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The Chanel runway shows can always be counted on for striking photo ops. For the spring ready-to-wear preview last fall, it was an elaborate set called Boulevard Chanel, where a crowd of fashion models gathered at the end of the runway in very expensive clothes, waving signs of feminist faux-protest. At the time, Chanel creative director Karl Lagerfeld told fashionista.com that he wanted to be lighthearted about feminism or, indeed, any sort of protest, about anything. (In Karl’s defence, he probably hadn’t seen Selma yet.)

It says something about the rapid metabolism of indignance and just the sheer volume of events and regimes that threaten women’s freedom and general human rights that something that provoked such strong mixed feelings and waggling fingers six months ago about trivializing the feminist cause – or co-opting any of the familiar imagery and vocabulary of dissent and agitation for change – has been forgotten.

(Imaxtree)

Well, almost. The key piece from Chanel’s staged mock-suffrage moment – let’s call it the suffragette-chic clutch because it’s so fun to say – has now arrived in stores bearing a slogan that doth perhaps protest too much (or, depending how you look at it, too little): “Féministe Mais Féminine.”

Loosely translated: “I’m a feminist, but … ”

But what, Chanel? But not the kind who wants to be called one, or is threatened with rape for acknowledging misogyny, let alone commenting on it?

Such a chic and cutely glib “but” to accessorize past feminist victories still being defended (and new ones being fought). Fashion had played an incremental but essential role, though hem length has always been the quieter revolution – effective but less impertinent or imperious than demands writ large on signs. I’d have to check with Meryl Streep and Carey Mulligan, stars of the upcoming Emmeline Pankhurst biopic Suffragette, but, along with the signs held aloft a century ago, the clothes on those feminists’ shoulders also carried a powerful political message.

Enter le féminisme and the controversial French feminist novel La garçonne (The Tomboy), which became a sensation when it was published on the same day, in 1922, that the French senate roundly denied women the vote. As the title suggests, the tomboy elements included female free love but were also right there on the cover, which depicted a version of the novel’s androgynously dressed, bob-haired heroine, Monique. She not only dressed (and behaved) a lot like Marlene Dietrich, but looked as Gabrielle Chanel herself did at the time – in sporty cropped hair and soft, wide-legged trousers. Chanel’s provocative designs made the corset obsolete and encouraged women to wear more comfortable clothing such as pants, she said, because women who had to ride a bicycle or walk to work had to be able to forget what they were wearing. (It may also have helped French women forget that, unlike their Canadian and American counterparts, emancipated years earlier, France didn’t pass women’s suffrage until 1944.)

(Imaxtree)

Katharine Hepburn, who, by coincidence, played Coco Chanel in a musical, was a sans-culottes of another sort and similarly understood the language of clothes. Hepburn’s mother was a suffragette who, with her friend Margaret Sanger, founded the American Birth Control League (a forerunner to Planned Parenthood). As a teen, Hepburn had protested alongside them in demonstrations (such as the 1919 march in support of birth-control access for unmarried women).

Hepburn’s early career may have consisted of women in romantic pairings (the ambition-curtailing domestic bliss that followed after the credits was implied), but, in her personal life, she flouted accepted dress codes and protocol even as a young starlet on the RKO studio lot: When when she was told she couldn’t wear dungarees in rehearsal, she took the denim off and went around without bottoms (throughout the rest of her life, she wore custom-made trousers by Valentina). Echoing Chanel’s philosophy, the athletic Hepburn told fan magazines a variation of the same refrain: that she dressed the way she did for the practical, day-to-day freedom. In a 1981 interview with Barbara Walters, Hepburn acknowledged her gesture of sartorial rebellion: “I put on pants 50 years ago and declared a sort of middle road. I have not lived as a woman. I have lived as a man. I’ve done just what I damn well wanted to.”

Girls being allowed wear pants to school (or being able to participate in sports) really only began in the mid-1960s, according to Jo Paoletti, who explores the era in Sex & Unisex, a new study of the social and cultural transformation of gender norms effected through clothing between 1965 and 1985.

In that same era but in another kind of strict schoolyard, the hostess of the New York society restaurant La Côte Basque maintained such an aversion to women wearing pants that the restaurant kept paper skirts on hand to ensure conformity to feminine dress codes. Upon arriving in an Yves Saint Laurent evening tuxedo one evening in 1968, Nan Kempner was famously turned away at the door. She refused to give in and, in a move that recalled Hepburn’s decades before, removed the bottom half and wore the jacket alone as a (very) minidress.

After spotting Chanel’s ready-to-protest stuff in stores, maybe feminist customers can take heart that the spring collection opened not with the offending placards and handbags but with a series of slouchy pantsuits. They were much like the ones the early feminist style icons wore, though probably the least Lagerfeld could do.