Dress like a girl
By: Samaya DeBose May 6, 2019
The way a woman dresses can reflect her personality, occupation, and wealth; but there is a discordance when debating whether it has the capacity to reflect her gender. This issue dates back to the 20th century where there was heavy debate on whether it should be acceptable for women to wear pants, especially in the workplace.
Today, women in power still face this issue. In response to Trump’s remarks in 2017 there was a new hashtag going around, #dresslikeawoman, which sheds light on current women who dress in ways that represent who they are, not what society says we should look like. This includes female firefighters, soldiers, athletes, police, and women who just like the convenience of wearing pants.
To learn about the expectations people had surrounding of women's attire I formed a couple of questions to ask...
Most of the people who responded to the questions were between the ages of 16-18 and currently live in the city of Philadelphia. So far, the responses that I have show that my peers have scattered beliefs on how a woman should dress which can be influenced by many factors. However, it is difficult to go into depth about the exact meaning of the results due to the vagueness of the question.
From this experience I learned that a lot of people’s views about how a woman should dress vary from each other so I’d like to learn more about people’s personal experiences with expectations on how women should dress.
In future investigations, I’d like to ask more direct questions surrounding expectations of how women should dress like: What are some things that you believe women shouldn’t wear due to their gender? How do you experience the expectations of what women should wear? What is your definition of “dress like a woman”? In this I hope to broaden the view of what dressing like a woman can mean.
Some future trends that I’ve found for women and how we dress: