{"id":19872,"date":"2020-03-06T23:46:23","date_gmt":"2020-03-06T23:46:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=19872"},"modified":"2020-03-07T14:14:00","modified_gmt":"2020-03-07T14:14:00","slug":"how-women-dress-for-other-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/how-women-dress-for-other-women\/","title":{"rendered":"How women dress for other women"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jaimie Arona Krems<\/a>, Oklahoma State University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cIf you can\u2019t be better than your competition,\u201d Vogue editor Anna Wintour<\/a> once said<\/a>, \u201cjust dress better.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, new research<\/a> suggests that women don\u2019t just dress to be fashionable, or to outdo one another when it comes to enticing men. They also dress for other women.<\/p>\n

But Wintour\u2019s quote misses some of the nuances that go into the outfits women choose with female friends, co-workers and acquaintances in mind. It\u2019s not just about dressing better. In fact, my colleagues and I found that women can be motivated by another factor: avoiding the slings and arrows of other women.<\/p>\n

The psychology of women\u2019s wardrobes<\/h2>\n

My social psychology lab<\/a> explores how women navigate their social relationships with other women. With my co-authors, Oklahoma State graduate student Ashley M. Rankin and Arizona State University graduate student Stefanie Northover, I recently studied what goes into women\u2019s fashion choices.<\/p>\n

Of course, both men and women consider a variety of concerns when selecting their outfits: cost, fit, occasion.<\/p>\n

Existing psychological research on women\u2019s clothing choices tends to center on how women dress for men \u2013 the makeup<\/a>, shoes<\/a> and colors<\/a> they select to impress the opposite sex<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But we posed a different question: How might women dress for other women?<\/p>\n

For over a century, psychologists have been interested in competition between men. Only over the past few decades have researchers started to seriously look into how women actively compete with one another<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The competition isn\u2019t necessarily nice. Like men who compete with one another, women can be aggressive<\/a> toward other women they\u2019re competing with. But it\u2019s rarely the physical kind. Instead, social scientists like Joyce Benenson<\/a>, Kaj Bjorkqvist<\/a> and Nicole Hess<\/a> have shown that women are more prone to rely on social exclusion and reputation-damaging gossip.<\/p>\n

So we wondered: Do women ever dress defensively \u2013 to mitigate the chance that other women might go after them?<\/p>\n

We know that women who are physically attractive<\/a> and who wear revealing clothing are more likely to be targets of same-sex aggression. For example, psychologists Tracy Vaillancourt and Aanchal Sharma found<\/a> that women behaved more aggressively toward an attractive woman when she was dressed in a short skirt and low-cut shirt than when that exact same woman wore khakis and a crewneck.<\/p>\n

We reasoned that women would be aware of this dynamic \u2013 and some would try to avoid it. So we tested this theory in a series of experiments<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Dressing defensively<\/h2>\n

First, we studied whether people would expect women to be aggressive toward attractive, scantily clad women.<\/p>\n

We asked 142 people to read a scenario about two women, Carol and Sara, who met for coffee after connecting on a friend-finder app that was like Tinder, but for platonic relationships. We asked the participants how they thought Carol would treat Sara during an otherwise uneventful coffee date. Although the scenarios were the same, some people saw a photo of Sara that depicted her as an attractive woman wearing khakis and a crewneck; others saw a photo of her wearing a low-cut shirt and short-skirt; and a third group saw her in the more revealing outfit, but the image had been photoshopped to make her look less physically attractive.<\/p>\n

We found that when Sara was attractive and revealingly dressed, people expected Carol would be meaner to Sara.<\/p>\n

We then wanted to see whether women would also act on the awareness of this dynamic, so we ran a series of experiments with college-aged and adult women from the U.S.<\/p>\n

For a set of two studies, we instructed female participants to imagine that they were going to meet new people in a professional setting, like a networking event, or at a social gathering, such as a birthday party. They were also told to imagine the event as either single-sex or mixed-sex.<\/p>\n

In the first, we asked women to draw their ideal outfits for those events, and we later had undergraduate research assistants measure how much skin was revealed. In the second, we asked women to choose outfits from a menu of options \u2013 akin to shopping for clothes online. Each of the possible outfits had been rated for modesty by a separate set of participants.<\/p>\n

In both studies, women chose more revealing outfits for social events than professional ones. This wasn\u2019t surprising. But interestingly, women chose less revealing outfits to meet up with an all-female group \u2013 regardless of whether it was a professional or social setting.<\/p>\n

But wouldn\u2019t the more revealing clothing in mixed-group settings simply reflect their desire to attract men?<\/p>\n

Not exactly. Not all women dressed the same for other women. The women who rated themselves as more physically attractive were the ones who chose more modest outfits when meeting up with a group of women. This supports the idea that they were dressing defensively \u2013 to avoid bringing attention to themselves and being targeted by the other women.<\/p>\n

Because same-sex aggression is more likely to come from strangers than friends<\/a>, in our final experiment we asked 293 young women, aged 18 to 40, what they would wear to meet up with a prospective female friend. Again, we found that more physically attractive women indicated that they would dress with more discretion.<\/p>\n

Together, these findings show that women don\u2019t always dress to impress. Nor do they dress to aggress. Instead, there\u2019s a more subtle social dance taking place \u2013 one that involves humility, hesitance and heightened awareness.<\/p>\n

[Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend.<\/em> Sign up for our weekly newsletter<\/a>.]\"The<\/p>\n

Jaimie Arona Krems<\/a>, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Oklahoma State University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jaimie Arona Krems, Oklahoma State University \u201cIf you can\u2019t be better than your competition,\u201d Vogue editor Anna Wintour once said, \u201cjust dress better.\u201d Indeed, new research suggests that women don\u2019t just dress to be fashionable, or to outdo one another when it comes to enticing men. They also dress for other women. But Wintour\u2019s quote […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":19873,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[293],"tags":[4037,7755,839,365,461,185],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19872"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19872"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19887,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19872\/revisions\/19887"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}