From the Anti-Rape Bra to Chastity Belts: How Women Use Clothing for Protection

“You might find a bit of armor useful when you become queen,” Cersei Lannister recently told a female rival on Game of Thrones. But her advice could just as easily apply to women from all walks of life—particularly now, in the aftermath of a series of high-profile sexual assaults around the world. In a reflex response to the quest for a societal aegis, a number of contemporary clothing designers have found armor (or a variation thereof) useful as a form of protection for women. Most recently, three Indian engineering students designed a bra even more kick-ass than the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms’ chest plate. The so-called Society Harnessing Equipment (SHE) reportedly delivers 82 shocks in response to an unwanted touch and was designed as “retaliation against menaces in society” after last year’s gang rape in Delhi.

Still, she accedes that what you wear can serve as a shield without the garments being literally rigged. “There are ways that I might clothe myself that are aesthetically pleasing, but also don’t highlight certain aspects of my sexual body. That’s a form of armor. It’s like armor lite,” she says. One of the examples she offered was the uniform worn by ’90s riot grrrls, the feminist punk rockers whose bands, including Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney, regularly spoke out against rape and in support of empowerment. These were the women who made flowing “tentlike” baby-doll dresses and “kick ass” combat boots fashionable.

Along those lines, Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, dismissed protective clothing as being outside the realm of fashion. Instead she thinks contemporary fashion’s “psychological aspects of protection” are more pertinent than its physical aspects. “The early theories of fashion tended to focus on the idea that dress was originally and primarily about protection, meaning essentially physical protection,” she tells The Daily Beast, and gives the example of shoes protecting feet. “Later theorists pretty much rejected the functional origins of dress and suggested instead that dress is much more about symbolic communication, particularly to display gender, sexuality, position in society, et cetera.”

Fashion can empower, even if it can’t protect. The little black dress is “like armor” in the sense that it bestows confidence on its wearer, Steele says. Not to mention Yves Saint Laurent’s iconic pantsuit, which started the ball rolling toward equality couture. In 1966 the French designer created a tuxedo suitable for women, called Le Smoking, which, according to Vogue, for the first time positioned the so-called second sex “at glittering galas standing lapel-to-lapel with a roomful of men in black.” In the 1980s Le Smoking became the power suit, and those glittering galas became executive offices. All this is not to say that men’s clothing has not historically served a physically protective function.


In the past, sporting male attire enabled women to camouflage their vulnerability, which was considered synonymous with their gender. Evidence suggests that to protect herself from being raped by 15th-century prison guards, French saint Joan of Arc dressed in drag. Several other women throughout history have also cross-dressed to ease their movement through society. Such was the case with Isabelle Eberhardt, who traveled through North Africa in the late 19th century, and author George Sand, in the same era, whose masculine garb supposedly became her VIP pass to male-only venues.

ven Queen Victoria’s parasol was equipped with chain mail, which was created for her in the 1840s after she survived several attempts on her life. “Possibly made by a manufacturer, or perhaps devised by her husband, Prince Albert, the parasol incorporates a layer of chain mail between the outer green silk cover and the lining,” Ehrman told The Daily Beast via email. “The parasol is very heavy, 1468 grams [3 pounds], and difficult to hold upright so the Queen probably never used it.”

Though the effectiveness of defensive female fashion, even when it is used, may never be quantified, there is a danger that this genre of clothing directly contradicts the feminist adage that rape has nothing to do with what women wear. However, Tarrant, an associate professor of women’s studies at the California State University, thinks inventions like SHE and Tsukioka’s vending-machine skirt serve a similar purpose to SlutWalk (the protest march dates back to 2011, when women in Toronto purposefully wore revealing clothing to fight the myth that rape depends on dress). “The solution is not to have Kevlar fashion,” Tarrant said, “but to the extent that SlutWalk put [rape] on the table for discussion, I think the same holds true for the anti-rape fashion.”

Source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/05/from-the-anti-rape-bra-to-chastity-belts-how-women-use-clothing-for-protection.html