I’ve been going through a dilemma. During another TikTok deep dive, I happened to scroll through my For You Page and found a video made by Erika Dwyer, whom I’ve been following for quite some time now.
Dwyer posts amazing style-inspiration videos focusing on emerging trends and provides overall insightful fashion wisdom to her viewers on ways to elevate their wardrobes in fresh and fun ways.
This particular TikTok — which may or may not have initiated my slight internal spiral — is a try-on style video where the creator showcases different outfits that fall under what TikTok has called the “man-repellent aesthetic.” With the pretty self-explanatory name, I think the viewer, myself included, understands what Dwyer is illustrating.
These are clothes that men hate, and I remember thinking, I would wear all of these outfits.
I feel like since I was a little girl, stalking the headlines of my mom’s People magazine covers, seeing countless articles meant to educate readers on “how to dress for your body type” or “what colours will make you stand out on date night.” But why should we care so much? Are these the important things to keep in mind when choosing an outfit? Why must I wear the most flattering dress or the colours that are most attractive?
It’s no secret that the fashion industry is proven to be misogynistic. According to Not Just a Label, “85% of students from top fashion schools are female, but only around 14% of the top 50 fashion brands are run by women.”
Chloe Laws, a freelance fashion writer, said in her article for Glamour U.K., “On the surface, this all might feel a little outdated and patronizing. Women are autonomous, they are free-thinking and fashion forward, and they do not think about men when they dress! A lot of this is true, on a conscious level, but I don’t think it accounts for certain realities: we live in a patriarchy, men still run the fashion world, and that is going to impact how we dress on a micro level.”
Laws continued, “I’ve always loved fashion, and had a sense of personal style from a young age. I remember one ‘non school uniform’ day, aged 11, my friends wore near-identical denim skirts and ugg boots… It was by no means cool, but it was unique — and I was still at an age where I dressed purely on child-like impulse and without concerns about how other people perceived what I wore. Somewhere in my teens, I lost that, and I began dressing for others. Specifically, boys.”
Whether we would like to admit it or not, to live as a woman within society is to live through the patriarchal subjectivity of and objectification from men. I may not have considered this fact when glancing at my mom’s magazines and seeing the highly problematic captions that called Jessica Simpson fat and Paris Hilton anorexic, but when I look back on how I used to judge the fashion trends of my teens or even from the past couple years, who was I tailoring my fashion choices to?
Famous novelist and feminist Margaret Atwood once wrote, “Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
Or from the words of a man, late art critic John Berger stated in his BBC series Ways of Seeing, “To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men … She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself … She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life … Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only the relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.”
(P.S. I would like to believe John Berger is also a fellow feminist as he was fairly woke for 1972, but that is research for another day).
Accompanying the man-repellent fit inspiration is a viral sound from creator Veronica Shavie, where she sarcastically listed off “ways to attract a man” while showing herself putting on clothes that display the exact opposite. These led to many other fashion influencers partaking in the trend and constructing outfits to suit the lens of the female gaze.
Fashion controversialist and Gen Z style icon Julia Fox told BBC 4’s radio show Woman’s Hour, “Whether I was realizing it or not, I think my appearance was very much to please the male gaze, in a way. And then something happened; I don’t know if it was motherhood or being thrust into the public eye, and I was like, ‘Wait, I don’t want to uphold this anymore.’ I want to dress for the girls.’ And men hate my outfits. They’re so mad that I’m not like how I was on Uncut Gems. I hear that all the time, but I don’t care… because the girls love it. The girls and the gays love it! And that’s really who I’m dressing for.”
When host Emma Barnett comments on the size of Fox’s glam team that came with her on set, Julia simply laughed and responded, “And not one straight man.”
To dress “for the girls,” as Fox does, is to dress in ways that prioritize your personal comfort level without considering anyone else’s opinion.
When asked to visualize the beauty standard through the lens of the male gaze, I’m sure a lot of us would consider it to be along the lines of wearing something form-fitting, delicate, overtly sensual yet not slutty with hair and makeup remaining perfectly manicured all night — a confusing yet expected marriage of effortless clean girl and Instagram baddie.
Is it possible to look like that at all times? Most women would probably say no. And if you answer yes, I definitely applaud you for your efforts.
I will also note that if what I previously described is what you feel most comfortable in, then that is completely acceptable. What is fashionable is completely subjective. However, what the female gaze challenges us to do is to analyze our style habits by asking ourselves, Who am I dressing for?
Now, do men truly have a distaste for my wardrobe? My immediate reaction if the answer is yes:
But, if I really sit with this theory that my clothes do indeed repel the opposite sex, have I done my job in dressing for the female gaze?
If I reflect on my current wardrobe, I realize something. As a 20-year-old single girl living in a city as lively and as trendy as Toronto, is it even possible to dress within the perimeters of the female gaze?
I think I would be lying to both myself and you, the reader, if I didn’t say that some elements of the outfits I tend to wear while going out to a club or bar are certainly more revealing than any other time of my regular week.
But am I doing it for the attention of a man? Or because it makes me feel confident?
And would you sue me if I answered yes to both of these questions?
Now, before I label myself as anti-feminist or a hypocrite, I have gone through a lot of self-acceptance when it comes to the relationship I have with my body. It’s only in the more recent years that I have started to feel comfortable with showing more skin, wearing a skirt that may show a little cellulite, or putting on a bikini without having to convince my inner dialogue that it’s okay that I don’t look like Kendall Jenner.
And that new-found love and positive mental shift in how I view myself in the clothes I wear have allowed me to explore certain fashion boundaries that I dared not cross before. Some of those boundaries include wearing clothes that show my body more.
Laws pointed out, “The male gaze is, of course, not about men on an individual basis. I am dating a man who loves how I dress, my dad has always encouraged my sense of style, and — generally — I don’t think the average Joe I meet on the stress gives a shit how I’m dressed.”
What you choose to put on your body will and should be 100% your choice. If it happens to attract other people, that isn’t a negative thing, as it should be 100% your choice to welcome or dismiss that attention.
I think the one thing I’ve learned overall through this reflection at this point in time, and through my journey of maturing, is that I now seek validation through the relationship with my personal style and not whether some guy tells me I look good (I, of course, will continue to accept and dish out compliments to the girlies always).
Charlotte Jansen wrote for Elle, “The female gaze is not only about what we see, but what we wear, the spaces we inhabit; it’s about the day-to-day details and rhythms that have us in mind … But I believe we should continue to covet the female gaze, to insist on it as a synecdoche for women’s creativity and presence. The female gaze keeps us vigilant to oppression and patterns of domination. To notice the unnoticed and find beauty in unexpected places. To care for those who are neglected. To boldly envision worlds we haven’t yet seen. To honour the rich wells of our imagination.”
So yes, I want to dress “for the girls,” but especially for one girl in particular: myself. Whether I am wearing this:
Or this:
Or this:
Or this:
