notodaystudio .
Sex and the Female
There was this episode at the first season of Sex Education where Maeve decides to have an abortion. The young girl got accidentally pregnant but was not sure about her feelings towards the boyfriend or motherhood altogether. She was the traumatized child of a drug addict mother, so charismatic yet so confused. The abortion clinic was a place where she could find comfort and care during this horrifying moment in her life..
In case you have been wondering - I know I have - clinics about birth control are not newly established facilities. The first ones were mobile clinics established by Marie Stopes, a controversial yet most influential figure in the British birth control movement. Stopes had published the book Married Love back in 1918, one of the first books ever to explain sex and sexual pleasure openly which was very much denounced by medical professionals, even though loved by the public.
Women back then you see didn't have the right to choose whether or not they wanted to be mothers. Sexual pleasure was out of the question for them as well. Even by early feminists who believed that a wife had the right to refuse sexual demands of her husband as a way of limiting the size of their families. Contraception existed of course but it was condemned by church and society in general. Methods included vaginal sponges soaked in quinine, injections of alum and water into the vagina and sheaths. All the above leaded to the fact that most women were almost always pregnant or breastfeeding.
Margaret Sanger knew all about that reality as her mother had died at the age 49 after 18 pregnancies. Qualified as a nurse, she saw impact of multiple pregnancies in a poor women. So she decided to act. In 1916, Margaret opened America's first birth control clinic in Brooklyn where the newly developed diaphragm was promoted. The clinic was of course illegal and 9 days after its opening Sanger was arrested. The publicity around this though kickstarted a birth control movement throughout the US.
No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body.
Margaret Sanger
Sanger was of course a person of her time. She favored birth control - actually the first known use of the term was included in her radical feminist magazine ‘The Woman Rebel’ - but condemned abortion. She considered it a dangerous and something that should be prevented by proper use of birth control methods.
Biography of Margaret Sanger as a comic
by cartoonist
Peter Bagge
We should note here that both Sanger and Stopes were accused of eugenics. I understand this can frustrate you quite a bit. But before condemning a person about a certain behavior, we should consider the actual establishment they were acting through. Eugenics unfortunately was a common attitude among intellectuals at that time. No one though can deny the fact that their work on birth control was pioneering. They set the pace for birth control and abortion rights demands which re - emerged in the 1960’s to this day. Sanger as matter of fact was the founder of Planned Parenthood that continues to offer sexual health care globally. There is an organization's written opposition about her racist beliefs of course…..
Poster by Britain’s Health Education Council in 1969
But is birth control the only solution? I am thinking of Maeve again. A young girl who accidentally became pregnant. Birth control methods didn't work out as expected. How many women out there have been facing the challenge of an unwanted pregnancy every day? Becoming a mother means so many things - the impossibility of unbecoming a mother being one of them. You can’t go back you see. Motherhood will stick with you no matter what. So you should at least be able to understand and consider facts before you decide to take action…
Human beings with wombs have been in such a different place from those without them since the dawn of time. In the first book of German criminal law Constitutio Criminalis Carolina written in 1532, abortion was punishable by drowning. Yes, women were drowned. Only them of course. Not their male counterparts. They were usually not even exposed. Because their body, incapable of pregnancy and giving birth, was giving them the right to do so. But what about a woman’s rights?
As women keep on dying or being seriously injured by committing to illegal abortions to this day, abortions have become central issue in feminist movements. Abortion laws have gradually been reforming over the years from early 1900s to 1970s, which was the decade with the most significant changes over this issue. The legal case that led to abortion being legalized at federal level in the US was Roe v. Wade in 1973. It concerned Norma McCorvey, who had become pregnant with a third child in 1969. Her case was constructed by Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington, two lawyers who filed suit on her behalf under the alias Jane Roe. The case finally reached the Supreme Court which ruled in favor of Roe declaring Texas laws unconstitutional. Abortion fell within the parameters of the right to privacy.
