Fundamentalist is a series where I try to understand are the drivers of the industry that businesses must solve
From 2014-2020, There was nationwide backlash of female students’ choice of clothing by K-12 school administrators in the booming years of Lululemon. Administrators started banning leggings and many clothing deemed inappropriate for school. I was approached by female friends in high school asking me to sign a petition to relax the school dress code. The petition was touted as being against the traditionalist, possibly jealous, and anti-progressive values of the administration. But from my male perspective, I can understand why administrators may have wanted to ban leggings.
Controversially provocative, leggings are still worn by many women for daily wear and athleisure; they may no longer be the trendiest fashion (maybe baggy jeans and Victorian-era, abdomen squeezing tops are back in), but they will forever stay in women’s fashion like the bikini. To my girlfriend, leggings are functional and comfortable, but they’re also sexy because of the way it accentuates women’s bodies; indisputably many men (boys) do look at the bottom half of legging-wearing women. Biologically, men like seeing women’s skin; why, I don’t know, but it works really well at bars and hotel lounges for my friends — it’s somehow alluring to men seeing the natural body of women and the best of the features that women as a whole can achieve such as skinniness, curviness, obesity (if you’re in a country that treasures that due to an unfortunate economic climate).
I think leggings are one of the greatest inventions in fashion. Specifically, it’s functional, comfortable, and looks good on women. But it also attracts male attention — which for many women is uncomfortable in many settings and if it’s not from someone that’s physically attractive. It’s why men get flak online for staring at women (and now it’s a meme).
I think the fundamentals of fashion is not just about making someone look good (post-styling) but also selling clothing that are fit for a niche/broad setting. For women’s fashion, it’s about accentuating the female body for the male gaze, styling it for other women to find it cute, and then, once those criteria are solved at a thesis level, tailoring the style and functionality of the product for a given setting.
This is obvious: yea, you want to look good and pick fashion tailored towards a certain setting.
But I want to dig deeper into the thinking. I want to explore how clothing is all about functionality and sex. We make clothes for functionality (e.g. staying warm, having 10 pockets for fishermen) and signaling to an opposite sex by accentuating features on the body or showing a sense of belonging (like a nice watch to signal wealth): tighter clothing for men to showcase muscles for sexiness (I think marriage material is a bit less surface level than that), and tighter clothing for women is about sexiness of women which might correlate with signals of fertility/health.
Why does women’s fashion still need to be cute for other women, not just the male gaze? I believe women are much more competitive with each other compared to men. It’s why you hear “girls are mean” from girls a lot more than “boys are mean” from boys. It’s a topic I’ll explore in a separate post.
Men’s fashion wasn’t just monotone (our only professional outfit is a suit) and about functionality in its overall history; there’s been diversity there too but not to the same extent as women’s fashion. The male gaze matters more for women’s fashion than the female gaze for men’s fashion. When you ask men how they choose a partner, visuals matter a lot. When you ask women, it matters less relatively speaking. Summarily, there’s a drive from the competition with other women, but also there’s a biological underlying nature of Homo sapiens that women are genetically supposed to be pretty to attract sexual partners. In many bird species, it’s the opposite; many birds are “prettier” or are supposed to be the prettier version of female humans. So women’s fashion is a lot more diverse than men’s fashion because of the competitiveness between women but also the need to suit women in multiple settings that can attract male attention (and potentially steal one’s attention away from another woman).
I think female fashion fundamentally must solve for the sex appeal, the nature of women i.e. the competition between women in the aspects that matter to women reproduction-wise, and functionality for women. Every brand solves these to a different degree for each criteria based on the setting. But those are the main criteria and why certain criteria matter more and end up with a lot more diversity than men’s fashion.
So as a reminder to myself, the next time I go out, do not pressure Girlfriend to finish up faster. It’s just in her nature evolutionarily.