Dressing for the Male Gaze, the Female Gaze, and All the Gazes In Between

What women’s attire appeals to straight men? Straight women? Lesbians? And more…

Perhaps in the past few days, some of you took a survey to rank the following female outfits based on your own preferences. Well, today I’m writing about the results!

When I took some gender studies courses in college (don’t make fun of me, please, it was required for my major) it seemed that the most important 101 concept for us to grasp was the idea of a “male gaze.” I may be butchering this since I admittedly got a C in these classes, but I guess the idea is that our society is built around women being looked at, and women constantly perceive ourselves as we are perceived by men. Men do the looking, women are looked at, many such cases.

Oh, so it’s fine when men of society look at women, but when a guy puts a camera in the women’s toilets, suddenly he’s a “pervert?”

Anyway, the “male gaze” has become short hand in fashion circles for dressing for men. This is largely seen as a bad thing. The dogma of women’s fashion is that you should first and foremost dress for “yourself,” and if you should dress for anyone else, it should be other women. This fashion “strategy” has been dubbed “dressing for the female gaze.” The assumption is that the male gaze revolves around revealing, skintight, boring clothing that’s often fairly dated, while the female gaze is Doing Fashion Right, showcasing your style with confidence and class. This could mean dressing in frilly, colorful dresses that don’t show cleavage, or wearing a chic minimalist pair of wide-leg trousers and a blouse. But basically, if you want to actually have style, dressing for the male gaze is a problem.

While I have plenty of issues with this framing, I don’t totally disagree. At this point, especially if you’ve read my fashion journey article, you probably know how I dress. And most of the time, I dress in a way that I enjoy, but that I hope my husband also likes. That being said, I know what he really likes, and if it were up to him, I’d be wearing high-waisted tight pants or jumpsuits for everyone occasion (never dresses.) This, for example, was an outfit he considered very cool. I found it a bit boring:

This was an outfit that he acknowledged looked nice, and he was glad it made me happy, but when asked, he said he wouldn’t have picked it out himself, and he actively disliked the coat (don’t worry, I asked him. I find this stuff interesting. He’s not being mean!)

But…notice anything odd? Maybe my husband preferred the first outfit because he likes pants, but the second outfit is probably still, on some level, dressing for the male gaze, even if I’m doing it “for myself.” Like, I’m not trying to attract random men on the street, but the “male gaze” is so ingrained in what we find attractive that an outfit I wear “for myself” includes a mini skirt, a crop top, and platform high heels. While there are probably some variations in what straight women versus straight men find appealing in women’s fashion, a lot of what we think looks good ties back to fundamental truths about attraction. For example, while men might generally prefer more revealing clothes, most women still like wearing clothes that define their waist, because a defined waist is just…part of conventional attractiveness. AKA: the dreaded male gaze.

This is why you find so much disagreement around particular styles, which are ostensibly worn by women, for themselves or other women, but which get the accusation of pandering to men—and not just men, but perverted men. Think: Lolita styles—you know, stuff like the below image. Is this for women? Is it for men? Is it for creepy men?

I wanted to figure all this out, so I surveyed over 5,000 people of all genders and orientations. I wanted to know: what are the clothes that straight women and straight men most disagree on? Is there a lesbian gaze, and if so, how different is it from a male gaze? Are millennial men more likely to prefer “dated” clothing that reminds them of their teens and twenties?

Just as a sneak peak question, which of the following outfits do you think straight men liked the most?

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