For more information about the case you can click to the buttons below:
Abortion had been legalized beyond the States as well. In 1971 the Manifesto of 343 was signed by 343 women who had had illegal abortions in France. The text which was written by Simone de Beauvoir was the following:
“One million women in France have abortions every year. Condemned to secrecy they do so in dangerous conditions, while under medical supervision this is one of the simplest procedures. We are silencing these millions of women. I declare that I am one of them. I declare that I have had an abortion. Just as we demand free access to contraception, we demand the freedom to have an abortion”
Those women had the courage to declare publicly what was held a secret since forever. And it had a huge impact because three years later the first female minister in the French government, Simone Veil, was appointed Minister of Health. Veil drafted and pushed through the Veil Law which legalized abortion during the first trimester despite all the violent attacks by the far - right.
I will share a conviction of women, and I apologize for doing it in front of this assembly comprised almost exclusively of men: No woman resorts to abortion lightheartedly.
Simone Veil
Little did these remarkable women know about what the future held. The Roe v. Wade case has been recently overturned…In a historic and far-reaching decision, the U.S. Supreme Court officially reversed Roe v. Wade on June 24, declaring that the constitutional right to abortion no longer exists.
Writing for the court majority, Justice Samuel Alito said that the 1973 Roe ruling and repeated subsequent high court decisions reaffirming Roe "must be overruled" because they were "egregiously wrong," the arguments "exceptionally weak" and so "damaging" that they amounted to "an abuse of judicial authority."
The decision, most of which was leaked in early May, means that abortion rights will be rolled back in nearly half of the states immediately, with more restrictions likely to follow.
The news rapidly spread around the world. Marches were organized, TV panels were on fire, forecasters gave their opinions out loud…Even in countries like Greece where abortion laws seem to be unchangeable for the near future, people became peculiarly numb. And worried. And angry.
I, for sure, became worried. And angry at the same time. How was I suppose to process this? My mind was flooded with images of women like Maeve trying to find a solution for dealing with an unwanted pregnancy in a country were abortions are illegal. Images like the paintings of Paula Rego’s Abortion pastels series that were favored around the web these days.
I googled the triptych and stared it for a few minutes. Such despair…These women so strong yet so devastated. Looking into the void. As you can tell by the surroundings, they have been under procedures which were no legal nor safe. You can also tell that these women are not passive. They own their decision and the pain that comes with it.
But they deserved better, didn’t they? They shouldn’t have been alone. They should have had proper medical care. They should, in Paula Rego’s own words, have had the right to choose:
A woman’s body can never be considered her own after all. Patriarchy and its manifestations has intruded into the way the female body exists and dominates it. Somehow, after all these years, we keep coming back to same notions. I try to find the root of this need to exploit and suppress. Could it be intimidation by the Other? The one that has no male genitals. The one that bears the ability to bring new life into this world. The one that is sexually more complicated yet quite fascinating..
Maybe this is where it all comes to. Females shouldn’t express their sexuality because it threatens the conservative ideals about them. They should not express their desires nor their fears. They should be obedient. And were they daring enough to act, they should deal with the consequences of a sexual encounter all by themselves. Them sluts!
As I was starting to get even more frustrated, I came across this article in the 13nth issue of Riposte. It was about academic Katherine Angel and her book Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent . There was something about her witty smile that instantly made me feel like there is hope. Made myself a cup of coffee and went through her interview.
-In recent years two requirements have emerged for good sex : consent and self - knowledge, she mentions. Consent as a yes or no dichotomy can’t be everything we want it to be. Language cannot say everything, especially for women, who have not been given the chance to shape it according to their own needs and desires.
So I am beginning to get it now. Consent is a way of making sure the sexual act should move forward but most of the time women do consent under the fear of taking a huge risk. Fear of being called sluts, of facing some kind of violence, of becoming pregnant. That can be worsen by the fact of not being free to decide over the unwanted pregnancy, even though it is her own body under that circumstance. All in all, a woman never feels truly free to experience pleasure …
Why is it so terrifying for our society to admit that women want to experience pleasure without wanting to become a parent? Why do we keep punishing them for being sexual beings like the rest of the animals on the planet? And let us not forget - Katherine notes, the long history of considering sex as something (mostly heterosexual) women give in exchange for other things. Like there is no female desire, they only act on gaining profit to get what they really want. And they should be punished for such behavior. Absurd but true.
Is there any hope? I am thinking yes. There is. Stay with me here…
We should consider that women still feel the need to be sexual, to find joy, to move forward and beyond stereotypes. They fight, and push and demand change. Researching for this article made that quite clear. I began to smile.
