Fashion: a Principally Feminine Interest

Exploring the not-so-superficial reasons we love clothes

As Mary Stanford argued convincingly in a recent piece for Fairer Disputations, Women tend to see their bodies as themselves, rather than as a possession or tool. Drawing upon the thought of Edith Stein, Stanford says, “By sensing that her body “is” her, a woman highlights the body’s capacity to represent, to “show,” the person.” Inspired by her piece, I will explore why fashion is a principally (or stereotypically) feminine interest, incorporating the ideas of Martin Buber and John Paul II.

The creative process of getting dressed is not a frivolous preoccupation, and neither is it vain, though it can become these if not pursued with virtue. Rather it is a deeply human attempt to communicate the truths about our Selves that are invisible and inarticulate. The female body, with its maternal capacity, is a symbol of the purest human communion, and therefore woman is more often concerned with the fundamental questions of fashion.

Martin Buber’s “All Living is Meeting”

For Buber, the origin of our concept of Self is in the eyes of the Other. In other words, our interior life begins when our question of our own existence is met by the recognition of ourselves we see in the faces of others. Thus the Self is never isolated, it is always relational.

The relational is the starting point of our cognition and reason. When I hold my 6-month-old daughter up to the mirror, I can see her apprehending that she is not me. Upon seeing herself she is both surprised and amazed to see that she exists, and then smiles or laughs and looks for my reaction as a way to question and then affirm what she is seeing.

 What I want to examine here, is the moment the Self apprehends another self—in order for my baby daughter to understand herself as a Self, she must first see me. Martin Buber has a compelling philosophy of this phenomenon, and he calls it “I in the Face of Thou.”

This relationship between I and Thou is the way we understand our own existence. Buber says,

“When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing for his object. He takes his stand in relation….If I face a human being as my Thou, and say the primary word I-Thou to him, he is not a thing among  things, and does not consist of things. “

For Buber, if we wish to avoid objectification of persons, it is impossible to say I without acknowledging the relational aspect. What he calls the primary word, “I-Thou,” is symbolic of this acknowledgement. Another phrase of his, “all living is meeting,” illustrates this beautifully and succinctly. To say all living is meeting is to rightly identify communion with others as the central and essential part of our lives.

Female Fertility as a Complete Experience of Meeting

It would seem therefore that as sexed bodies women and men experience the relational I-Thou differently. Woman’s experience of I-Thou is made different by her maternal capacity to bring forth new Being from herself, because she has the potential to contain within herself the primary word I-Thou completed. If “all living is meeting,” then a woman’s body mediates meeting in a particular way, because with her body she is able to bring into existence those whom she meets.

The body presents to us a reality that is not entirely material, John Paul II says “it expresses the person in his or her ontological and essential concreteness.” When a woman becomes a mother, her body also becomes a symbol of her child, a symbol of both I and Thou, an unseen and yet complete relation of persons.

This is not to reduce woman to her body, rather to emphasize the reality that women experience embodiment in a very different way than men. But perhaps it also offers an explanation for the tendency of women to reduce themselves to only their bodies.

As Stein writes,

“The mysterious process of the formation of a new creature in the maternal organism represents such an intimate unity of the physical and spiritual that one is well able to understand that this unity imposes itself on the entire nature of woman.”

Buber himself references pregnancy when expounding upon his theory of I-Thou relation, saying that I-Thou arises from “purely natural combination,” giving the example, “the antenatal life of the child is one of purely natural combination, bodily interaction and flowing from one being to the other.”

Since a woman’s body can facilitate the experience of purely natural combination as no masculine body can, it is reasonable to assume that this would lead to a particularly feminine concern for the body, because the woman views her own body as a vehicle for the true communion of an I-Thou relationship with another. Hence, her particular concern for its vestments.

Clothing As a Mediator of Relation

Pope John Paul II, in his Theology of the Body, gives an interesting treatment of the introduction of clothing to our first parents. He explains that the author of Genesis included the detail that Adam and Eve did not feel shame at their nudity as a descriptor for us of their wholly reciprocal relation to one another. The Biblical author wants to emphasize that between Adam and Eve, the I-Thou is so pure that there is not even the slightest possibility for objectification, that their Selves are entirely relational and therefore entirely fulfilled and capable of life.

John Paul II goes on to say that the shame they experience after they sin, which drives them to create clothing for themselves, is a “boundary experience.” In other words, the I-Thou is no longer inseparable, there has been a little barrier put between the two, and this barrier is built of shame. He also calls it a “threshold experience,” having a built a doorway between the I-Thou where there was none. Now a shiver passes when you cross this threshold.

Clothing finds its origin in the barrier introduced into the I-Thou relation, in the shame-inducing threshold experience. There must therefore be some way of wearing clothing that best mitigates or facilitates the I-Thou relationship instead of inviting that which shame tempts us to, the I-It of objectification.

In Roman Meinhold’s Fashion Myths, he says that we “self-stage” with clothing.

He makes the pertinent point that “clothes are physically closer to the human body for the longest periods of life than ‘one’s neighbor,’ and this neighbor also uses clothes when trying to orientate himself in relation to others.” We use clothing in an attempt to make the I more recognizable in the face of the Thou. Clothing is an “it” that builds the I into something capable of facing the Thou in the first place. It can facilitate meeting; it attempts to restore communion. This begs the question:

How does one use clothing properly, so that the self isn’t abstracted by this necessary object but rather brought out more fully in the face of Thou?

Woman’s unique I-Thou experience Informs her Interest in Fashion

Since woman’s existence is particularly bodily, and concerned with the purely natural combination that can exist between persons, this question weighs more presently on her mind than on the masculine psyche. The woman’s body is not a tool to her; therefore her clothes are not just meant to keep her warm, rather they are an important way that she can communicate and perceive the unarticulated realities of personhood. Buber says that “all living is meeting,” and I argue that all clothing is a mediator in this meeting. Should it not be a gateway to true communion rather than an unscalable wall?

This is the crux of the characteristically feminine love for fashion. Fashion is often very irreverent of the person, denigrating the human body and suppressing any potential for an I-Thou relationship. But fashion as it ought to be acts as an opportunity to use our bodies to commune with one another.

Take the agony of “not having anything to wear.” Though one may quip about this nearly universal female experience, it illustrates what we are often unable to articulate about our sartorial choices. To get dressed is to prepare oneself to meet others in the purest sense of the word; to get dressed is to present oneself as we understand ourselves to be in hopes that the other will truly perceive us. Woman, as ontologically distinct from man in her maternal capacity for purely natural combination with another, finds herself occupied with clothing and fashion as a means by which she may approach the communion of persons that she experiences in motherhood with those around her.

For woman, an interest in fashion is far from foolish, it is paramount for healthy human relationships. A new feminist movement that is sex-realist and seeks to support women’s interests would do well to applaud those in the fashion industry who create clothing that is worthy of facilitating the relationships that women desire and that society needs. Sex-realist feminism would also do well to lean into fashion as a women’s interest, thereby acknowledging that woman’s bodily experience is unique from man’s, and in hopes that fashion that holds reverence for the female body may in part heal the division between the sexes that feminism has for some decades encouraged.