Elements of a Woman's Dress, Part 2

Examining the distinctive clothing women wear and why we continue to wear it.

As I mentioned, I teach high school and during the school year, most of my conversations are with teenagers, and I work with them as well on various events and projects. This, combined with raising six daughters, means that we are occasionally discussing clothing and why we women wear what we wear, and I’ve had to figure out for myself what it all means. Sometimes it’s just instinct, but sometimes it’s involved research and observation.

I remember working with one smart, ambitious, athletic young girl who was serious about her Catholic faith, and always quite a tomboy. As we prepped for an event where she would be having a prominent role, I told her, “You need to wear a dress.” “Why?” she demanded. “I can’t stand skirts and stuff.” I immediately said something like, “Because God made you a woman, and have to you embrace that, and that means learning how to use the tools of dressing as a woman for His glory.” Her sisters had a style that was much “girlier,” so I encouraged her to find a dress that she liked, even if it was different from what they would have chosen. I still have the pictures from that event: she looked both feminine and stunning. Today she’s an Air Force pilot, tough and brave, and unquestionably feminine.

It’s not easy to learn the art of wearing womanly clothing, as countless comedies underscore. And it really is an art that does not come naturally to every girl or women. I’m grateful to my mother, sisters, aunts, and grandmothers who taught me how to dress by their example or direction, and who dropped hints when my fashion experiments failed. But many women today don’t have this sort of social capital, and so I think it’s worthwhile to explain why it is that women throughout history have chosen to incorporate certain elements into the way they dress, and to learn how to use them.

The Bodice

Women’s bodies change. We are meant to be mothers, whether physically or spiritually, and recognizing that role nourishes us interiorly. When our cycle begins, our bodies blossom into womanhood and change in shape and composition. The bodice, formerly the corset, was meant to support, protect, and shape a woman’s body throughout these changes.

When a woman’s body stretches and expands with pregnancy, it needs to contract after birth. Again, the corset, of very ancient origin, was introduced as a belly-binding mechanism to bring the woman’s stomach muscles and the interior organs back into place. It helped with posture as well, and even though a minority of women could be foolish about wearing corsets tight to the point of fainting, that sort of silliness is characteristic of some women in every age. Primarily the corset and its accoutrements helps the postpartum, mature, or aging woman keep it all together, externally and internally. Anyone who has experienced or knows someone who has experienced uterine prolapse knows this is no joke.

Pretending through fashion or ideology that women’s and men’s bodies are basically interchangeable or malleable has produced terrible ignorance that is detrimental to the health of women. Aside from the horror of allowing mutilating surgery, the lack of interest that society shows in curing something as endemic and agonizing as endometriosis shows how little a woman’s body really matters to our culture, when it’s not being used to sell cars or cigarettes.

It is also foolish for older women to pretend that they are at a different stage of life then they are, but it is not necessarily wrong for women to do what they can to harmonize the differences between young women and old. The bodice enables a woman to retain a more feminine shape than aging allows, and that is so helpful to women, especially when they struggle with confidence and self-image.

Here is a word on modesty: while it’s common online to speak about how a lack of female modesty affects men, I believe it affects relationships between women even more. It’s generally not recognized that most women have a hard time getting along with other women, and have difficulty getting on the same page or working as a team with them. (There are various reasons for this, which I’ve written about elsewhere.)

Fortunately, usually a woman’s cycle, designed by God, has had the effect of pulling women together, whether it’s a group of women all experiencing the menstrual cycle with the same rhythm and providing each other backup as needed (the reason women carry purses!), or women coaching and supporting each other through pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, postpartum, and menopause. When I became a mom, I was surprised to discover how it was suddenly so easy to talk to any woman: the baby or child instantly became the conversation piece. So if idiosyncrasies and uniquenesses tended in the past to divide women, the physical experience of being a woman at least united them.

But here is yet another way our promiscuous and contracepting culture exacerbates these difficulties: if women contracept, their cycle is disrupted. And if men are constantly on the lookout for new partners and need not stop with one, all women playing that game are immediately in competition with every other woman, especially those younger or prettier. That this game of promiscuity is still played or promoted by elites and influencers and is accepted as a social given today means that women’s fashion too often reflects this. Hence women are constantly encouraged to show more skin and pretend more youth than is comfortable, reasonable, or practical, and this shows up in the styling of the bodice.

