What Do We Wear?
The chaos of women’s fashion leaves us with no clear ideas
LAST week, everyone watching the Met Gala had just one question: What are they wearing?
No, seriously. I don’t understand what they wore (or why). Please explain it to me.
Consider: Katy Perry wore a red burka. Claire Danes wore the pirate shirt popularized on the show “Seinfeld.” Rihanna wore a table cloth with cut outs of other table cloths sewn onto it.
And that’s just three of the celebs that made Vanity Fair’s Best Dressed list.
It’s fashion, we’re told. It’s not for regular people. And, of course, that’s largely right. What Hollywood wears to its fabulous parties doesn’t translate to the rest of us.
The trouble with that is that it leaves women with few glamorous role models from whom to glean clues about clothing, for use on an everyday basis. The upshot: We women have lost our fashion sense and simply don’t know how to dress anymore.
Part of it is that youth culture has seeped into everything. Hollywood is infected the most, and when the celebs copy the kids, it doesn’t quite work for normal people.
Then again, regular folk are not immune to the influence of youth either. And when your mom is Snapchatting herself in dog ears and using the word “cray” (guilty, on both counts), it gets harder for her to go put on her grown-up clothes.
In the Hollywood Reporter in January, Camille Paglia raises a related problem: “Women in or out of Hollywood who dress like girls and erase all signs of aging are disempowering themselves and aggressing into territory that belongs to the young. They are surrendering their right of selfdefinition to others.”
Self-definition is important. What we wear represents to the world who we are. In the fashion world, it’s OK to try to be something you aren’t. But in real life that’s trickier.
During the presidential campaign, much was made of Hillary Clinton’s clothing choices. She’s a classic example of trying to do fashion in a field that doesn’t allow for it. Pantsuits are one thing but Hillary veered into different territory with clothing that looked like Kim Jung-un chose it.
The strange outfits, long metallic jackets and patchwork ensembles she wore might work at the Oscars but didn’t work quite as well talking to coal miners.
Does anyone believe Hillary is walking around Chappaqua wearing her astronaut outfits? Of course not. Who was she trying to be?
The rest of us tend to know that some things just don’t apply to our everyday lives. Now that the push-up bra era is over, for example, bra-free is (once again) the new thing — at least for Kendall and Gigi and other models who don’t have jobs that look anything like yours.
But most regular women know they still have to wear bras. Celebrities can wear cone bras and meat dresses. The rest of us can’t.
It gets worse: Women are fed so many different messages — mostly by other women. We’re told to pick items that flatter our shape, for example. Good advice, right? Wrong.
Dozens of articles reject the word “flattering” as a positive quality. In a piece for the Huffington Post titled “The Word ‘Flattering’ Is the #1 Enemy of Feminism Today” (yes, seriously), Annie Walton Doyle writes that “you never, ever hear the word flattering in relation to a boy.”
That’s false, of course. Jezebel had a piece titled “Why don’t Ted Cruz’s clothes fit him” — on the very topic of Cruz’s unflattering ensembles.
But men may get the word less often than women because men’s clothes are entirely predictable and, with few exceptions, uniform across all body types and lifestyles. Men’s clothing doesn’t allow as much room for error.
In 2015, a story surfaced by a woman who wore the same outfit to work daily. The former art director, writing in Harper’s Bazaar, said she got tired of wasting time every day deciding what to wear.
“To state the obvious, a work uniform is not an original idea,” she wrote. “There’s a group of people that have embraced this way of dressing for years — they call it a suit. For men, it’s a very common approach, even mandatory in most professions.”
Women didn’t run en masse to copy this great idea. They appreciate the individuality that their clothing affords them that men don’t get to have.
Unfortunately, that still leaves a big question: What are we going to wear?