It is really difficult to upturn beliefs that have been established for centuries. I can understand that now. People tend to fear change. They feel safer doing what has been done. Those who are privileged lack the tones of empathy that it takes to step back and acknowledge the inequity. We see it literally everywhere. What started in the US this summer has allowed voices from the darkest corners to rise again and spread their poison. We witnessed that from a man of the cloth recently in Greece claiming that raped women who got pregnant enjoyed the intercourse…These are dangerous people who belong in the past.
We need to survive. Women need to survive. Should you ask for my point view, they also need to thrive. So we will do whatever it takes to save the hardly gained rights and push for more. Until every human female on the planet has the right to own her body and her choices. Until equality becomes reality.
Maeve chose to have the abortion alone. But there was a gentle male friend of hers who decided to be there, who wouldn’t leave her helpless. Who supported her choice. Who even stood up against anti abortion protesters outside the clinic. Who gave her a hug afterwards and asked nothing in return.
Maybe there is still hope.
*If you are facing the abortion dilemma yourself and are in need for some privacy, click here for useful information.
Fasfem meets Fårö
I was ecstatically watching The Matrix Resurrections new trailer and travelling back to 1999, when notifications occurred...Leda had created the seminar event. I was pushed fast forward, back to present day and I was full of joy!🎈
Because I thought about this girl I used to be back in 1999, who felt like an outcast in her studies field, was seeking something not available at the time, secretly reading and writing about fashion and feminism...I would like to let her know that all of this would flourish in the future. It would become writings and images and sounds. Incredible people would believe in it and together we would create new realities ..
So we would be delighted to see you at our fresh from the oven seminar at @faro, inspired by fasfem geek stories, to explore the way the powerful female expresses herself through the dress. How much does the dress influence in the way personalities are created and communicated? Let’s explore it together...👗📚
Marvellous illustration of my dreams by Jalex Noel
You can find details about the seminar - which will take place in Athens and be in Greek - here and here.
Sexism is Big in Japan
Let me begin with a story I used to hear a lot when I was growing up. A great grandmother of mine got married at the age of 13. Being a teenage girl, she hadn’t got her period started. Not just yet. Her husband was very young as well. And totally unaware about menstruation. He demanded of her to get pregnant right away. As you can imagine this didn’t happen. So to punish his girl - wife for not giving him a child, he made her cook huge meals and invited his male friends over to eat. She was forced to serve them while she was starving. The torture came to an end as she started getting her period and got pregant to her first child. Then she was allowed to her fundamental right of …you know..EATING.
That story dates back to Greece of early 1900’s. It hit my memory while I was searching for information about a woman’s role in Japan these days. I had just come accros this statement of Minister of Health, Labor and Welfare Hakuo Yanagisawa in 2007 -women are childbearing machines. Under existing gender norms you see, giving birth and raising children is still considered a woman’s main contribution to Japanese society.
Few months ago, while in preparative state for the Tokyo Olympics, Momoko Nojo run a petition campaign that gathered 150,000 signatures in just two weeks. The #DontBeSilent campaign helped oust Tokyo’s Olympic chief Yoshiro Mori for his sexist remarks. He appeard to have claimed that women talk too much and that meetings with many female board directors would "take a lot of time". Nojo used her hashtag on social media platforms and the response was so huge that Mori was forced to resign and be replaced by Seiko Hashimoto, a woman who has competed in seven Olympic Games.
I decided to search a little further. You see I couldn’t put my mind to the fact that the world’s third largest economy remained chauvinistically oriented. But it did. Another campaign had taken place in 2019. Yumi Ishikawa a young actress, writer and temp worker, created #KuToo movement. It was a campaign calling for an end to female workers having to wear heels. And of course it evolved from a shoe thing to a wider debate around Japan’s culture. Meaning of things we wear proves to be far more deep than we imagine, as always…
The fact that those succesful campaigns were both led by young women is really subversive for Japan’s reality. A reality that consists of teaching the young to keep quiet and defer to their elders. As a result the most powerful political and business leaders are unsurprisingly men in their 70s, 80s or even 90s. And just like that Japan’s gender gap is the largest among advanced economies.
