Sex Fuels Fashion: Destabilizing the Male Gaze by Shattering the Glass Runway
Despite its reputation as a widely female-oriented industry, fashion remains a field run by men.
But how can an industry dominated by women’s wear and buoyed by female dollars persistently thwart females from becoming lead executives?
While the top fashion schools inadvertently maintain a 5:1 female-to-male student ratio, only 14 percent of the leading 50 major fashion brands possess female leads on both the creative and financial side of the business, as of 2021. Between unconscious bias and disparities in sponsorship and mentorship, professional mobility constraints enabled decades of fashion decisions coinciding with trends and pop culture to exist with men at the helm. In this regard, the transparency of the fashion industry shamelessly reveals artistic decisions made under the palms of the male gaze.
Theorized by British film critic Laura Mulvey in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in 1975, the male gaze defines the way the world perceives women through the lens of heterosexual desire. Not only does the male gaze phenomenon reveal unequal social power between genders, but it also reduces women into objects of pleasure rather than people to respect.
Historically, only men possessed financial independence and thus the consumer field remained male-dominated. With this in mind, artistic representations consistently catered to the male gaze as they garnered millions in profit amongst heterosexual male audiences. In other words, if it sold, it went, and the prominence of oversexualized fashion campaigns was insatiably lapped up by the fashion world.
While the 60s marked a period in Western fashion where the second-wave feminist movement challenged views of sexuality and relationships, less conservative views of marriage and greater freedom of expression, this trifecta largely contributed to the popularization of sex in mainstream media and everyday conversations. Playing a large role in its generalization, Hugh Hefner became a symbol of a sexual revolution in the name of women’s empowerment. However, what started as a gesture towards sexual liberation quickly soured as Playboy magazine increasingly exploited women for their looks, consistently subjecting them to objectification at the expense of the male gaze.
Image: USA Today
In fact, in a 2010 New York Daily News article, Hugh Hefner declared that “women are sex objects,” revealing an unawareness between the difference in ‘subject’ versus ‘object’ and his apathy regarding its negative implications toward the media-represented image of women. No doubt, the magazine coupled with equally fetishized renditions of female desire in the media ultimately led to an infestation of male sexual entitlement in fashion consumerism, an issue dragging behind the industry like a leaden weight into the present day.
But this invasive point of view hasn’t just taken a hold of the way men design and create, it has also encaptured the way women themselves dress and thus influenced their creativity with apparel too. Despite progressive maneuvers to avoid the classically unavoidable voyeuristic male gaze, much needs to be done to dismantle men’s chokehold on women’s self-perception. In a way, fashion’s male dominance manipulates a society where the fetishized image of women’s bodies consistently falls subject to one-way surveillance. In doing so, childhood conditioning leads countless women to dress and admire those with whom they believe best please the male eye, for example, the staple feminine outfits characterized by tight, short dresses.
On top of rendering some women unable to wear what they want out of fear of social rejection, the persistence of the male gaze also leads to self-objectification among women. Research suggests that perpetuated unrealistic beauty standards invoke female self-criticism and self-objectification, as well as encourage a sort of hyper-fixation on the body and form. For example, according to the 2016 Dove Self-Esteem Project, 69 percent of women and 65 percent of girls surveyed cited increased pressures from advertising and media to reach an unrealistic beauty standard as a key force in driving appearance anxiety. Deeply embedded in media portrayals, the sweet and sticky male gaze has become a successful lifelong marketing campaign that continues to define how women view their bodies and unabashedly suggests the image of a “perfect woman” to strive toward at any cost.
Rebuking the idea of a woman perpetuated under the male gaze, Gen Z is taking back woman's identity, showing little interest in appeasing the opposite sex but rather reclaiming their autonomy and empowering themselves. On the frontlines of the movement, Gen Z celebrities such as Billie Eilish have reinvented what it means to dress like a woman, dressing in oversized, baggy clothing, often attire her hip-hop male counterparts may be seen wearing instead. With 108 million followers on Instagram, 21-year-old singer Silish’s stylistic choices are and continue to be a rebellion against sexual objectification by the male gaze. Putting her musical talent at the forefront of her identity rather than her appearance ensures that people follow her for exactly that rather than having a platform that is supported by or bolstered by sexualization. (Vogue)
Although many Gen Z feminists and stylish early adopters are combating the patriarchy by wearing masculine clothes, many are also taking the opposite approach and turning objectification of women and the male gaze on its head. By reclaiming femininity as their own and using it for their power, wearing clothing typically viewed sexually may be the vehicle for social change as well.
While there is no right answer to the fight against the male gaze and men’s perceptions of women’s bodies, fashion’s innate ability to affirm identity and supercharge first impressions remains an essential ingredient to dismantling the glass runway.
At the end of the day, the only gaze that should matter is yours.