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This post is the beginning of a series we will be doing on the French influences in the Capitol. We know everyone is hyped about Hamilton right now, but we have a sweet spot for Thomas Jefferson (wahoowa!) and his French affiliations. 

On any young woman’s bookshelf you’re bound to find a few lifestyle or trendy self help books touting any number of essential lifestyle guidelines. Among the plethora of feminine self improvement one book stands distinguished in the race to self betterment: French Women Don't Get Fat, by Mireille Guiliano. With the rise of magazines like Darling, Verily, and Kinfolk, it’s important to remember and pay tribute to the origins of “the art of slow living”: the French. First released in 2004, French Women Don’t Get Fat reminded us how more than diet or calorie counting, lifestyle plays a key role in the way we approach food. In the following decade there have been many iterations of the simple and elegant approach Guiliano outlines with her trusted Dr. Miracle and personal anecdotes. Part of the reason for Guiliano’s staying success is that her guide was among the first to romanticize being intentional. Guiliano illustrated how being deliberate can create an effect that gives the mundane a feeling of indulgence.  

Part of the book that was most striking for an American girl raised on Southern Sam’s Club food hauls was when her Dr. Miracle emphasized buying only what you need for a day or two at small local markets. She speaks to this process and engagement with food as a part of the importance of Ritual Preparation. This ideal of routine preparedness can be hard to come by and reckon with a hill staffer’s demanding schedule. Nevertheless, when the opportunity presented itself Mckinley and I made our way over to the market to pick up a few essentials and the makings for a spring cook out. Mckinley is admittedly much more of a baker, but loves the challenges of exploring in the kitchen. 

Mckinley’s ride or die recipe for melting a man’s heart: Chocolate Chip Bundt Cake 

Hannah’s any-day-that-ends-in-y dinner: Char-grilled Unagi Don (Eel) JK JK too many bones to deal with, also definitely not French, but we’ll cover Japanese influences in the future (I mean come on, how could we ignore the cherry blossoms). 

Savour has a wonderful list of French recipes here. If you need us we’ll be donning aprons and rewatching Ratatouille while waiting for water to boil. 

They say if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog 

Back at it again! And just in time for the Cherry Blossom Festival this weekend!

We took a little hiatus over the holidays while Hannah traveled back to Hungary and Ukraine again. But she’s back and as excited as ever to showcase the best of D.C.’s style. Starting with this weekend and the Cherry Blossom Festival! 

The festival is a celebration of the 3,000 cherry trees given to Washington D.C. in 1912 from the Mayor of Tokyo. The festival is to commemorate the gift and honor the enduring friendship between America and Japan. And while Shoshana in the most recent episode of Girls reminded us “you can never rush a Cherry Blossom” this year the buds are sprouting a little earlier thanks to the warmer weather. Mckinley and I are particularly excited about the paper lanterns that are decorating CityCenterDC.  

You tighten the belt on your trench coat as the drizzle turns into an honest and miserable rain. You are told good writing never begins with descriptions of the weather. 

As you tug at your collar you wonder where your Paul, from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, is and if you should finally throw in the towel and get a cat. You enjoy thinking in cliches unapologetically. You ignore the irony that you’re probably more of a Marilyn while impersonating the classic Audrey. It’s October and you’re cold and DC regrettably does not have an inviting Tiffany’s stand alone store front for you to peruse. You weigh the option of scheduling in time to venture out to Tysons next weekend, but it ruins the nonchalance and spontaneity you’re seeking to emulate. You decide to re-watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s instead. You realize you sound like an angsty middle schooler, distracted by shiny things, and return your attention to the weather. The clouds are low and heavy. The atmosphere sits on your mood. You hope your performed femininity is likable. You care a little too much. You eat a little less. You run a little more. You spend money equally on blowouts and booze. You are tired, but not deterred.

You are early for work or play or wherever you intended to be, thinking the rain would slow your progress; it instead caused a quickness and deliberateness to escape the exposure to the elements.

You confront the fact that you are not Audrey, and certainly not Marilyn (today at least).

Today, today you are Emma Bovary: vulnerable and impacted by your environment, delighted by baubles, restless with desire, stubborn, and decidedly unlikable. It is only a brief foray into character, an anti-heroine tragically cursed by compulsion and femininity. 

The look doesn’t suit you, but the weather will clear tomorrow; you will choose a different persona, another mask, a better outfit. Tomorrow you will pioneer a new female archetype. 

