‘Dad’ fashion is sheer laziness
It’s easier to call your 30-something partner’s inability to make themselves look nice ‘‘dad fashion’’ rather than ‘‘laziness’’, writes Tess Nichol.
Cast your mind back to the heady days of 2015. National was marching its way to the end of nine long years in Government. It was still up in the air whether climate change would kill us all. And everyone was furious at that dentist who killed Cecil the lion. In many ways, a much simpler time.
It was also the year beer bellies got a rebrand, with the cutesy idiom ‘‘dad bod’’ emerging to describe men with a bit of a pukunui rather than rock-hard abs.
The term’s origin is credited to a post at Odyssey, an American website full of crowdsourced, unpaid, weirdly specific and often unintentionally hilarious posts, the bulk of which are submitted by US college students.
The site’s reach is unusually large, considering the low quality of most of its submissions. Last March, a woman went viral after posting ‘‘You May Have Worn the Prom Dress With Him, But I Get To Wear The Wedding Dress’’, an almost unbelievably jealous ode to the girl her fiance loved before her, which amused and alarmed the internet in equal measure.
Three years before that, in her post ‘‘Why Girls Love the Dad Bod’’, Clemson University student McKenzie Pearson coined a term which was embraced so wholeheartedly it endures to this day. ‘‘The dad bod says, ‘‘I go to the gym occasionally, but I also drink heavily on the weekends and enjoy eating eight slices of pizza at a time,’’’ she wrote, admiringly. ‘‘It’s not an overweight guy, but it isn’t one with washboard abs, either.’’
So, just a normal guy then?
Much like the dad bod itself, dad-centric terminology has spread. By the end of 2018, BuzzFeed had declared ‘‘dad shoes’’ (sensible, chunky white lace up sneakers), ‘‘dad hats’’ (sun smart caps) and ‘‘dad shirts’’ (hideously patterned button-down shirts or block-coloured, slightly oversized collared rugby jerseys) its favourite trend of the year.
The style seems more or less a revival of the ‘‘normcore’’ trend, which saw style arbiters elevate basic, practical garments (Teva sandals, anoraks) to the realm of high fashion.
Think Justin Bieber and his seedy little moustache, cap pulled down over greasy hair and baggy short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt tucked into high-waisted pants. Think Chance the Rapper in a billowing zip-up windbreaker and white lace up sneakers with an almost excessive amount of arch support.
The whole look is about taking the genuinely fashion-free aesthetic of every father who says ‘‘OK guys, let’s rock’n’roll’’ before each car trip, and transplanting it onto celebrities who actually care very much what they look like – unlike the dorky dads who’ve inspired their ensemble to start with.
Fashion is cyclical so the anti-fashion revival makes sense, but isn’t reframing a daggy and extremely low maintenance aesthetic for men a bit of a cop out? I don’t want to be a feminist killjoy about this (just kidding, I love being a feminist killjoy!) but the ‘‘dad’’ label seems suspiciously like a very successful ploy to repackage male mediocrity as something cute and quirky.
It feels like a way for women who date men to disguise their boyfriend’s slobbishness in order not to feel depressed by it. After all, it’s easier to call your 30-something partner’s seeming inability to make themselves look nice ‘‘dad fashion’’ rather than ‘‘laziness’’.
It’d be easier to be kind about the trend for dad bods if there was a similarly affectionate term for women’s bodies. But while we reassure guys that the decidedly average bodies they were already allowed to have are great, a friend who’s now in possession of a mum bod, talked to me, post-partum, about the efforts she’d gone to to avoid stretch marks while pregnant and the mild panic she’d felt every day the baby stayed in her tummy past its due date, because she’d read in online forums that sometimes lines could appear without warning right at the end of a pregnancy.
Compare the celebration of celebrity dad bods to the scrutiny famous new mums are put under to assess whether or not they’ve ‘‘got their body back’’ weeks after giving birth.
It’s pretty annoying that, while women are worrying about what the incredible feat of growing another human being might do to their bodies, men are being encouraged to really lean into that developing beer gut. To frame our wholesale embrace of the dad bod as some kind of win for the average Joe looks past the fact he was already doing pretty well to start with.
By the way, that same friend took her baby out a week after she was born, wearing perfectly applied red lipstick. So guys, I’m sorry: you’ve got no excuse for wearing a hoodie to meet your girlfriend’s parents.