This article is more than 7 years old
This article is more than 7 years old
Empowerment lies in creating things, not in ripping out body hair. Please don’t give us Brazilians in place of buttons and bows
John Lewis is Debenhams for people with labradors, and they’ll never get my pubes.
Having grown up in a city without one, I have often been struck by the cult-like way in which people talk about John Lewis. I have seen grown men brought almost to tears discussing its bedding selection and choice of lightbulbs. I’ve sat through literally hours of office chat about its “never knowingly undersold” commitment and geisha-like customer service. I’ve heard it’s where people have their wedding lists.
All of which makes the fact that John Lewis is moving into the sticky-fingered business of bikini waxes all the more disquieting.
Now, let us be clear – your hair is your hair and you have complete authority over what you do with it. You can thank the My Body, My Rules school of feminism for that. But, when it comes to the decision between haberdashery and hair removal, I’m afraid I have to take issue with the latter.
When the Sunday Times, after interviewing John Lewis’s new managing director, Paula Nickolds (who in fact started her career in the sewing department of the organisation), says that the “traditional products, including hats and haberdashery, are being downgraded in favour of new services, including holidays, in-store prosecco bars and bikini waxes” it makes me want to weave myself a row-boat out of leg hair and sail away to the horizon.
John Lewis today reassured customers that they “have no plans to close or downgrade our haberdashery departments. Haberdashery is woven into the fabric of our business and there are no plans to unstitch it.” But such rumours are unnerving, not least because the better part of life lies in creating things, not ripping them out. As women – and let’s be honest, women are more likely to be booking in for John Lewis bikini waxes than men – we should aspire to be making things, rather than removing them. To sew your own is an act of creative independence; hair removal and prosecco bars simply fuel the endemic belief that our bodies are flawed and we need “professionals” to fix them or drown our sorrows.
The idea that shopping and “pampering” are a “leisure day out” as Nickolds claims, is a bare-thighed lie. There is nothing leisurely about disliking your own legs. There is nothing relaxing, luxurious or indulgent about covering your nadgers with hot wax and ripping out the evidence of an adult, mammalian body. I’ve had less painful rock-climbing accidents than the one time I tried to wax the back of my thighs. And at the risk of going full Trotsky on your nether regions, the removal of pubic hair is yet another way that capitalism plays on personal insecurities to make money from your body. And we don’t have to go along with it if we don’t want to.
On the other hand, taking on the active, creative, expressive role of maker is genuinely galvanising. In June I went to Berlin for the summer, armed with little more than my sewing machine. Over the next three months I created almost everything I wore with my own hands. There was a dress made from antique soviet linen bought on the corner of Boxhagener Platz, a pair of trousers made from Neukölln cotton, a bridesmaid dress made from a roll of silk found behind a box of potatoes at the Türkischer Markt, numerous jumpsuits, shorts, shirts and vests – all made on my bedroom floor using a machine I inherited from my great-aunt Margaret. Those items weren’t only cheap, didn’t just fit me, didn’t just keep me off the streets for an hour at a time, but will serve as a lifelong reminder of a wonderful trip and the fact that, despite what the fashion industry may tell us, we can all do it ourselves.
Many of my friends would no doubt be thrilled to their very pudenda at the idea of a John Lewis wax. As leisure activities go, it at least gives money to one of our last employee-owned companies and might be more fun than pole-dancing classes or throwing up sambuca into a sticky bin outside Flares. But my generation needs materials, tools and the confidence to do it themselves, not “me time”, prosecco and plucked genitals.
When tearing out your pubic hair and slapping on grease become genuinely uplifting acts of self-empowerment then sports societies will stop using them as hazing initiation rites. In the meantime, you’ll find me, crouched over my sewing machine, making yet another outfit. For that is my own personal commitment: never knowingly underdressed.
