There has been a recent trend in fashion that has been all too easy to mock and dismiss: men and women have been wearing their fourth-wave feminist credentials on their T-shirts. T-shirts with feminist slogans have been sold by Etsy and Asos; they have even made it to the Paris fashion week schedule. Fashion and feminism don’t always get along, which is precisely why what’s happening right now is significant. When women on protest marches are wearing the same feminist-slogan T-shirts as models on the Paris catwalks, we have, what we call at fashion week, a moment.
Last Saturday, the actor Natalie Portman spoke at the Los Angeles Women’s March wearing a Dior T-shirt sporting the legend “We Should All Be Feminists”, a quote Dior took from the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and which became the most Instagrammed look of the previous Paris fashion week. Rihanna posted a photo of herself in the same T-shirt on Saturday, as well as another image of herself wearing a pink THIS P**SY GRABS BACK hoodie from the label, designed by Victoria’s Secret model Leomie Anderson. This was shortly after Alexa Chung put up a selfie wearing an IN SOLIDARITY T-shirt from the Deep End Club, a conscious fashion label by DJ Tennessee Thomas. Ariana Grande Instagrammed herself in a hooded sweatshirt bearing an image of Malala Yousafzai and the legend FIGHT LIKE A GIRL. She teamed the sweatshirt with a pair of thigh-high boots.
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