2025 Met Gala pt 2
I haven't managed to watch part 1 yet but did watch this. I was considering posting it to r/knits but it really belongs here because some of the women did menswear inspired suits that aren't Sluts R Us style but are femme, are pretty and fun and I may wish to revisit this as a source of inspiration.
I REALLY liked the white dress towards the end with wide set black pin stripes and I MUST check that again if I ever actually get a knitting machine and etc. It's terrific and has me rethinking how to do femme office suiting with traditional menswear patterns as someone who is fond of paisley and large florals for myself.
Hands down best look: The guy with the red suit and royal robe thing going on. Other guys are also killing it with the opulent dandy style which would also be a great place to look for great power dressing in a femme friendly style.
I don't think I've linked to this blog on this site previously, but some of my posts on Feminine Character Works talk about clothes and women's issues, such as this one called Dress for Success and it links to a previous post with similar themes.
In short, American women lack good historical references for how to dress as a woman with real power in her own name. Historically, American women either are sex objects and make money that way or the wife of someone in power, which is to some degree a respectable sex object or sex object with more to offer her man than just sex, but it's not power in your own name.
Neither category lends itself well to power dressing as a woman with power in your own name, so American women in business have a long history of borrowing from menswear to try to find some means to dress for success and this too trends towards not really serving us well.
Attractive young women decked out in traditional menswear pieces are often seen as extremely sexy, like Demi Moore in Ghost. Short hair and men's clothing don't hide the sex appeal of someone like that and the impact is to emphasize that she's an attractive woman via the juxtaposition and you tend to not see women dressing that way who are physically not obviously femme.
And trying to take a traditional office suit for men and change the pants to a skirt tends to fall far short of translating or adapting the male language of power dressing to a feminine version that really works for women. It ends up being the Also Ran answer.
Bonus points: Luke Meagher goes on a bit there about African cultural references. I'm a huge fan of respectfully and appropriately borrowing from other cultures and I've not said much, if anything, about it in my writing but African American culture survives the legacy of historical slavery and systemic racism in part because it's not patriarchal.
With Black American men being last hired, first fired and seeing stupidly high rates of incarceration, Black families survive because the mothers, aunts, grandmothers and sisters are the backbone of the family and of the community, thereby giving them resilience that baffles retarded White Supremacist jackasses.
So I have found African American cultural tidbits fascinating and useful as a White Woman who has zero desire to play handmaid to a toxic patriarchy as outlined in this piece of writing by me.
Black American women have ALWAYS worked and Black American culture is much less enamored of the idea and cultural practices associated with the idea that the height of success for a woman is to marry well and then PROMPTLY lose her voice.
The movie The Little Mermaid is based on an older story by Hans Christian Andersen that I grew up with and a central plot point is that in order to try to get the man of her dreams, she must give up her amazing voice.
I find it shocking that no one seems to pick up on this seemingly blatant Freudian subtext that women ROUTINELY give up their own voice when they marry and ALSO that she is trading her single most attractive feature that her object of affection finds wildly alluring for the prospect of trying to keep him.
This mirrors themes of my writing, often found on the above linked blog Feminine Character Works, that men seem to routinely find me wildly attractive for having agency -- or "a voice of my own" -- and shockingly often wish to IMMEDIATELY break me of it.
My childhood memory is that losing her voice lost her the interest of the man in question who didn't recognize her in her human form with no voice.
Similarly, I've consistently felt like "Why in the HELL would I get with a man actively trying to surgically remove the very thing he finds alluring about me so I can promptly become exactly what he hated about all his other relationships???" and I feel it's a factor in my long history of remaining alone post divorce, which I've hand waved off as a lucky break helping me to stick to an agenda of getting healthier because so far, no man has constituted meaningful temptation.
