Of the millions of words associated with Gloria Steinem, the pioneering feminist and co-founder of Ms. magazine who died on September 3, at age 92, perhaps the most famous were those she uttered as a casual aside during a birthday party in 1974.
A reporter observed that she didn’t look her age, Steinem remembered. “This is what 40 looks like,” she retorted. “We’ve been lying for so long, who would know?”
Little wonder Steinem became not just the voice, but also the face of feminism, its aviator-wearing avatar, who made it her mission to tear down the barriers around women as well as the stereotypes that helped build them. Those bromides included the expectation that age was a problem and thus something to hide, that any interest in appearance indicated an interest in superficiality and that, as National Geographic once characterized it (critically), “only plain women want equal rights because they aren’t hot enough to attract a husband.”
For Steinem, a woman’s agency included not just how she lived her life, but also how she looked while she did so. It was part of the right to choose: who you were and where and how you appeared. And from the moment she appeared on the cover of Newsweek in 1971 under the banner “The New Woman,” smiling, her hair parted at the center and teased in back with blond streaks cascading around her face — and with (yes, of course) those aviators — she did it consciously and according to her own rules.
Her early employers may have labeled her a “girl reporter,” critics like Maxine Cheshire may have dismissed her as “the miniskirted pinup girl of the intelligentsia” (and an early connection to the C.I.A. may have suggested her looks were a cover), but the glasses, the hairdo, the bell bottoms, hip-slung belts and bodysuits were merely weapons in her battle, and the troops she inspired were the legions of young women who came after. For her, style was a tool of change and a means of outreach.
“Fashion in the past meant conforming and losing oneself,” she said in “Gloria,” a 2011 HBO documentary, referring to the way designers and society had dictated femininity, with its corsets, crinolines and rules. “Fashion in the present means being unique and finding oneself.”
She did, thanks to the influence of Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” whose attitude — a young woman navigating life in the city on her own terms — she could relate to. Also Wonder Woman, whose bullet-busting bangles inspired her own love of jewelry.
Steinem settled on her signature look, she told Teen Vogue, because she was nearsighted. “Growing up, people were always pinching me on the cheek, and so I felt I had a very fat face,” she said. “Those things were undercurrent somewhere, you know, causing me to wear my hair down and wear big glasses.”
What may have started as protective covering turned into a trademark over time, to the point that at a book party for Lena Dunham held at Steinem’s home earlier this year, the guests’ goody bags included Warby Parker versions of her emblematic shades.
As for the clothes that went with them, they stayed similarly consistent. Steinem’s working uniform (she had one long before Steve Jobs) was, she told Dunham’s online newsletter, Lenny Letter, in 2015: “Boots, pants, a sweater or a T-shirt. A concha belt. Something that’s Native American or Indian or something that has a resonance from the past before patriarchy came along.”
The belts, she said in a video interview a few months before she died, were useful because with a belt “you didn’t have to change your clothes or buy new clothes; you could wear the same thing, black pants and a top.” You just changed your accessory.
As for that black, Steinem’s preferred color, she chose it because “it seemed much simpler.”
“You didn’t have to worry about what matched what, and you could wear whatever jewelry,” she said.
All of which meant she could spend her time thinking about the substance of what she wanted to convey since the style was taken care of. It was such an effective dressing formula, she once said, that when she was traveling around the country, she could stow everything — “a change of underwear, corduroy jeans and those turtleneck bodysuits” — in her briefcase.
And it worked in all contexts, including in 2017, when the Council of Fashion Designers of America bestowed a Board of Directors’ Tribute Award on Steinem (along with Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood and Janelle Monáe). Accepting the honor, Steinem wore black sequined Michael Kors trousers, a black sweater and a black hip belt. She thanked the audience for their activism and Kors for the “great pants.” As far as she was concerned, the clothes enabled the cause rather than undermining it.
As a result, when the vintage site What Goes Around Comes Around held an auction of some of Steinem’s wardrobe this year to benefit her foundation, the event was framed not as a fashion sale, but as an opportunity to “own a piece of history.” At that point in her life, as she was happy to admit, she was dyeing her hair, but she had never had plastic surgery. Those were her decisions, and she still believed in modeling them for all to see.
“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,” Steinem said in a video before her auction. But most of all, she continued, “for freedom.” Part of her legacy is showing the world how that might look.
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