Fashion: Where's the Focal Point?

Last spring, as the season of the Shedding of the Overcoats was predictably followed by the Griping of the Elders, John Scalzi posted a cogent tweet: a picture of some "spring fashions" as worn by young women, with a comment like "And they want us to look at their faces. Right."

I retweeted it; you can probably find the picture in his Twitter archive, or mine, if you dig back. Personally I wouldn't bother. However, when Kathleen Timpf posted this...

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/feminists-complain-postcards-normalize-violence-against-women/

I was motivated to post some further thoughts on Scalzi's tweet. (Note that the fashion illustrations above and below aren't exactly the ones I had in mind while writing; they're the closest thing Morguefile pulled up from a search for "women." I've not been paid enough to spend a whole day illustrating a blog post.)

For as long as people have been writing in English, every year, people have noticed young women shedding their winter wraps in spring. (This "unwrap-ture," more than II Thessalonians 2:3 , probably inspired those old bumper stickers, "In case of rapture this car will be unmanned.") Young men have stood about, staring, and older people who resent our blessed immunity to that sort of "spring twitterpation" have grumbled. I'm not all that old. Or at least I wouldn't want to sound that old, if I were.

To the extent that they really are new styles, of course, fashionable clothes are not indecent. The extents to which new fashions may violate church rules, school or office dress codes, or local traditions concerning what prostitutes wear as their working uniform, can help determine the success or failure of new fashions. I’m convinced that the main reason why fashion designers have been screaming “Miniskirts are back!” since about 1980 has been that anything that’s established on 14^th Street is never going to be worn on K Street.And I’m all in favor of it. I found it very liberating to be a young woman in a city where young women could go just about anywhere and do just about anything, without being harassed, as long as we wore flat shoes and skirts that covered our knees.

This brings to mind another observation, also traditional: Dowdy female tourist complains that somebody asked her for a “date” right in front of her husband, to whom she was clinging while waddling around the attractions of Washington in a skimpy skirt and high-heeled shoes. Washingtonian observes: “If you were dressed like that and that type didn’t ask, now that would have been an insult.”

Anyway, Yahoo knows I’m female, so Yahoo flashes pictures of new fashions alongside my e-mail. They seem finally to have given up on the miniskirts—do we have Melania Trump to thank for this?—and started showing dresses. Some of these dresses are photographed from behind to show how much attention they call to the models’ back ends.

Right.

Top-heavy women who are extremely tall and otherwise extremely thin sometimes look more normal-shaped in things that emphasize the shapes of their back ends. Melania Trump can benefit from calling attention to the bottom line.

Bottom-heavy women who are tall, slim, and shapely sometimes look very slinky in things that visually celebrate their back ends. Jennifer Lopez looks sultry in just about anything.

Most of us merely look fat in things that call attention to our back ends, so these dress styles are unlikely to succeed in becoming a real fashion trend.

I see these images, and I think, “You, the merchant, seriously think I’d imagine I’d look like that in that? Ha! Ha!”

But if women want people to look at their faces, wearing styles that direct the eye somewhere else does seem counterproductive.

To those among The Nephews who are, in literal fact, nieces, I say: It doesn’t seem to run in our family, thank goodness, but a lot of people are what are called visual thinkers. Like Temple Grandin, they “think in pictures.” 

She may be autistic, but she knows how to present a respectable picture of herself...

Visual thinkers are most conscious of what they see. No matter how well they do on visual puzzle tests, or even on more traditional math and reading tests, in many crucial ways visual thinkers are extremely stupid and deserve pity. (They’ve actually designed an intelligence test, called "Raven's Matrices," for the purpose of giving themselves an appearance of having higher I.Q.s than other people. If you’re not a visual thinker, you can solve these visual puzzles, but you can’t solve them as fast as a visual thinker could.) They think they know all about things when they’ve scanned what the facing sides of those things look like for a few seconds. They can hardly pay attention to what they’re actually hearing, holding, working on or even saying when something has “caught their eyes.” They are pathetic. It’s not fair to distract their eyes and interfere with their ability to think rationally.

Remember the general rule of sensory mode preference? The majority of people who score high on traditional I.Q. tests (male or female) are auditory thinkers. The majority of sensible, competent women are tactile and/or kinetic thinkers. The majority of men, especially the book-smart-and-life-stupid type, are visual thinkers. A few visual thinkers are distracted by the sight of boys or men, but most of them are incredibly distractible by the sight of young women.