A certain amount of variation in fashion among women naturally emerges because physically, women as a sex are more consistent. The matrix of variations of women’s features is smaller, so women’s formal dress is meant to deliberately distinguish them from other women. This is why women’s formal wear comes in a range of styles and colors, but can be sized small-medium-large.

Men as a sex are more physically inconsistent with a much wider matrix of variation: more men can be taller than average, shorter than average, and the difference between their body parts can vary incredibly — which is why menswear needs to be measured in inches. Hence men’s dress tends to emphasize uniformity: a group of men tend to look best when their dress is identical or nearly so: hence suits, tuxedos, military dress, professional uniforms, even the bright and unifying colors of a sports team. If men’s dress promotes unity and union, women’s dress tends to produce a range of harmonious variations.

Matching tuxes and “mismatched” dresses captured by Stephen & Melissa Photo & Film.

But the promiscuous game pits woman against woman endlessly, so that women dressing for an event can be tempted not to synchronize with their fellow women but to consciously outshine all the rest, an endless attempt to be Cinderella at the ball, long before or after the moment for catching princes has passed. This endless fantasy in the end exhausts fashion and creativity, and produces no satisfaction or happiness for either sex. I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis’s dispatches from The Screwtape Letters regarding the demonic goal for women’s fashion as a tool for destroying charity among women and between the sexes:

Since [what Hell promotes] is a kind of beauty even more transitory than most, we thus aggravate the female's chronic horror of growing old (with many excellent results) and render her less willing and less able to bear children. And that is not all. We have engineered a great increase in the licence which society allows to the representation of the apparent nude (not the real nude) in art, and its exhibition on the stage or the bathing beach. It is all a fake, of course; the figures in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full-grown woman to be. Yet at the same time, the modern world is taught to believe that it is being “frank” and “healthy” and getting back to nature. As a result we are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist — making the ratio-circle of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible. (C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Letter XX.)

Men and women who reject the game of promiscuity can still end up unthinkingly mimicking it in how they expect women to dress. Close to skin-tight clothing forces all women to be a certain shape, regardless of who they actually are or what stage of life they are in. It’s honestly just not charitable to saddle each other with these expectations, and it prevents unity among Catholic women, particularly between the generations. Given this, I think the issue is worthy of close examination by any women who are serious about recovering culture and passing on what’s valuable to their youth. (I keep thinking that Christian women need to think far more about fashion than they usually do for this very reason.)

Again, the key to understand “modesty”—originally considered as part of the virtue of humility—is that it should be rooted in charity. Showing too much of one’s own endowments, whether that be a full bosom, shapely shoulders, or flat stomach—could put other women who feel they are not similarly endowed at a disadvantage. That most women don’t tend to enjoy competition and also suffer from a more negative self-image was something wiser cultures acknowledged. Traditional social modesty was meant to allow the spectrum of women to gracefully approach harmonization of their particular beauties without forcing a showdown between old and young, pretty and plain. Recovering some sense of sisterhood among women in this regard would again be a good goal of any effort of culture recovery.

The Veil

The veil refers to any piece of women’s clothing which communicates “There is more to me than what you see.” Women are God’s masterpiece, the crown of creation, according to the Scripture, and yet in every culture, women have chosen to judiciously veil themselves. Generally, women are naturally far less comfortable with nakedness than men, and hence veil themselves, whether that be via a covering for the head, a shawl across the bosom or a skirt wrapped around the legs.

Today in Western culture, aside from traditionalist Catholics and women like myself who veil in front of the Eucharist and the altar, the only time a woman dons a veil with its traditional meaning is on her wedding day.

And we remember there what the veil symbolizes: the bride does not veil herself because she is not beautiful but precisely because she is. She has the confidence on that day to veil herself in preparation for the marital unveiling.

There is a difference between veiling and hiding. Too many women, especially youth, seem to use the comfortable fashions of hoodies and baggy fleece pants to hide themselves from view, even disguising their femaleness altogether. In too many cases, I’ve seen young girls dress this way to protect themselves from being seen, to hide the self they judge is “not enough”—not pretty enough, not endowed enough, not thin enough—to display.

I blame it on pornography, which too many girls have seen at shockingly young ages. If girls come to believe that this is what is expected of them as women, it only makes sense that they would hide! (Or even want to accept being women at all.) The normalization of porn has also had a larger devastating effect on the fashion world. Consider: the elite women of the world are competing with porn stars for the attention of men, and the effect has been poisonous and deadly to beauty and creativity in the industry.

