Something you may or may not have all noticed of late is that the new cool thing for girls to wear this year is tights. (Leggings??? I’m not really sure…) There are girls running around everywhere in knee high boots, leggings and a tee shirt. Wearing this around two years ago would have looked ridiculous and totally out of place. Then 3 years ago girls were wearing around those pregnancy shirts which would have looked ridiculous two years before and…. Well you get it.
For men however there are no such similar rapid paradigm shifts in what we wear. One year big lapels are in, the next year small. One year big ties are in the next year small. Nothing game changing. Why is it that women’s fashion changes so much faster and more dramatically than men’s?
A while ago I read a study about the effects of clothing on male and female perception of the opposite sex. What it boiled down to was that how attractive men found women was primarily correlated to the woman they were looking at regardless of what she was wearing. How attractive women found men was strongly correlated to what the men were wearing and how they were groomed. Men can tell if a woman is good looking even if she is disheveled and wearing sweats and can tell they don’t find a woman attractive even when she is dressed to the nines. A below average looking man can, however, look very attractive by wearing properly fitting nice clothes and doing their hair. This puts moderately attractive women at a greater reproductive disadvantage with respect to their more attractive peers than moderately attractive men.
When a rapid paradigm shift in fashion occurs for a short period of time men are exposed to clothes on women they have not experienced in a long time or ever and are thus unable to evaluate how attractive a woman wearing the new clothes are. Women who are fairly attractive might then be evaluated by a man as being extremely attractive thereby closing the gap caused by men’s ability to generally to evaluate a woman’s attractiveness irrespective of what she is wearing. Because of this for all but the most attractive women it is reproductively favourable to frequently cause rapid fashion changes in order to break down the borders between them and the most attractive women. For men this need does not exist as we can already increase our attractiveness without having to break through social stigma of totally new clothes.
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Just a theory, but I think it’s because of the way men and women react to how each other are dressed.
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Joel
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Jackie
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Jackie