Why is it that women must cover their intimate parts, specifically their chests, while men’s chests are able to be shown freely? This dates back to as far as you can date, to when men decided what women would wear, giving them the power. Women still having to show less skin sticks to the mentality of a society that women are lesser.
Women are and have been expected to cover up their skin and their intimate parts while those parts are actually the strongest and most important of a woman’s body. If you look at Greek art, the Greeks cherished the human body, especially a woman’s body. You can see in statues or in paintings that the women are exposing skin, usually completely nude or bare-chested.
This same idea is starting to shine through in today’s fashion world. Women are becoming more and more powerful in politics and business and creating fashion that promotes women’s bodies, marking a grand movement in society. The fashion industry is starting to break the boundaries of “covering up” that hold women back from focusing on more important issues in society.
A recent fashion line that depicts this movement perfectly is Dilara Fındıkoğlu’s “Not a Man’s Territory” Fall/Winter 2023 Collection. In her show, she dresses her models in safety pins, chains, leather, knives and corsets to showcase the strength of women, while also exposing skin and intimate areas to give the idea of vulnerability.
“Why is a woman’s body a question of everything? Why is it exploited so much? It’s always a topic: what should she wear? What shouldn’t she wear? This is my little dance of revolution towards actually possessing your body back,”
Fındıkoğlu said in an interview with Vogue.
“Not a Man’s Territory” said loud and clear a woman’s body is not for the male gaze, but for the woman herself. The women and designers that are stepping up and making a move in the fashion industry by embracing skin are creating a statement that says women’s bodies are the fashion and they are not meant to be sexualized but admired from afar.
People in the fashion industry: models, designers, celebrities and influencers are also starting to show more skin within fashion. Dove Cameron has been a fashion icon specifically promoting female body positivity. Throughout her Instagram, she unapologetically posts photos embracing her body by showing a little bit of skin.
Supporting women and the right to their own bodies is Cameron’s forte as she released a powerful music video for her song “Breakfast” in August of 2022. It brought the overturning of Roe v Wade and the power dynamic of men on women to people’s attention.
Over the past few years at the Met Gala, attendees and their designers embraced the changing industry by creating pieces that exposed more skin. From the 2022 Met Gala, we saw Vanessa Hudson in a completely sheer gown by Moschino, Lily James in a beaded see-through dress by Versace and Kendall Jenner in a sheer netted tank top by Prada, to name a few.
Across time, art featured women in the nude, predominately the Greek, French and Italian. Greek statues from the second century BCE projected women and their bodies as sacred, exposing their intimate parts as art. One of the most famous Greek statues from the fourth century BCE is Praxiteles’s Aphrodite of Knidos, sculpted completely nude, who is the goddess of love and symbolizes the celebration of the divine female body.
Art like this expresses how the woman’s naked body was admired and praised as an art form throughout history. The showcasing of women’s bodies in fashion today is creating an environment where we can appreciate women as art in a non-sexual way.