I would say that going forward, recovering the concept of the veil in Western Christian culture is crucial. Again, women veil not because their beauty is sinful, but because it is precious. Remembering the symbolism of the bridal veil, which yet lingers, though robbed of so much of its impact by promiscuity and selfishness, may help.

I choose to begin veiling at Mass when I heard an impassioned speech by a black woman at a Catholic woman’s retreat daring us to veil before the Holy of Holies in the Eucharist. “You know you should be doing it if you believe what you believe!” she exclaimed. I realized that she was right, and from that time on, I’ve worn the veil in church. I don’t veil before men, or in public, but like the angels, I choose to veil before the Creator of the World when He comes to us as Bread and Wine. That also feels like a useful act of culture recovery.

Ornament

Ornament refers to any of the multitudinous decorations that women layer over their clothing— as Shakespeare lists, “silken coats and caps and golden rings, ruffs and cuffs and farthingales and things.” To be honest, this is my favorite element of dress, and I can’t go out in public without my earrings, and weather permitting, a scarf. The same Christian counter-culturalists who often argue that women should always wear skirts and head coverings often also argue against ornament, misquoting 1 Timothy 2:9. And yet it’s clear in the Bible that jewelry and ornaments were widely worn by heroines from Esther to Judith to the bride in the Song of Songs, who are noted and praised for their jewelry—the matriarch Rebecca even wore a nose ring. Obviously in context, St. Paul’s point was that what makes a woman truly beautiful and noble is not upper-class clothing but the content of her character. As full members of the Church through baptism, women should hold themselves to a higher standard: holiness is not just for men.

We women freely admit ornament is not necessary: but here is where our drive to be generous overflows: we wear ornament because it’s fun, it’s pretty, others enjoy seeing it, and it helps us communicate our unique beauty. Also, the skill of ornamentation is the art of drawing attention away from what is less pleasing towards what is more interesting or engaging, and again, this helps a woman feel confident in her appearance and harmonize with women who are older or younger, prettier or plainer. Makeup can emphasize pretty eyes or shapely lips. Earrings highlight the ears and eyes, and can visually balance the face. Necklaces, scarves, collars, ruffs, or embroidered necklines accentuate the neck and shoulders. Shoes and anklets draw attention to the feet and (away from postpartum hips).

Again, since women, unless they are intentional, have difficulty bonding with other women of different ages, cultures, backgrounds, and so on, harmonizing with other women via ornamentation truly helps. So many times have I opened a conversation with a stranger by saying, “I love the ____ you’re wearing” — shoes, necklace, outfit, etc. When someone does the same for me, it usually makes my day.

Ornamentation helps with harmonization: although I teach my daughters how to wear makeup and jewelry, I let them know these are really for older women, because young women don’t need the help. I’ve enjoyed the prerogative of age in this regard to wear more jewelry now that I’m over 50, and few things make me happier than finding a new pair of earrings.

For those who are tempted to think this is all shallow frippery, it’s worth noting how Christian culture has chosen to portray the holiest of women, the Blessed Virgin Mother, in art, and how she has chosen to present herself in apparitions to various people throughout history. While she was on earth, Our Lady might have dressed as a peasant, but now that she has access to a heavenly wardrobe, she seems to enjoy putting on the bling: According to the visionaries, in her appearance to Catherine Laboure, she wore silk skirts. At Lourdes, she had golden roses for shoes, and at Fatima gold edging on her floor-length veil. And let’s not forget that combo at Guadalupe with detailed pink patterns on her dress and the stars on her shawl matching the constellations in the sky at the time.

My daughter, who also thinks about these things a lot, points out that a woman’s dress is the gift she gives to those she is meeting with, especially when she meets with other women. Our Lady shows us this in how she dresses for the occasion. Not only modesty, but generosity and charity, or as St. Paul says, to clothe themselves with good actions as befits women who follow Christ. While Our Lady gives us an example, it’s far more important to act like Mary than to dress like Mary.

And yet the dress has a value. It is a tool, and in these days of confusion and dissipation, it’s one that can be used wisely to save time and energy, avoid confusion, bring about unity, and create beauty. Hence it’s worth the attention of those interested in culture recovery.