You undo the belt, and shed the now damp outer garment as you cross the threshold to your destination.

Capitol Hill Barbie is back y’all. We heard some people were talking smack about Ann Taylor and first of all, how dare they. Writing in the Atlantic, Cintra Wilson claims that D.C. fashion is “terrible” and “patriarchal.” *Insert eye roll gif* So we thought our first post back should pay tribute to the staff assistant uniform in all its glory. Wilson claims that the iconic Ann Taylor uniform is oppressive and even “alarming.” Girl, stay in your lane. 

Wilson confuses safety with oppression. Uniforms are integral to societal cohesion and formulating identities. Yet even so, they can be a foundation for free expression and counter-cultural expression (think Scorpio Rising, leather jackets signifying biker culture). 

Look, Cintra, can we call you Cintra? We get it, D.C. isn’t New York, or L.A., it is our nation’s Capital. Definitely not the fashion capital. No, D.C. has the burden of being a second home to allllllll the Senators and Congressmen, making it the biggest super nerd circus outside of CERN or Silicon Valley. People in power wear uniforms: CERN has white lab coats; Silicon Valley has the Steve Jobs black turtle neck and dad jeans; D.C. has the blue blazer. We recognize that these are notoriously male environments. The Ann Taylor uniform empowers women to join the blue blazer Old Boys Club. 

These people, our lawmakers, our movers and shakers, they are not the most stylish bunch. We know that. They know that. (They are so desperate for fashion influencers they have turned to the President’s teenage daughters for guidance -- Malia, Sasha, call us, we would love to feature you.) They come from the heritage of powdered wigs and long black robes. 

George Washington *~Fashion Icon~* 1777

Why are you penalizing them for it? Who hurt you? We’ve all tried to fit into a too-small Ann Taylor number and been bitten by an unmoving zipper; that is no reason to damn the entire enterprise of pencil skirts. 

Overwhelmingly the response to this article was defensive, because though short-sighted, at the beginning of her article, Wilson did make a few decent points and poked at a gaping vulnerability. Specifically how the aforementioned patriarchal heritage and hegemony plays out through what women wear to work. She makes such a compelling introduction! 

In Washington, D.C., there is an excruciatingly narrow margin for acceptable female dress; all women, no matter how attractive or plain, no matter how many postgraduate degrees they have, or how well they fly fighter planes, walk an inescapable fashion tightrope. Their style will fall into the binary categories of either “dowdy” or “slutty”; there are virtually no fashion grey areas.

Preach, girl. Love a good madonna/whore binary take down, yes. 

Wilson continues, and starts to lose her way:

My shorthand for the look was always “capitalist burqa” or “corporate office submissive”: cubicle-wear of so-so quality for the single girl in her late twenties whose self-esteem has been almost beaten to death by the beauty-industrial complex, and whose decent education has been punished with a thanklessly demanding office job.

...burqa? Submissive? Wilson sounds like she saw the 50 Shades of Grey movie in the K street Loews theater, encountered a prissy lobbyist in the bathroom and decided to write an article gleaned from all her newfound D.C. expertise. And then back to her reflexive hatred of Ann Taylor:

The Ann Taylor ethos rubs me the wrong way for the same reason I don’t like white women singing “Summertime” or winos drinking cooking extract: Too much vanilla will make you go blind. But the brand is the retreat position for the schizophrenic D.C. work environment, where female sexuality is both an asset and a liability.

Woof. “Too much vanilla” -- Head meet desk. The point of wearing Ann Taylor is that it is a uniform. It is iconic. A la Matilda Kahl, a New York art director who wears a white silk blouse and black pants to work every day. The trend toward deploying a utilitarian, call it vanilla, approach to dressing is in fact gathering plaudits for its efficiency. 

And since Wilson seems keen on throwing burqas into the conversation, let us take a minute to appreciate wearing actual burqas and the niqab for security and freedom. Take for example one of 2013′s Best American Travel Essays from the perspective of Colleen Kinder, a white woman, donning a niqab in order to “beige out” in a Cairo market. It is easy as western white women to jump to the conclusion that women who choose to cover themselves are oppressed. I would be slow to make the assertions that Wilson assumes about the relationship between submissiveness and the burqa. Other cultural codes of fashion practice are not water-cooler punch lines. Wilson assumes that women don these uniforms without any agency of their own. 

