"Boy" Cuts: Part II

American Apparel flannel shirts women's vs. men's

Images via www.americanapparel.net

In my last post, I asked a pretty basic question: “why is it that most women’s clothing is designed to either a) show off or b) hide the body, while most men’s clothing is designed to comfortably fit the body?” When I say designed, I want to emphasize that I’m looking at the shape and cut of the fabric, first and foremost, which determine how a garment fits. Let me give a few examples.

Some days, you wake up and all you want is to wear a goddamn white t-shirt. For me, it’s barely a step up from just-not-even-gonna-get-dressed-today,-hope-that’s-cool. It’s also a fairly classic, chic, minimalist choice if you can pull it off. But I think it’s particularly hard to find that just right white t-shirt. My current option isn’t exactly cutting it. It’s a v-neck from (no surprise here) American Apparel, a brand notorious for it’s staunch policies on labor justice and equally staunch ad strategy of degrading women. You know this shirt was designed for a woman because:

1. the sleeves are extremely small and rounded and expose the armpit when I raise my arms;

2. the side seams curve in and back out again at the ideal, agreed-upon “waist” line, in which all women’s clothes wearers are identical (clearly); and

3. the v-neck is designed to highlight a certain partwell, twoof the body.

All of which choices were made, primarily, to show off the so-called female form. It’s something that I find pretty counter-intuitive, given the original motivation behind deciding to wear a white t-shirt. Of course, American Apparel also offers a line of Unisex items. These are cut and sized according to the Men’s styles, like, well, all things considered universal, no?

So. True story. I hit up a Labor Day sale this year looking for classy button-down shirts I could wear to teach. Changing jobs is always a great excuse for shopping. On the advice of some of my closest well-dressed dude friends, I headed to J. Crew’s outlet store in Round Rock, Texas. After meandering around awhile, I picked up a few patterned women’s shirts that weren’t heinous or any shade of Easter egg. The thing is, I’m pretty picky about colors. I like to wear neutrals and primary colors, and in the ladies’ section I couldn’t help but mutter to myself, “Who in hell needs so many kinds of pink?”

That’s when I saw the entire back wall of the store stacked floor to ceiling with gorgeous, primary-colored prints and solids, all folded perfectly, all buttoned to the top. Men’s shirts. Duh.

J. Crew Fall 2013 Style Guide

Image from Fall 2013 Style Guide via www.jcrew.com 

I picked up a huge pile, (after spending considerable time just petting the things. Have you noticed how soft they are? Before you even wash them? I always assumed dudes just broke theirs in better. Nope. And don’t even get me started on the price difference.), and headed with my arms full back to the dressing room. Stopped by a middle-aged sales woman, I was asked if I intended to put my glorious stash of men’s shirts up at the front to be gift wrapped. For a second, I was legit confused. And then I explained, in a vaguely insulted manner, that no, I was going to try these on myself, thanks. She looked me up and down, and then took me back to the fitting room.

Because I suddenly felt a need to defend my non-normative selections, and because clothing salespeople make me nervous in general, I began to explain how I like the colors, how maybe they’ll fit better. To which she admitted, not shamelessly, that she owns several of the men’s shirts herself. “Have you felt how soft they are?” she swooned.

The fact is, the men’s shirts are not just made from better fabric, but are sewn better than the women’s and fit me way better and way more comfortably. Because women’s shirts are cut with a curved waistline that has been standardized so that it fits some idealized woman’s body, I always walk away with the feeling that my waist is clearly in the wrong place. It’s not the clothes that are the problem, must just be me. And I’m not the only one: J. Crew’s creative director Jenna Lyons has her own button-downs custom made.

Jenna Lyons

Image via www.businessinsider.comJamie McCarthy / Getty Images

There’s definitely something fishy about the recent turn to menswear styles among women’s clothing designers that coincides with a consistent blindness to ways to cut clothes that would fit, rather than objectify the body. Even if they follow more neutral silhouettes, boy/tomboy cuts are still about the viewer more than the wearer. Amelia Diamond has a theory of her own about this contradictory trend. She writes, “I’d argue that the lean towards masculinity is, in part, our wanting to divorce ourselves from the oversexed pop media coverage on musicians...so consistently almost-naked that they’ve erased the mystery and allure that the female body used to hold.”* It’s not a bad theory, but off the runway I think the pull for customers is more about comfort than it is about appearance. Even if it's the appearence of comfort that's being advertised. More on that next time.

*Kudos yet again to Rhiannon Goad for the lead.

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