How women dress for other women – Alternet.org

If you can't be better than your competition, Vogue editor Anna Wintour said once, dress better.

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Indeed, new search suggests that women don't dress just to be fashionable or to outdo themselves when it comes to attracting men. They also dress for other women.

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But the quote from Wintours misses some of the nuances that go into the outfits that women choose when thinking of their friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. It's not just about dressing better. In fact, my colleagues and I have found that women can be motivated by another factor: avoiding the slings and arrows of other women.

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The psychology of women's wardrobes

My social psychology lab explores how women manage their social relationships with other women. With my co-authors, Ashley M. Rankin, graduate student from Oklahoma State and Stefanie Northover, graduate student from Arizona State University, I recently studied what's going on in choice of female fashion.

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Of course, men and women take into account a variety of concerns when choosing their outfits: cost, fit, occasion.

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Existing psychological research on women's clothing choices tends to focus on how women dress men. makeup, shoes and colors they select to impress the opposite sex.

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But we asked a different question: how can women dress for other women?

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For more than a century, psychologists have been interested in competition between men. It is only in the last few decades that researchers have begun to seriously examine how women actively compete with each other.

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The competition is not necessarily fun. Like men who compete, women can be aggressive towards the other women with whom they compete. But it's rarely of the physical kind. Instead, social scientists like Joyce Benenson, Kaj Bjorkqvist and Nicole Hess have shown that women are more likely to rely on social exclusion and reputational gossip.

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So we asked ourselves: do women dress defensively to reduce the chances of other women chasing them?

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We know that women who are physically attractive and who wear revealing clothes are more likely to be the target of homosexual assault. For example, psychologists Tracy Vaillancourt and Aanchal Sharma found that women behaved more aggressively towards a pretty woman when she was wearing a short skirt and a low-cut shirt than when the same woman wore khaki and a crew neck.

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We thought that women would be aware of this dynamic and some would try to avoid it. So we tested this theory in a series of experiments.

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Dress defensively

First, we investigated whether people would expect women to be aggressive towards attractive, lightly clothed women.

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We asked 142 people to read a script about two women, Carol and Sara, who met for coffee after signing in to a friend finder app that looked like Tinder, but for friends. platonic relationships. We asked participants how they thought Carol would treat Sara at an uneventful coffee date. Although the scenarios are the same, some people have seen a photo of Sara who represented her as a pretty woman wearing persimmon and a round neck; others have seen a photo of her wearing a low-cut shirt and a short skirt; and a third group saw her in the most revealing outfit, but the image had been altered to make her less physically attractive.

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We have found that when Sara was attractive and revealingly dressed, people expected Carol to be meaner to Sara.

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We then wanted to see if women would also act according to awareness of this dynamic, so we conducted a series of experiments with women of university age and adults from the United States.

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For a set of two studies, we asked participants to imagine that they were going to meet new people in a professional setting, such as a networking event or at a social gathering, such as a party. birthday. They were also told to imagine the event as a single sex or a mixed sex.

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In the first, we asked women to design their ideal outfits for these events, and then we asked undergraduate research assistants to measure the amount of skin revealed. In the second, we asked women to choose outfits from a menu of options similar to buying clothes online. Each of the possible outfits had been evaluated for its modesty by a separate set of participants.

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In both studies, women chose more revealing outfits for social events than professional outfits. It was not surprising. But it is interesting to note that women have chosen less revealing outfits to meet an exclusively female group, whether it is a professional or social environment.

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But wouldn't the most revealing clothes of mixed groups simply reflect their desire to attract men?

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Not exactly. Not all women dress the same for other women. Women who considered themselves more physically attractive were those who chose more modest outfits when meeting a group of women. This supports the idea that they were dressing defensively to avoid being noticed and targeted by other women.

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Because homosexual assault is more likely to come from strangers than friends, in our last experiment, we asked 293 young women, ages 18 to 40, what they would wear to meet a future friend. Again, we found that more physically attractive women indicated that they would dress more discreetly.

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Together, these results show that women don't always dress to impress. They also don't dress to assault. Instead, there is a more subtle social dance that involves humility, hesitation and heightened awareness.

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Jaimie Arona Krems, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Oklahoma State University

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This article is republished from The conversation under Creative Commons license. Read it original article.

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