Why Women's Fashion in Washington, D.C. Is So Terrible—and Patriarchal

Why Women's Fashion in Washington, D.C. Is So Terrible—and Patriarchal
In the schizophrenic work environment of the nation’s capital, female sexuality is both an asset and a liability.
In Washington, D.C., there is an excruciatingly narrow margin for acceptable female dress; all women, no matter how attractive or plain, no matter how many postgraduate degrees they have, or how well they fly fighter planes, walk an inescapable fashion tightrope. Their style will fall into the binary categories of either “dowdy” or “slutty”; there are virtually no fashion grey areas.

LATEST FROM POLITICS


Kevin McCarthy and the Contest for House Speaker

The default answer to this no-win fashion conundrum, for an alarming amount of working women, is to buy their wardrobes at Ann Taylor; a label so ubiquitous in D.C. it might as well be tattooed on the C7 vertebrae of every woman under 60. The line has always offered tasteful middle-management office classics in wool with just enough spandex to vaguely suggest a Sarah Palin strip-o-gram. My shorthand for the look was always “capitalist burqa” or “corporate office submissive”: cubicle-wear of so-so quality for the single girl in her late twenties whose self-esteem has been almost beaten to death by the beauty-industrial complex, and whose decent education has been punished with a thanklessly demanding office job. She’s a can-do Cinderella who has always had to change the oil in her own pumpkin and is too overworked to have a healthy social life outside the workplace. Her outfits must therefore be corporate-respectable, yet body-conscious enough to attract a nice tax-attorney husband.

The Ann Taylor ethos rubs me the wrong way for the same reason I don’t like white women singing “Summertime” or winos drinking cooking extract: Too much vanilla will make you go blind. But the brand is the retreat position for the schizophrenic D.C. work environment, where female sexuality is both an asset and a liability.


Sexy Lingerie Wholesale Wholesale Lingerie China china wholesale lingerie china lingerie