What's personal style got to do with International Women’s Day?

Quite a lot, actually. Recently a high achieving and extremely intelligent professional woman told me she resented feeling that she ‘had’ to wear makeup to work. Many of us (me included) completely suspended or reduced our makeup practices during lockdown and, from what I’ve observed, many women have not returned to their pre-lockdown application.

But not to wear any to work? That’s brave isn’t it?!! Is it brave? Should we consider ourselves as brave if we present our unadorned face at work? Why? Almost every man on the planet presents their natural face to us every day. Are they really more beautiful than us? So much so that there is nothing they need to ‘make up’ for? This question is the essence of what personal style has got to do with International Women’s Day.

Historical assumptions about women

Historical assumptions and myths about women abound. Frighteningly, ‘learned’ men debated for centuries whether women had souls!

Along with this was the question of whether women should be educated because we are unable to properly comprehend higher knowledge (sadly, in some places this debate is ongoing). Of course, without education, women never had opportunity to demonstrate cognitive capacity so our intellectual inferiority became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It is within this context that we largely became subservient to men, whether reluctantly or because we believed the hype.

The ‘fair’ sex myth

In place of being bright however, we could content ourselves with being the ‘fair’ sex. We have long been considered such.

As with the previous learning capacity example, the belief that beauty is a feminine trait is culturally assumed, NOT actual fact.

Interestingly, in his study of human behaviour, Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist who studied cognitive development, observed that human responses progress gradually from being natural, intuitive ones when we are very young to responses we think will be socially acceptable as we mature.

If we, as ‘the fairer sex’ are rewarded from infancy for cultivating physical beauty, we will continue performing our ‘beauty’ rituals (humans tend to do what we are rewarded for).

So again, over time women’s cultivated and contrived appearance eventually risks confirming the initial premise to be true (ie, we expect women to be fair / beautiful and if we think we are not, we feel pressure to ‘fix the problem’).

Mainstream media feeds into this myth directly; we are asked to suspend our own reasoning and to ignore any contrary evidence. Instead we are urged to accept half-truths and myths about women's bodies. I’m sure you can think of some of these myths. For example,

• our hair should be smooth, shiny and plentiful on our head

• we should have minimal hair elsewhere

• our skin should be smooth and unblemished

• our lips should remain as cherubic as a child’s

• we never sweat

• our breasts defy gravity

Natural or socialised?

It is through socialisation that the expectation and subsequent pressure for women to present themselves always as beautiful and flawless, endures.

This is the connection between personal style and International Woman’s Day, and returns us to the question of whether we should consider not wearing makeup to work as courageous.

Unfortunately women believe they are expected to edit and tweak our appearance for presentation in public in ways we would never expect a man to.

Dare we expose the myth?? That we are not hairless, flawless etc… Imagine a time when all women spent as little time on grooming and beauty rituals as men, even just for one day!

Are we there yet?

There was an article in The Guardian recently about whether a mother should cease telling her adult daughter to be more vigilant about hair removal. An associated poll allowed readers to vote for whether the mother’s request was reasonable or not.

Fortunately 98% of people who voted in this poll said the mother should desist, so perhaps the world is beginning to wake up. And yet, lip fillers, botox and buccal fat removal are still with us. Thankfully foot binding and extreme corsetry have largely disappeared.

So as for this year’s International Women’s Day theme, Embrace Equity: really? I don’t think we’re there yet. As Naomi Wolf wrote in The Beauty Myth, impossible beauty standards are there to wear women down, both physically and psychologically, which makes us easier to control.

Don’t get me wrong; I love wearing makeup and taking care of my skin. I like it in the same way that I like editing a photo. I’m visual and I like the creative process. But I no longer feel the pressure to wear makeup in the same way I used to (there’s so much more I could say here).

So why do I work as a personal style specialist?

Working on personal style is not about looking more beautiful. It’s not about grooming or perfection and certainly not about expectation. It’s about enjoying the wonderful fashion out there, having fun with it and expressing yourself through clothing.

You might want to learn how clothes can highlight what you love about your body and camouflage anything you’re less keen on. However it’s also learning about the meaning of clothing and the messages you broadcast through what you choose to wear wear. To me, clothing and personal style remain endlessly fascinating.

Inspired by the book, Beauty Bound by Rita Freedman