A woman’s role in Japan is being obediend and in the service of others. They lack representation and are discouraged into going after leadership posititions, both in state and business. They are expected to become stay - at - home mothers after giving birth. So women who decide to have a family are becoming fewer and fewer and birth rates are dropping. Even fewer choose to define the norm and claim their rights. In a country where it remained legal for husbands to murder wives for infidelity until 1908, being a feminist seems like a bad joke to a significant part of Japanese society.
But things are heating up. The above examples of young women expressing anger and being respected for that has given the push to all young women to consider a change in attitude. As all flash lights will be gathered in Japan for the Tokyo Olympics this summer, activists and human rights advocates could have a chance to enhance their movement. Would love to watch them turn this into their advantage. And Japanese goverment respond consensually.
My thoughts go back to great grandmother’s story. After spending few days crying over her pilow with an empty stomach she took a decision. To survive. So she carefully removed some food from the pot before her husband’s favorite stew became covered in thin crust. And ate it just as he was around the corner coming back from work…
I am always terrified to think what women have gone through, the oppressed feelings, the violence. Things like that can’t still be happening but they do. It’s the patriarchy infused in every aspect of our lives. We need to grab every chance we got and change it. Everywhere. Even at the world’s third largest economy…
Credits:
Opening photo is artwork “Women speak out” by Franziska Barczyk.
For more information about sexism in Japan you can click here, here, here and here(in Greek only).
Can ethical consumption exist in fashion?
I was preparing an Instagram guide the other day with several things I wish to own in the near furure. Things I thought might interest fasfem’s little community. While picking up staff, a feeling of frustration began to take over me. Because I was making the guide with the goal of ethical consumption in mind…But what does that even mean?
I paused the guide and did what I do most of the times when numb and indecisive. I googled.
Ethical consumerism: practiced through the buying of ethically - made products that support small scale manufacturers and local artisans, protect animals and the environment.
Yes, that was actually what I had in mind. To buy from brands that actually try to make things better or buy second hand. A form of BUYcott where I support those whose actions align with my ethics. A form of action through my wallet.
It is not unusal for a consumer nowadays to expect companies to have a purpose. According to the 2017 Weber Shandwick’s research, The Company behind the Brand: In Goodness We Trust, 46% of global consumers are increasingly buying from companies or brands that make them feel happy and good, and 30% are increasingly buying from companies that have a social purpose or strive to make a positive contribution to the world or market they operate in. You see consumers are in need to rise up and fix a broken world themselves. They also look up to brands who make a strong effort to be part of the solution. Because even when investors seem to decrease when a brand chooses the clear path, sales do not.
I am not alone for sure. As a woman, I even belong to the part of the consuming force who are more empathic and willing to buycott. So why don’t I feel like I am making an impact most of the time? Because I actually DON’T. There so many issues that remain unresolved in fact and in my mind.
Big supply chains, where the origins of goods are somehow lost until they are delivered, could be the first. Sometimes it is impossible to know who made our clothes and under which circumstanses. Brands on the other hand who claim to support charity have been exposed to use the cause as another form of marketing strategy. A strategy that can be enhanced by the smart use of social media platforms. Which surely I am not against at when it actually makes a difference. But in many cases the support is just a very pety amount of money in comparison to the actual profit from a product being labeled as ‘ethical’.
And then there is the paradox of higher prices. Due to raw materials quality, transparency in manufatcturing and distribution and small scale production, most of ethical choices are more expensive. I get it. But I can’t stop thinking about the fact that people of lower income are excluded from the so called ethical consumerism because they just can’t afford it. Is ditching a coat from ZARA in order to buy from a smaller sustainable brand just not possible for some? How can we reverse that just by changing shopping habits?
I know that there are no right or wrong anwers sometimes. There are a lot of things to take under consideration and lots of systemic issues to be examined further. I have decided to think things through on a personal scale. What is there possible for me as person to do in order to help? Educate myself better. Try and shop by people whom I look up to. Small scale businesses whose products are made with love and lots of effort. People I actually know personally sometimes. According to my income with no guilt. Take part in actions that lead to change. Support causes each way possible. Just do the best I can. Hope that in the post pandemic era the lessons are actually learned. And allow myself to take some joy while purchasing..
For some interesting views about ethical consumerism you can read here, here and here. For data about ethical consumerism in pandemic here. I leave you to go and finally finish my reading on Fashionopolis…
Credits:
Photographer Craig McDean captured the above picture for British Vogue February 2019. Styling by Grace Coddington.
