Journal: News & Comment

Substance in style

Permalinks to this entry: individual page or in monthly context. For more material from my journal, visit my home page or the archive.

In 1986, when she was nearly 80, the Council of Fashion Designers of America gave Katharine Hepburn an award for lifetime achievement. Hepburn was not a fashion designer, but in the 1930s she made pants (long considered unladylike) acceptable, and then fashionable, for women. My wife wears skirts often enough, but like Hepburn she generally prefers pants. She and other women who do can thank the actress for giving them the choice.

Hepburn is the prototype for the modern, independent, no-B.S. woman in control of her own destiny—the kind of woman I'd like my two daughters to become. Being that way wasn't always easy for others to accept, as Hepburn said herself:

I strike people as peculiar in some way, although I don't quite understand why. Of course, I have an angular face, an angular body and, I suppose, an angular personality, which jabs into people.

Katharine Hepburn died today at 96.

 |