The Gaze and the Body: Her Fashion vs. His Fashion

Who am I dressing for? The mirror or the camera? The cohort or the algorithm? Myself or the gazer? (On good days: chiefly myself.)

We’ve labeled these sociopsychological patterns (aka aesthetics) for decades: the male gaze—tight, glossy and overt—and its supposed counterpoint, the female (or interior*) gaze—looser, powerful and artsy. Both, however, are capricious performances of self-editing, revising the body’s first draft in ways the world will understand. They are constructs conjured from the alteration of agency, fluid negotiations between autonomy and appearance. Ultimately, the polarity between label and reality lives in intention, not in attention.

I asked a few people how they think about it. Sanaa, a psychology major, phrased it most elegantly: “Dressing for the male gaze, for me, is like dressing to be felt wanted, desired, seen and yet, being in control of exactly how you want to be perceived. Dressing for the female gaze is being effortlessly confident. It’s being comfortable with yourself and owning your individuality. It’s being playful, cute, confident and radiant, all at the same time.” Her words were lucid, and what struck me most was how both gazes hinge on twin forces of ‘confidence’ and ‘control’.

That’s precisely where I think we’re missing the point. We’ve grown accustomed to objectifying intention itself: blaming women for dressing for the male gaze and men for dressing for the female one, as if self-expression were a crime of allegiance. The gaze has become a scapegoat, a convenient way to outsource accountability for choice. But isn’t the real question not ‘who’ we’re dressing for, but ‘why’ we’ve made the act of dressing such a moral battleground in the first place? 

Another student remarked, “If dressing for the male gaze isn’t for yourself, then dressing for the female one is.” The distinction, though tidy, struck me as too binary; too eager to moralize one mode as vain and the other as virtuous. 

Sid, a Statistics and Data Science major, joked lightheartedly, “Male gaze means I’m showing muscle. Female gaze? I’ll wear whatever my girlfriend tells me.” Beneath the humor was candor: proof that the gaze isn’t gendered.

I think we work too hard to make fashion a moral metric. Social media, ever the amplifier, turned those dichotomies into hierarchies. The “hot girl” aesthetic became reviled as vain, while the “clean girl” aesthetic was valorized as feminist. Society loves its labels and their influence is discernible across every social paradigm. For example, these ideas are married into institutions like profession, religion and culture alike: “She’s premed; she could never wear that.”. While some of these distinctions hold true by the metric of age and maturity, and there is a time and place for social decorum, much of it feels overused, blurred and weaponized. The truth is simpler than the theories that shroud it. Sometimes, I just want to wear something that might be coded as the male gaze, but it’s entirely for me. Because I love my body! Because I feel confident in it! Because I can!

What fascinates me is how these styles are framed as moral opposites when, in truth, they’re dichotomous reflections of the same psyche—each standing at the cusp of control. Neurosocially, this duality is almost predictable: the pursuit of validation, whether through desirability or distinction, activates the same mesolimbic reward circuits that regulate pleasure, risk and recognition. The gaze may differ, but the dopamine doesn’t.

Fashion, then, becomes a dialect of corporeal yet conceptual. Yes, it can be commodified, its impact diluted by ubiquity and repetition, but its ownership remains resolutely personal, belonging to the wearer alone. A corset may be subjugation or sovereignty; the distinction rests in context. On Halloween or any night, I might want to look formidable. To be called sexy and beautiful, without being annexed by either gaze. That isn’t capitulation; it’s self-authorship. 

I can be coquettish without being complicit, deliberate without forfeiting propriety. So no, I don’t think fashion’s gaze is inherently male, female or even binary. At its apogee, the gaze is not about outward possession but inward authorship. And if we must propound a rule, let it be intention over attention.

*interior gaze –  the act of dressing through your own eyes rather than for someone else’s.

• #changing perspective
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• college
• fashion
• mental health
• politics
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