subject: Defiantly Simple And Non-white [print this page] Daughters and their willfulness, their nerve to want the wedding spider man costume their way, is fodder for many of these writers. Even for those women, or perhaps especially for those women who, like Stanger-Ross, are "appalled" by the white zentai. Or like Michele Landsberg, who recalls in Unbearable Whiteness that when she was young, she was "nauseated" by wedding traditions. For Landsberg, coming of age in the 1950s, the zentai was a measure of a woman's worth in the eyes of society, a worth demonstrated by the maintenance of one's virginity. "My zentai," Landsberg writes, "defiantly simple and non-white, stood for my rejection of a woman's role." Maybe so, but that costume zentai ("silk, with a scoop neck, short sleeves and a pattern of abstract costume zentai pink and green swirls") still played its part as "silent guest of honour," making its voiceless appeal as the representation of the woman wearing it. Or as Adwoa Badoe puts it in Witness In Silk, choosing to reject the white sateen means, for some women, becoming "one who would live her life true to herself." Fortunately, My Zentai doesn't neglect the perhaps more superficial but way more fun aspect of the whole thing - the license to costume zentai up. Badoe herself finds something quite dramatic in peach silk, mid-calf, showing off her matching peach shoes. "When I wore the spider costume, I was smitten with myself," she recalls.