Similarly, why not look at the intention that can go into “beiging out” in an office and professional environment? Why is it submissive? Why are female uniforms couched in sexual innuendo or linked to oppression, while male uniforms are standard and unremarkable? Why must a woman's style be rebellious and counter culture to win the respect of fashion moguls. 

Wilson’s arguments against the uniform could be persuasive if they were not subsequently lost in a stream of consciousness narrative that went on to attack society wives, socialites, and Republican administrations in an all-inclusive, indiscriminate net. 

The next recipients of Wilson’s snark are a small segment of our sisters in style. Wilson hones in on those plagued by the expectations of ladies who lunch. The Georgetown elite. Her most prescient pull-quote-sound-bite-self-indulgent-almost-interesting remark: 

There is an indulged weakness evident: The ideal-society wife is made into a streamlined, luxury toddler.

In her over-broad attack on all-things-female DC, she pivots from discussing women overburdened by work relying on flavorless fashion, to the wealthy presumably looking for husbands? So are we to believe that all the young women working on the Hill are future society wives? 

We don’t get an answer, because by the time you recover from the motion-sickness of her drunken swerving from one social stratum to the next, she comes around the bend and crashes into political commentary bashing the Bush Administration and their torturous regime of “Peter Pan collars” (*adjusts tinfoil hat* -- conspiracy!). While trying to recover from the whiplash of that impact, brace yourself, because the car is about to slip through the guard rails into the roiling rapids of First Ladies and the politics of A-list designers. 

It is hard to know where to begin to address her mischaracterizations and caricatures, since they are so wide sweeping. If anyone is guilty of infantilizing the women on the Hill, I suggest Wilson take a hard look in the mirror. 

Let’s see the receipts. Let’s get a good look at those”virginal Easter Egg” get-ups Wilson seems to think are a by-product of Republican power:

Dat ankle tho

Here are the Bush Twins literally on Easter Sunday coming out of a church service at Fort Hood in Texas, 2005. Honestly, not that bad and similar to a lot of the styles we’ve seen on the Obama girls. Hardly Amish.

Pretty sure when Rihanna wore that dress everyone freaked out...

And honestly we’re talking about the 2000s. Just yikes. We all deserved better than that fashion. We’re also going to be bigger than pointing fingers at those who do actually look like Easter Eggs from time to time. 

To conclude (which Wilson also neglects to do), here at Hill on Heels we believe that beauty is bipartisan. Fashion goes beyond party lines. Because truly the issue of DC fashion and its many interwoven nightmares of propriety, is and are a lot to bite off for an article advertising a sartorial book about a fashion road trip (that we will probably hate-read). Pseudo anthropological mockery doesn’t get you very far when you start to look at the women actually in the offices, instead of drawing from pre-established stereotyped cartoons you have in your head. 

Despite what the likes of Wilson would have you think, pretty little collared button up things, and black skirts are not a prison to which ladies on the Hill have been condemned. Quite the contrary, they are a basic platform on which to begin, a firm foundation that allows for efficiency or nuanced self expression in all its many forms. Give me tights, give me scarves, give me arm candy, give me gorgeous blazers with perfectly cut lapels. Fashion is what you make it. That’s power.  Wilson instead chose the easy and predictable narrative of female victimhood.

P.S. We did a little research on the current state of fashion in the district since Wilson seems to have forgotten to do so while flying by the light of her own biased observations. I will be the first to admit that I too have biases and predispositions, however I would like to think that when writing about a subject for a news organization one would try to gather as much information to discern the truth before throwing together a sloppy summary of personal assumptions. 

A nice round up of fashion bloggers in the DMV from 2011 by The Washingtonian

2013 CBS local highlights five fashion blogs 

And TIME, defending D.C. Fashion Week

P.P.S. 

We invite you, Carrie Bradshaws lost in Abu Dhabi super markets, to the congressional halls, to come and see behind the burqas.

I believe in pink. I believe that laughing is the best calorie burner. I believe in kissing, kissing a lot. I believe in being strong when everything seems to be going wrong. I believe that happy girls are the prettiest girls. I believe that tomorrow is another day and I believe in miracles. -Audrey Hepburn

You walk to lunch blasting Nicki Minaj through headphones and decide that you don’t actually like the taste of kale even though you swore to Jessica it was changing your life. You wore pink to work, and you feel good.