On Wed, 13 Jul 2005, Robert Uhl wrote: > ... Which is something I don't get about most modern business > clothing. The entire purpose of clothing is to make one attractive, > and yet there are few things less attractive than business casual for > both men & women.
I can think of plenty of purposes of clothing other than making one attractive. In a business setting, in particular, there are many situations in which a woman does not want to look "attractive" because she is taken less seriously or is assumed to be sending sexual signals. Competent, professional, tidy, tasteful, yes. Attractive, definitely not. And men typically do not find any need to look "attractive" at work; men who go out of their way to look attractive may be seen as interested in something other than getting business accomplished. Deborah Tannen has written some interesting things about the linguistic concept of "marking" and business clothing. In language, "marking" is the addition of a suffix or other element to a word to indicate gender or another quality, e.g. the generic "poet" plus a marker becomes "poetess" and in turn signals certain qualities. She notes that in business settings, men have the option of dressing in an "unmarked" fashion -- that is, neutrally, so that nothing about their clothing stands out or makes a statement about them. In the average office setting this might mean a grey suit and conservative tie, or a blue blazer and khakis, or whatever is considered the norm. They can add to that -- an arty tie, red socks, etc. -- or choose something else entirely, if they wish to use the clothing to make a statement. Women, however, have no "unmarked" option in this setting, because whatever they wear is interpreted (accurately or not) as meaning something. If they wear the female equivalent to the man's suit, it's read as sending a signal of (at the least) their intent to fit in, or to seek power, or to be "masculine," or any of a number of other things. Women's clothing can be variously "cute" or "sexy" or "frumpy" or a variety of other things. Makeup sends signals; the lack of it sends a signal. Short skirts send one signal, longish ones send another. And so forth. In some social settings, this is true as well -- men can rent generic tuxes (which they may or may not choose to differentiate in some individual way) but there's no such thing as a generic evening gown. To bring this back to historic clothing, it strikes me that in many of the periods we discuss here, both men and women's fashions were "marked," at least on the upper-class level; there wasn't always a "generic" that all men (or all women) could wear that would not send a signal. I think I'm only beginning to recognize some of the clothing signals that would have been evident to the period viewer in my eras of study. I know a scholar who has done two books so far on the significance of the clothing descriptions on Chaucer's general prologue to the Canterbury Tales, if you want a good set of examples of cues that the medieval reader would have found significant. --Robin _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
