Dressing with a side of shame

On what's appropriate where/wear

You can’t wear that

I’ve been thinking a lot about shame and dress. About how we decide what’s appropriate where, and how we enforce those (written or unwritten) rules with shame. And how that shame shapes us as we age.

I remember the first day of grade 8 so clearly. I was newly 12, and I was excited to wear a pair of wedge sandals to school that I’d gotten over the summer. They were my first real heeled shoes — I’d had some little-girl heeled dress shoes as a smaller kid, but these were grown-up wedges for my woman-sized feet. I wore them with a black tank top and beige shorts, and I remember feeling like a cool girl for the first time in my life. It didn’t last.

Almost immediately boys were mocking me, and there were girls clearly whispering about me, too. My cool-girl outfit was reading as “slutty girl” or “trying-too-hard girl” to my peers, and they weren’t shy about saying it. I cried when my mom picked me up and never wore that outfit again.

I have a similar memory from about a decade later when I was working the front desk at an office in LA. It was a scorching day and I was once again wearing what I thought were an office-appropriate tank top and shorts. But when my boss spotted the UPS man flirting with me (through no prompting of mine) she came out from her office and scolded me for my outfit. Specifically for my outfit — not, “Hey, I noticed the UPS man flirting with you. Are you OK?” Not, “Hey, sorry the UPS man was being inappropriate just now. I’ll call the main office and have his boss tell him to knock it off.” Instead it was: “Don’t wear such revealing clothes when you’re working the desk.” Period. Full stop. In front of all my coworkers at the desks behind me. I was humiliated.

Why can’t women and girls and so many others catch a fucking break? There’s a whole Instagram account dedicated to documenting this kind of “dresscoding”; the bio reads “Follow for 1-2 reels/week” — that’s how often this is happening that we know about. Dresscoding is rooted in sexism (even the data tells us that) and the author of the IG account (rightly) uses the term slut-shaming to frame the incidents. But I find it so painful to look back on those moments and think, “Yeah, I was being slut-shamed, even though I was just trying to go to school or work in an outfit that made me feel good.”

The target of the shame doesn’t even have to be dressed “sexy.” It’s the mere fact of their body — often the too-much-ness/not-sanctioned-by-the-mainstream-ness of their body — that’s the problem. Maybe the girl has developed breasts early (hi, it’s me) or she’s showing an inch of midriff and she’s not pencil skinny. Or she’s got long legs so all shorts seem short. Or god forbid her bra strap is showing. Or or or. It’s just relentless. The shame/self-policing/lack of confidence spiral.

I know I’m not saying anything new here when it comes to sexism. I just find it helpful, sometimes, to say out loud that I find it hard. Hard to look in the face of my shame when I’m trying to pick an outfit for work that’s not too much in any way and questioning whether I own anything “work appropriate” at all. Wondering if I’ll get a sideways look for wearing mid-thigh-length shorts on a 95-degree day. Worrying that my postpartum body, in all its extra-ness, is allowed to wear this sleek dress or that strapless shirt. It makes me bitter. But saying it out loud is a pathway to change, or at least a way to stop the shame in its tracks and not let it dictate what I put on my body.

In some ways I think things are a little different now — I see younger people wearing whatever they want and looking confident, and there’s been such a strong movement around dresscoding that it gets called out when it happens. That’s the kind of shame I’m looking for — shaming institutions (and the people who run them) for acting like assholes. But in other ways it’s much the same — that’s why the dresscoding IG account is still in business. Maybe I should pin up this 2017 photo of myself and look at it whenever I need to be reminded that I’m the boss of what goes on my body — and I look good.

Even with my postpartum “extras.”