Fasfem watches : BEYOND THE VISIBLE, Hilma af Klint
When I came across one of her paintings - first in row on the gallery below - I felt the familiarity giving me the goosebumps. It reminded me of fasfem palette, the colours I had chosen to create my mood board for my site’s design. It was only three years ago …but the painting dated back to 1907!
It was by a Passerbuy’s post on Instagram that I was intrigued and did some more research on the lady behind those marvelous huge paintings, my palette’s ancestor included:
Hilma af Klint. Born in Sweden in !862, studied arts and lived all her life there. Weared black, always. Being spiritual has urged her to create a group with four other female artists called De Fem. Made seances with them - it was the thing for intellectuals back then as quantum physic’s foundations were established which explored the unknown. She created hundreds of abstract paintings, before Mondrian and Kandinsky ever did. But we never knew that until recently..her art was firstly shown in Los Angeles in 1986 and the exhibition at Guggenheim Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future is the most recent.
But I wanted to know; why was this genius kept away from the history of art? Maybe because it has been the history of male genius thus far? What about the future though? I have decided to watch the documentary by Halina Dryschka to find out. Would you care to join me?
Helmstedt
As long as I can remember myself obsessioning over fashion, one thing has never ceased to amaze me; artful expression on the textile. There is something thrilling on watching plain canvas to transfrom into a wearable piece of material.
There is a creative lady up in the North who uses her brushes and fingers as magical wands. Whatever they touch - be it paper, clay or fabric - gets transformed into poetic version of matter. Matter we can use. Matter - in case of fabric - we can actually wear :
This fairy of a designer is Emilie Helmstedt, creator of the awarded brand Helmstedt.
In her Copenhagen based studio her collections coexist with papier -mâché sculptures and poems. As you can she from the gallery above her creations are unexpected sometimes yet so delightful! All prints are handpainted by her before transported onto fabric. Dreamy dresses, every day objects and huge sculptures are giving us an optimistic view of this world, world where we:
“Take care of not only ourselves and each other, but also cherish the environment.”
Emilie is only 27 years old and already highly recognized in contemporary fashion scene as a very creative and talented disigner. Here you can she the cover page she created for ELLE Danmark January 2021 edition. It has a message of hope and creativity hidden at the center of it…can you spot it?
Yes, Emilie is bringing a child to this world this April…
What I find really hopeful in the development of Helmstedt is that one of the brand’s main interests is stable growth and a humanist approach to the way they do business. For example, due to covit pandemic situation, they created the line ‘Staycation’ last August with reduced prices so as to be more affordable to all brand’s lovers worlwide.
I will leave you now to enjoy Emilie herself describing you the way she finds inspiration and creates:
Les Fleurs Studio
Captured by the thumbnail picture above? I myself need a few moments to pause and inhale its beauty…That’s the way I feel every time I get into Les Fleurs Studio universe. The colours, the light on the pictures, the music background on the videos, the curation of the editorials…yes Maria Bernard has made an entire universe all by herself.
A universe where diversity and the environment are well respected and celebrated. A celebration you definetely want to be part of. Les Fleurs has a collaborative nature and it evolved from a marketplace for products Maria has herself designed, to a collaborative social and retail platform. Designers and Maria are provided with visibility in order to communicate their sustainable message:
“ We don’t produce.
We reuse.”
Usage of pre existing materials, reconcepting the vintage tailoring and curating edits of archive and vintage are few of this brand’s actions that pave the way to reclaiming the term sustainability. Here is a small collection of their products to pure enjoyment of your senses:
I find what Maria does so promising in addition to its artistic allure. Here we have a gorgeous 25 year old lady with a huge following on social media. She could just relax and enjoy styling her selfies wearing the tons of free staff that influencers of her magnitude receive every day. Instead she chose to leave Madrid - Maria is Spanish - move to Paris, design her on line and create a space for real aspiration and connect with her peers, giving them the oppurtunity to reach out to a bigger audience. People who are true artists and have strong work ethics inspite of their smaller following on social media…
Would love to see more of that in the next years in fashion world, especially in my country Greece, where so many talented young people - women ever more maybe - remain in the shadow. It reminded me one of the reasons fasfem was created in the first place. Do you agree with me?
