Gender Roles and Fashion

Joanne Finkelstein, in After a Fashion, explains that fashion can be seen as a device for confining women to an inferior social order. Throughout history women have been isolated from men by their fashion dues to society - women would risk spinal disorders from corsets, chronic foot pain and arch trauma from high-heels, and submit to a constant preoccupation of worry over men's approval of clothing appropriateness. Fashions play such an integral role in how we judge one another - how much money we have, what music we listen to, how much education we have received - that any gender-bending fashions exhibited by women are at best taboo, and at worst, unattractive to men (the alleged Ultimate Woman's Worry).
In many societies, gender is not considered a part of nature, but rather learned, acquired, or earned as a rite of passage. In some tribal communities, acquiring gender status represents maturity and responsibility. …