Womens Clothing Trends - Tumblr Posts

I really haven't had time to argue about something this stupid, but I have a school break, so why not at least try to explain it to everyone ranting at me about how I made a personal choice not to dress correctly.

@alethiaii "It's not patriarchy, nobody pointing a weapon at you to force you to wear them during winter, it's you not using your brain."

Right because if you aren't forced at gunpoint to do something, obviously it was a choice made in a vacuum with absolutely no subconscious psychological and societal pressure created by industries and ideologies that continuously create an ever-changing ideal woman for whom subconscious biases create a peer pressure to conform to, right? None of that exists I guess. I should have just walked in to high school in Men's clothing with no makeup and not given a fuck, right? The way my peers would have treated me in response to my refusal to conform would have had zero effects on my mental health, right? In a world full of liberal feminists where the message I constantly received was one claiming that the more skin they showed, the more makeup they wore, the more they made their "own choice" to shave their legs and pravtice their power walk so as to be "sexy and empowered", in a world where I was taught having power meant that your stilettos and eyeliner were "sharp enough to kill a man" as we used to joke, how was I, as a 15 to 18 year old at the time, supposed to have responded to that message?

And if you think this type of effect doesn't happen between women, allow me to post some backup info and thoughts I saw in a recent post:

@siryouarebeingmocked Sure let's run with the idea that I was referring to the past 3 centuries. The context of my post clearly shows that I was talking about recent history when I said a lean or skinny figure is considered the ideal for women, so let's take a look the last few decades beauty ideals in terms of weight and body type for women, as these are the concepts that would have influenced my thought process as a high schooler in the mid 2010s. Here is some more information on that particular concept and how it came about over the last century.

From Viren Swami, Professor of Social Psychology, Anglia Ruskin University

"If we go back far enough in time and look at sculptures created by ancestral humans populations, we get a very different picture of what the ideal body for women may have looked like. Our ancestors inhabited environments characterised by food shortages and individuals who were able to quickly increase their body mass may have had an advantage in terms of health and even fertility. This is supported by the archaeological record of Venus figurines – such as the “Venus of Willendorf” from the late Stone Age – which suggests that between ten and 100,000 years ago, the ideal female figure was robust and round.

This was the case up until the 19th century... In the late 19th century, this started to change. An idealised image of a woman with a slight shape and a small, corseted waist, sloped shoulders, tapered fingers and delicate feet started to emerge in North America and Western Europe. Known as the “steel engraving lady”, this ideal came to be associated not only with frailty, weakness and subservience, but also with high social status and moral values.

In the 1920s, the exchange of corsets for new undergarments that bound the breasts created a flat-chested, boy-like appearance. During this era, the beauty ideal shifted to an almost exclusive focus on slenderness, requiring the use of starvation diets and “rolling machines”. It was also in the 1920s that the proliferation of mass media helped to create a standardisation of beauty ideals in North America and Western Europe. Movies and magazines, as well as Hollywood stars, presented a homogenised vision of beauty and it’s also during this period that we see the first adverts for weight loss.

By the 1940s, slender legs became the focus of beauty ideals -– emphasised with hemmed stockings and high-heeled shoes. Bust size also grew in idealised images and would soon become the dominant feature of female ideal beauty. Interestingly, researchers during this period began to document the first instances of negative body image, with women desiring smaller body sizes and larger breasts.

By the time the supermodel Twiggy debuted in the United States in 1966, the trend toward increasingly slender bodies had taken hold. Playboy centrefolds and Miss America pageant winners all showed a decrease in body weight and hip size, and an increase in waist size, bust size and height between the 1960s and 1980s. By the mid-1990s, this female beauty ideal had become synonymous with the thin ideal, which has remained at clinically underweight levels.

It is certainly true that, in the early 1980s, a more muscular ideal of female beauty emerged – exemplified by broad shoulders. In fact, shoulder pads became became the defining fashion statement of the era, known as “power dressing”. Nevertheless, the focus remained on a thin, slender body shape. Likewise, the re-emergence of particular types of exercise regimens – such as high intensity interval training and weightlifting – has resulted in a more muscular ideal for women more recently, but typically the ideal remains thin.

