The F. Word: Fashion and Feminism

Maybe you are not that much into fashion. Neither are we. Still it’s fashion week time, so we thought a little article wouldn’t hurt anyone. Especially not as we are introducing the great Leandra Medine with her fashion blog “The Man Repeller”.

Fashion, that women love and men hate – this is the credo of “The Man Repeller”. Leandra Medines’ blog is a very unusual fashion blog in many different ways: it is rather text-heavy, self-mocking and intelligent. For everyone not knowing what exactly a “The Man Repeller” is, the first post explains:

So, “The Man Repeller” is obviously not s usual fashion blog. In a way it is the complete opposite of every other successful fashion blog: no flawless perfection, no staged insights in her Jet-Set-Lifestyle, no self-adulation à la Chiara Ferragni or Aimee Song. Instead Leandra is a mixture of a ‘comic relief’ and a style icon. In one of her articles she explains “What to wear when you want to get fired from your office job” – explaining what is inappropriate about the outfit she is currently wearing. In another post she goes to Bryant Park to ask men “what they really think about man-repelling fashion”.

The most successful post on her blog is called “Why I don’t wear Make-Up”. It is her way to deal with an email she once accidently got in cc, describing her as “smart, but ugly as fuck, truly a man repeller”. Not only the clumsy sender of the email, also some other loyal followers of Leandra proposed to wear some make-up from time to time. “I noticed that the details of my makeup regimen (or lack thereof) have become something of a hot topic on the Man Repeller Instagram feed”, writes Medine in her post and explains that she is not renouncing make-up for a feminist principle but because she is, drum rolls: lazy.

And that is exactly what “The Man Repeller” is all about. It is not about being a feminist fashion blog. It is more about the fact that women can and should feel independent from current fashion trends or popular opinions. “My eyes will never be blue, my bone structure will never allow for you to mistake me for a Scandinavian model”, she writes in a very popular post. “I am who I am and even if that infers ‚ugly as fuck‘, I think it’s, I don’t know, beautiful”.