The Bizarro World of Women’s Clothes Shopping
Going shopping with your wife or girlfriend is confusing. Why? Men buy 'clothes', but women buy 'fashion'. Tweet
Highlights
Most men hate clothes shopping — we just want to get in and out as fast as possible.
Women walk in, slowly peruse the racks, drape hangars around their necks, place items side by side.
The question is why so many women still hit the street in outfits that make them look terrible.
Women dress way too much to please other women.
One thing most men definitely didn’t miss during the pandemic was shopping for clothes. Not for one even a nanosecond. Me, I try to get in and out of a store faster than the night-cleaning crew at Chernobyl. Grab stuff off shelves, find the right size, buy. No trying on. The idea of untying my sneakers, pulling off my pants, sweater and shirt, hanging everything up on the hooks, to try on some jeans? You kidding me? It’s basically the same as when I was eight and with my mother. Find the size the chart says fits and we’re outta there. Only now if I get home and the pants don’t fit, I might just say fuck it.
Women? They walk in the store and slowly, deliberately peruse the racks. Drape hangars around their necks to see how things look. Place items side by side. Ask the clerk if they have other colors. Then, drum roll, into the dressing room. Which often involves two women going in so they can try on stuff together. Two guys do this, it gets written up on Yelp under the category “Retail Stores w/ Good Man on Man Action”.
Men get creeped out if a salesperson knocks on the dressing room door or pulls back the curtain asking if you need help. And no man ever believes anything a sales person says. “You look amazing in that jacket.” Right. It costs $750 and you’re on commission.
With women, the more opinions the merrier. They’ll have the FedEx guy weigh in on whether the creamy beige goes better with their eyes than the teal blue.
True, women’s clothing basically goes through an entire metamorphosis every eighteen months. Skirts. Pants. Short sleeves. Long sleeves. High waisted pants. Low waisted pants. Tight pants. Baggy pants. Yoga pants.
And, yes, the payoff is that women often look good in their clothes.
The question is why so many women hit the street in outfits that make them look terrible.
On the other hand, given how much effort they put into it, the question is why so many women hit the street in outfits that make them look terrible.
There are two schools of thought on this:
School One: At the crucial moment, the best friend from the dressing room is MIA. At 7:00 a.m. on a Monday morning, late for work, shoving kids out the door and onto a bus – or even dressing for an evening out — there’s no BFF around and, left to her own devices, the woman will put on clothes that make her look crummy. Barely five feet tall and a micro skirt. Earth-tone linen layers fit for a MooseHead Cookbook fan club to a swank dinner. Wrapping that thing in a high-waisted denim bucket after a thirty-five pound post-Covid wight gain — what’s the problem?
School Two: Women dress way too much to please other women; or, alternatively, men who may like women, just not in the ways the rest of us do. See: any episode of Sex In The City.
Maybe they think we men have no right to an opinion, since we’ve basically been dressing the same way since we got out of tights and stopped powdering our wigs.
So, okay, maybe I have no idea what makes me look good. But I absolutely and unequivocally know what the woman in my life should be wearing: clothes that make me notice her, admire her, desire her. Which I guess means clothes that I can’t wait to help her take off.
So when she’s out shopping, as far as I’m concerned, there’s only one voice, (in its many incarnations), I think she should listen to.
The FedEx guy’s.
