It’s a given that women are treated as sexual objects in the media and in everyday life. Look at any TV show or magazine. Look at the feminist memes floating around your Facebook feed.
But women’s clothing is highly sexist in itself. Yes, I mean the garments.
Not just because women’s clothing includes things that mens’ clothing doesn’t include. Not just because women’s summer staples are supposedly teeny shorts and tiny tops. Or because sandals are designed to show off our painted toenails and stilettos are designed to push our hips forward. Not just because we’re expected to color our hair to look younger and to make up our faces in conformist masks.
Sexism in women’s fashion runs much deeper and is much more fundamental than these usual suspects.
Men can easily buy high-quality, long-lasting, wardrobe-staple, style-heavy and fashion-defying clothing. The oxford-cloth dress shirts my dad stopped buying when he retired twenty years ago haven’t gone out of style. He can put one on and no one will guess that he didn’t buy it last week. The loafers and brogues he bought thirty years ago still look like new (weekly polishing), and he can buy exact duplicates today. His wool sport jackets from the sixties and seventies and eighties are in good shape and don’t look like fashion travesties. His ties are a little dated, to be sure. But he can wear his Liberty ties from the seventies and eighties. They’re vintage now.
That’s what happens when men buy well. They can wear their clothes for decades. Their clothes hold up and they don’t look dated. My dad didn’t have to buy in New York or London or Rome to get this result. He just went to the better-quality men’s store at the local mall.
Women’s fashion is designed to be, well, fashion. It’s designed to be highly decorative, of the moment, and then to be discarded and replaced with something else.
Can you wear a woman’s suit from the eighties without feeling (and looking, let's face it) absolutely ridiculous? Those blinding colors! Those shoulders! Can you wear a woman’s day dress from the early sixties—with its gloves and stockings and jacket and hat and matching purse and shoes—unless it’s for cosplay? Can you even wear those skinny jeans that seem to be the only type of jeans you can find? Really, you can wear them? Really? (Just because you can wear them doesn’t mean you should.)
Look at women’s watches—as I’ve been doing lately. They’re really jewelry. I dare you to find one that you can actually read (yes, my eyesight isn’t what it used to be) and that you can expect to last several years. Women’s watches are high on fashion—what material the band is made of, the style of the band, the color and material of the face—and short on utility. Men’s watches are high on visibility and durability. (Oh, and they’re high on extra bells and whistles, like stopwatch and time-zone calculation functions.)
Look at women’s shoes. Is there something like a women’s brogue, something long-lasting that you can wear for decades if you maintain it properly? No. A brogue is a popular women’s style right now, but they’re all of the moment, with heels and in right-now colors and made of short-lived, high-maintenance materials, like pale, lightweight suedes. Women’s “brogues” have grown far away from their sturdy walking-shoe roots—a history that men’s brogues still maintain.
And look at women’s shirts—I’ve been hunting for a really good woman’s button-down shirt. Can’t find one. Women’s button-downs for officewear are often made of linen and rayon and silk, so they have to be maintained carefully—and expensively—throughout their useful lives. Their colors and tiny style details change every year, so you can’t wear them for long without looking dated. And they’re often too short to stay tucked in. (I guess designers think that a woman working in an office doesn’t need to turn, bend, or even sit.) For casual wear, women’s button-downs are shown as outerwear accessories, worn belted over shells, fashionable alternatives to sweaters. Oh, and they’re made of linen and rayon and silk.
I recently bought a women’s shirt from Thomas Pink. I had high hopes walking into the store. But I learned that they only offer a couple of women’s styles. (The shop is famous for offering multiple fit options, letting them match every peccadillo of their male customers’ bodies.) I was promised that the collars wouldn’t curl, even though they don’t offer collar stays with their women’s shirts. (Of course un-stayed collars curl. It’s just a fact, like gravity.) I’d hoped to be able to choose among the several fabric weights that they offer men, but their womens’ styles only come in one weight—heavier than most women’s shirts, but lighter than their best mens’ shirting. The shirt is really good quality—for a woman’s shirt—but not the dream come true I’d hoped for.
I want to be able to find clothes and accessories that don’t discriminate against my gender.
That are made well and built to last. Using high-quality materials. That fit me well. That won’t look dated in two years—five years, ten years, twenty years—from now. That are high-value.
That have style, not fashion, as Coco Chanel distinguished.
I guess I’ll have to wait until my next life, when I come back as a man.
No comments:
Post a Comment