Another significant change that began in the 1990s was the denigration of overweight women. In popular TV, for example, overweight women were stereotypically portrayed as unintelligent, greedy, and unable to form romantic attachments. There has also been increasing focus on the health risks associated with being overweight across all media. The effect of the combination of the idealisation of thinness and the denigration of overweight has been the homogenisation of a beauty ideal that is unachievable for the majority of women.

Contemporary Western women are exposed to this thin ideal in almost every form of media – from magazines to TV shows and popular films. So it’s no surprise to learn that so many of women in the West are dissatisfied with their bodies. In one large survey of almost 10,000 women in the United States, for example, my colleagues and I found that almost 85% of respondents were dissatisfied with their current body size and wanted to be thinner.

Even more concerning is evidence that the thin ideal is now a global phenomenon, with women in most urban, developed settings – including places like India and China – reporting an idealisation of thinness and a desire to be thinner. For body image scholars, this is worrying because of the overwhelming evidence that body dissatisfaction is a risk factor for disordered eating, consideration of cosmetic surgery, and poorer psychological well-being in general. All this seems to indicate that today’s body standards are indeed becoming increasingly unattainable.

So, have we clearly established that thin and lean was pretty much the ideal body in media influencing my choices subconsciously from 2010 to 2014? I would say yes.

Moving onto the next point made by several people:

"Why did you shave in the winter?"

"Why didn't you just buy warmer clothes?"

"Why would you wear leggings when it's cold out?"

And here's your answer: because society told me that's what I should be doing. And we are right back to the toll taken on anyone's mental health who chooses to strongly stand out from the socialized status quo. (More on that in a moment).

Here is what you might call the starter pack for my high school in 2010:

And here are some photos off pinterest when you search the term "cold winter outfits"

You will notice they are ALL wearing leggings, even a decade later. But let's look at some of their gear. I mentioned the starter pack- it contains what are the target version of Ugg Brand boots. They were not very warm but all I really did was stand at the bus stop in them. Take a look at the other photos now. Many of the women, despite the leggings, have on warm, well made boots made by a brand called Sorel. How do I know they are warm? Because I have three pairs. They retail around $175 to $250 a pair. I have 5 siblings, my parents did not have the money for those kind of boots. My coats were from JCPenny or Kohl's and I didn’t discover sown coats until I was 25.

Nowadays, I wear four layers, my sorely boots, my snowpants, my Columbia down coat, my well made mittens and my hat that is warm but also supports children's cancer research (check out Love Your Melon for more info on that) and I don't give a shit about how I look. But 17 year old me? Let me just post a link from @dykemind on how the pressure of invisible forces might affect your psyche.

So yes. I wore leggings in high school when it was -20° fucking Fahrenheit to stand at the bus stop. My coat wasn't the warmest one on the planet. I wore knockoff Ugg boots and poorly applied eyeliner and skinny jeans that were tissue paper thin. And I did it because everyone else did it.

And yes, the guys still made stupid jokes when we complained about being cold. So maybe it was all just male immaturity. Maybe it was poorly made clothing. Maybe I should have spent any money I saved on warmer clothes brands which I didn't know existed. Maybe I should have snapped out of all the societal influence and made my own choices. But how many female high schoolers do you know who don't stick to the status quo for the most part?

As someone who grew up in the coldest state in the midwest, literally nothing was more annoying than guys mocking us girls growing up for "being a wimp and getting cold so easily". Like, excuse me, but I would like to see a high school aged boy to try and survive a Minnesota January after shaving all the hair off their legs and underarms, while wearing a coat that is designed not with their warmth, but with the transparency of their figure, in mind, and wearing the thin black leggings from Target or Pink or wherever. Not to mention a lean figure has always been made to be the ideal over one for women.