In order to cripple a male visual thinker’s mental processes, a woman doesn’t have to do anything in particular. There’ve been actual tests that showed that male students’ test scores decline in proportion to the bust size of a female test administrator. Men who have this weak point just have to accept it as a cross they have to bear. There are, however, things women can do to make things a little easier—or not. One thing we can do to make things more difficult, if we really want to distract and sabotage men, is to call attention to our bodies with styles everyone else isn’t willing to wear, like the skirts that call attention to the back end.

There are times when this is not an altogether bad thing to do. Say your worst friend likes to tag after you and chat up your dates, confiding among other things that she’s never had a close female friend. A new, extreme fashion look might help your Significant Other figure out what he can do to help you deal with this girl in a spirit of Christian charity. 

But at school...? At work...? Dear nieces, although some of our forebears were full-time professional Beauties and some actually found it liberating to be the less glamorous ones in the family, we all have in common a physical look that makes it hard for people to guess which of the old family photographs was whose. You have that look too. It develops slowly. You may be noticed as being young more than beautiful up to age eighteen or even age twenty-five, but your day will come. Even with your trench coats buttoned up you are going to affect traffic. Have some mercy. Dress...

I won’t say “modestly.” I refuse to say “modestly.” Modesty is a character trait not a fashion look. The character trait is defined by not wanting to call attention to yourself, so if other girls at your school are wearing skin-tight miniskirts and sawed-off T-shirts that show piercings in places this web site doesn’t mention, as a modest person you might go out and get those piercings, as well as the tawdry clothes, so that you wouldn’t stand out by looking like a lady in a crowd of what appear to be sex slaves. So let’s let modesty fade discreetly into a back corner, according to its nature, and think, instead, about what you want to make the focal point of your outfit.

Do you like for men to look at your face, instead of your body shape? Right...you don’t have to wear a tent, but you can put together outfits that nonverbally tell a visual thinker, “I just throw on whatever’s comfortable and suitable to the occasion...jeans that leave some room for scrambling over rocks or jouncing in a saddle, skirts that I don’t have to hike up if I run, shirts that may or may not need to be tucked in.” Decorative effects should be close to your face, like a lace collar, a scarf, or a headband. Wear your colors, which highlight your face, rather than “fashion” colors that clash with your face and “wear you.”

Do you want older women to see you as an adult, not just a dumb punk kid? When you want to be noticed as a person who has her act together, focus on a sort of “together-ness” in your clothes. If there are different pieces of color, matching colors looks “together.” If there are buttons, buttoning them up looks “together.” Clean, neat, well kept things look “together.” Messy punker, Goth, slut, gangster, or gender-bender styles are fine if they actually make people leave you alone at school; if you want the benefit of the doubt, a nice apartment, more hours or responsibility on a job, a scholarship, or an extra week to finish a term paper without prejudice, preppie and yuppie are the best looks.

Do you want to be seen as honest, trustworthy, and sincere? There are those who don’t want you to know this trick. No slick magazine would print it. It works, though: When you’re not on stage or on camera (or in the sort of office where you are on camera), let your real face show. That’s right: no makeup. Women who “make up” their faces “to look their best” are trying to simulate the effect of a state of sexual arousal. This looks “sexy” to men, but it also makes it harder for them to tell when No means No or, for that matter, when Yes means Yes. If you dare, try letting people see the difference between the way you look when you’re watching a boring TV program and the way you look when you’re listening to good music. Your face will change in response to things around you, which will make your face a focal point even if you’re wearing a red shirt.

Some women want people to ignore their faces, their lives, whatever they do or don't do as day jobs, and focus on their bodies. That's their right. If people see you in a bikini when you're not underwater, they understandably think that that's the statement you're making, too. Biking in a bikini, like the models of whom the Femmes Solidaires complained, doesn't give anyone a right (or desire) to beat you up but it does nonverbally say, loudly and clearly, "I wouldn't think being pinched or spanked was a 'microaggression'!" If you want the respect people show to their mothers, choose your clothing accordingly.

Even your Auntie Pris has not always wanted to wear full-length trousers or almost-full-length skirts and flat shoes at every minute of every day, as (some of your) explorations of my closet show...but on the very few occasions when I've worn That Kind of Thing outside my own home, I've kept a trench coat buttoned up over it.