The changing face of femininity and the right to choose Lisa Armstrong: 'You can commodify sex, but you can't commodify sexuality or sexiness. You've either got it or you ain't. And the same goes for femininity. Raf Simons's appointment at Dior, announced this week; Hedi Slimane, another designer who previously specialised in menswear taking over at YSL; Miss Universe deciding to accept transgender contestants... we can take it that femininity, or rather the definition of femininity, is in for an interesting ride. READ: Dior's Raf-ish New Look Goodie. I'm a bit sick of the old definitions. It's not that I'm anti-feminine, whatever that is precisely. It's just that I've never bought the notion that you can somehow slip into femininity by pulling on some frilly old tat. Gianni Versace once said: "It's not the clothes that are sexy, it's the women wearing them." How right, and how honest, given that his entire empire was predicated on selling sex appeal. But while you can commodify sex, you can't commodify sexuality or sexiness. Ditto femininity. You still hear mothers and sometimes fathers exhorting their tomboy daughters to dress in a more feminine way, though. Even more surprisingly, you still read fashion articles doling out tips for feminine dressing. Then there's Venus Palermo, the multi-lashed, rose-bud lipped, 15-year-old peroxided Snow White, lookie-likie whose make-up tutorials on YouTube demonstrating how she turns herself into a living doll every day have attracted more than ten million hits - and a whole lot of vitriol for her parody (deliberate or otherwise) of femininity. READ: Yves Saint Laurent confirm Hedi Slimane as their new creative director Well here's some breaking news to add to the Miss Universe shocker. It's the 21st century. Ideals of beauty may not exactly have broadened out to the extent we hoped back in the Seventies, when the dawn of Black Power first challenged the hegemony of Caucasian looks but at least templates of femininity have multiplied. If the Fifties had one feminine ideal - the hourglass whore-in-the-bedroom-domestic-goddess-everywhere else - the Sixties came up with the gamine (Bardot and Seberg), the foal (Shrimpton or Twiggy) and towards the end of that decade, the let-it-all-hang-out earth mother. By today's paradigms, they all projected slightly passive images, but at least they represented the dawn of choice. And that's the point surely. Femininity today is a pick and mix affair. If you want to do ruffles and peep-toes and cleavage and ringlets all in one shot, that's fine but you'd better know that unless you can carry it off with a post-modern Dolly Parton wink or have Dita Von Teese's meticulous eye, a whole section of womanhood is going to find you old-fashioned at best, and probably an object for their derision as well. In some ways, we've gone backwards. Once women seemed able to play with gender boundaries without the wrath of blog falling on their heads. Marlene Dietrich wore men's tuxedos years before Saint Laurent put them on the catwalk and was acclaimed a messiah of style. Ditto Katharine Hepburn. Yet nowadays, the way women dress becomes a matter of virulent debate and hurled insults before you can say chill out, aren't we all meant to be sisters? We're either too slutty, too frumpy, too "surrendered wife," too aggressive. Maybe it's because the battle lines between the different ways women decide to conduct themselves in public are still being fought over. We're constantly hearing how the male of the species has been emasculated by women's emancipation, but what about the way men are invading our territory? They cry openly, they can do the mothering bit when their partners are out smashing glass ceilings and recently, according to the New York Times, they've taken to having bikini waxes in the continuing quest for a hairless Beckham-like body. And no, apparently they're not all gay or models. Yes, they're taking Advil to deaden the pain. Sweet. I'm still trying to visualise the practical application of a male bikini wax. Have I missed some radical evolution in swimming trunks over at Boden? Or has the recent wave-let of transgender and transvestite models broken down barriers between the sexes completely? READ: Male model Andrej Pejic models a push-up bra No wonder 1950s notions of femininity won't quite do any more. Not that the media are giving up on them any time soon. Each new season of Mad Men prompts another cycle of rose-tinted retro fashion shoots. No one wears any of it of course, or hardly anyone, for the simple reason that all that frothy, heavily boned stuff is hopelessly incompatible with modern life. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be allowed to indulge in it when the fancy takes us, because if fashion has made any progress in the past few decades, it has been to provide us with an array of options. That's why I'm genuinely excited to see what Simons and Slimane come up with in their new jobs. Whatever it is, I hope they can cope with female breasts. A lot of designers can't. But the best fashion nowadays squares the contradictions between male and female influences. The resulting balance looks fragile but when it's good, it's strong, pragmatic and very chic. And it works because it reflects women's lives rather than trying to palm us off with pastiches of the past.