Have you noticed all the paeans of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the mainstream media in recent months including an awestruck look by Yahoo! at her planking exercises? The latest silly iteration of this trend is an overlong CNN.Com article by Rhonda Garelick about her robe collars. Not only are they analyzed in great detail as fashion but also as to the deeper political meanings of her collars.
Every time you think Garelick can't possibly write any more on the very narrow subject of Ginsburg's robe collars, she continues to go on and on and on and.....
Sometimes, fashion's greatest power is its stealth -- its ability to turn up in unlikely places, on unlikely people, and in the smallest details. Consider the case of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the 85-year-old force of nature who sits on the Supreme Court.
Can anyone imagine Garelick describing Justices Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito as forces of nature?
Today, as a Supreme Court justice, Ginsburg continues to stand out -- literally, visually -- by virtue of the decorative collars that she famously affixes to her judicial robes.
Stand by for the Ruth Bader Ginsburg robe collar deluge!
Given her historic position and stature -- she's the second female justice, appointed in 1993 -- you might think that Ginsburg would have little need for such sartorial distinction. Yet, her collars make crucial symbolic points, albeit subtly.
In adopting the collar, Ginsburg was following a tradition established by Sandra Day O'Connor, the court's first woman (appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981), who sought to feminize her robe with a simple white lace jabot. Ginsburg though, expanded the concept, amassing an entire wardrobe of collars, collected from around the world, in a wide array of styles ranging from simple half-circles of fabric or lace to elaborately beaded and jeweled affairs.
Um, could we possibly switch to a topic slightly more meaningful such as Justice Ginsburg's eyeglass frames?
Beyond their role as a feminizing touch, these collars constitute a communication system, a kind of fashion semaphore.
Is there also a fashion Morse code?
There is her favorite "majority" collar (an embellished gold jabot with tiny, delicate pendants) and her "dissenting" collar, for example, which instantly telegraph Ginsburg's opinions (to those court observers fluent in "Ruth") before a single word can be uttered. (Ginsburg wore her "dissenting" collar a day after President Donald Trump's election -- a dark, beaded number composed of long, metallic, finger-like projections, resembling a piece of medieval armor -- throwing sartorial shade while maintaining the official neutrality demanded by protocol).
Perhaps CNN journalists should now start wearing those metallic collars with long finger-like projections when reporting on President Donald Trump.
When espied on the judicial robe, Ginsburg's collars startle the eye a little; they seem incongruous. This is because the traditional black robe inhabits a realm quite far away from both femininity and fashion. Somber, unadorned, and voluminous enough to obscure nearly the entire body, the American judicial robe -- like those worn by clergy, choir singers, or graduates -- is designed to subsume the individual into the collectivity, privileging the institutional body over a specific, human one.
Does this Ginsburg robe collar gush ever end?
Ginsburg's collars forestall such presumptions. By drawing attention to the specific person beneath the robe, they disrupt the amorphous collectivity of nine black-clad jurists. Her collars re-inject the concept of "body" into the dis-embodying judicial robe, signaling not only the presence of a woman, but by extension, the presence of a biological human body -- which demands acknowledgment and consideration.
To answer my previous question...probably not.
To re-establish the body within the robe is a progressive political statement: Theoretical (and visual) bodiless-ness is a privilege available only to those whose bodies do not hinder them. Those with the most "noticeable" bodies (including women, gay people, the disabled, transgender people and people of color) are always, paradoxically, at greater risk of not being noticed by the law -- susceptible to having their needs overlooked (needs for reproductive rights, gender and marriage equality, or racial justice, for example).
Congratulations Rhonda Garelick! You have now officially entered the realm of SJW self-parody!
Ginsburg's collar reminds us that the law cannot be purely abstract or disembodied -- that fairness requires it to remain attached to all bodies and their needs.
You can read all that from a...robe collar? We anxiously await your chicken entrail analysis.
And finally, while the collars quite specifically identify Ginsburg as an individual, they serve another purpose, too: They turn what was a generic male garment into a potentially generic female item as well, inviting future women to occupy it.
Supreme Court justice robe collars... Is there anything they can't do?
And femininity in fashion -- of the sort we see in many of Ginsburg's ruffled or lacy collars -- still codes as decorative, incidental, or girlish, even though Ginsburg is a deeply formidable woman. On other women, frilly adornments -- bows, ruffles, lace, ribbons -- hardly suggest righteous power. This remains a problem -- the decorative suggests the less central, the less important, a side embellishment. Perhaps then it would be liberating to read Ginsburg's frilliness as irony, as permission (or as an invitation) to reclaim femininity in fashion for its subtle, surprisingly undermining power. Now might be the right time to proclaim the dainty lace collar the next pink pussy hat.
Next week on CNN: the power implications of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's shoe heels. Actually it might happen since accompanying this article is a plug for the September 3 CNN film, RBG.
