No, I Am Not “Dressing for Myself” During a Pandemic
The last thing you should have to worry about when a loved one is hospitalized is how you look when you show up to be at that person’s bedside. And yet.
Not long ago, I rushed back to the Bronx for a medical emergency. It was/is the kind of emergency that upends the table where your lifeplans lay. All of your precious objects clatter or shatter on the floor below. The best you can do is watch your feet while working around the wreckage.
Each day for too long, my sister has dressed in the best casualwear she has, put on three plain face masks, fixed her hair, and lugged bags to the hospital filled with freshly cooked meals, changes of clothes, blankets, bottles of water, and phone chargers. She’s spoken politely to doctors and nurses and social workers through the frustrating opacity of the medical system. She has done her own research to keep up with the conversations around her. She code-switches to her white voice on phone calls with people who can help.
Before my sister leaves home, she does a complex calculus that will approximate how healthcare staff will respond to her based on her appearance. She knows if she shows up with her curly hair tamed and well-conditioned, the nurses will comment on how lucky her partner is to have her. They will respond more precisely to questions about procedures and medications and transfers. If she wears her hair underneath a hat, the guards at the front desk will regard her with suspicion and withhold vital bits of information, like whether there has been a covid outbreak in the unit she is trying to visit. If she must wear a hat, she will smile extra hard with her eyes so that staff hopefully know she is not to be feared or barred from the premises.
Each day, she gets up and tries her best to be as inoffensive as possible so that she can continue to support her partner.
She is not dressing for herself.
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A pandemic-era article on Refinery29 about getting dressed despite corona-induced isolation. Source: Refinery29
The phrase “I dress for myself” is now a common response to the (extremely gendered and hetero) notion that women groom themselves to attract the attention of men. The belief that women pretty themselves up solely for the sake of being nice to look at is, obviously, one of the ways patriarchal power continues to manifest itself. It doesn’t need explaining and many on theinternet have spent time writing pieces that mention consent, personal autonomy, comfort, and resisting the male gaze.
During the pandemic, there’s been a surge of writing about how COVID-19 has changed our style habits and how to dress during a pandemic that have used the “dressing for yourself” angle to explain sweater and earring recommendations that will make home-workers ready for any video call. I found one commentary that makes an interesting point about the social aspect of outfits being lost during isolation— it is hard, the article says, to totally dress for oneself when our clothing participates in a social culture of compliments and aesthetic inspiration. I think that’s an important point. But, still, all of these articles describe getting dressed as an activity that is all about shifting towards a new kind of fashion standard, towards physically expressing the people we are on the inside. And it misses the experiences of so many people who are going through (maybe) the worst times of their lives.
I think it’s a good thing to assert agency over your body. I do. I think clothes can be fun and expressive, even with the difficulties of dressing my fat body. But my dissatisfaction with the idea of “dressing for myself” comes from the way it decontextualizes garments and the bodies that wear them, as well as the way it usually only addresses the clothes that make us feel or look “good” (more on that later).
When my sister gets dressed to go to the hospital, she isn’t dressing to express herself or a preferred aesthetic. She’s wearing the clothes that will make her look as put together as she can manage so that people at the hospital will take her seriously when she asks questions about her partner’s wellbeing. When she gets to the hospital, she showers and dresses her partner in clean outfits to let staff know there is someone who cares for him, someone who will ask questions and raise hell if he is dead on her next visit.
Where does all of this fit within the notion of “dressing for yourself?”
(It doesn’t.)
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The point of this post is to think through how the clothes we wear function as resistance and protection and how, for bodies that are fatter, Blacker, disabled, queer, and gender non-conforming, this kind of protection becomes even more important in times of immense strife. During a pandemic, when many of us are forced to come into constant contact with hostile institutions, how do we work to protect ourselves and be sources of strength for the people we love? And, as another fun exercise, how is the role of clothing as protection completed disregarded by the world of fashion, which is obsessed with white feminist ‘#girlboss’ culture notions of self-expression and resistance?
For an example, consider shapewear. The way we want our bodies to look is shaped by socially constructed body ideals and the benefits of conforming to these templates. There are many, such as the prevailing thin ideal and the (less socially powerful) “snatched” body shape that is so coveted among women of color and, increasingly, white women who like to blackfish. Some bodies, by virtue of racism, colorism, fatphobia, and ableism (to name a few processes), have less value than others in a context that praises these body ideals. Therefore, our efforts to hide, accentuate, or “flatter” certain physical features through the clothes we wear are literally attempts to improve our individual value, privilege, and/or mobility in those same contexts. On a thin body, shapewear may provide a lift or contour that isn’t otherwise there and increase social value. On a fat body, shapewear can create a silhouette that falls more in line with the acceptable hourglass shape or snatched ideal, which is the only time fatness is deemed as OK. When I wore shapewear to my doctoral program interviews, I wasn’t doing it to make myself feel good. I wore shapewear under conservative dresses and blouses because I didn’t want my body to take up more space than it needed to, because the fat intellectual is still treated as a paradox in the academe.
And what is gained when other people find our bodies nicer to look at? A lot, says research, including increased employment and income prospects, likelihood to be seen as trustworthy, and (of course) romantic opportunities.
In a social context where fatness and blackness, for instance, are universally derided, this means that appearance-dependent privileges are denied to fat Black people. However, in a pandemic where blackness and fatness have been highlighted as “health risks” by historically violent health authorities, the mere existence of fat Black people is, for the umpteenth time, a problem of the highest order. And herein lies the importance of clothing and my sister’s clean sweaters and her plain masks and her appeasement of authority.
How do we hide our bodies so that we may continue to live for ourselves and others?
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I wish we could all live in a Vogue article on pandemic outfits. I do. It would mean that one of our greatest concerns would be figuring out how to be nice to look at on Zoom while we all work from home.
But we don’t.
Only about 25% of the American workforce can easily work from home. At least 126,139 people are currently hospitalized due to COVID-19 and almost 400,000 have died from it. Entire households and communities of people are in mourning or scrambling to take care of their loved ones in person or from a distance. And marginalized people are still putting on their best clothes and masks and faces to go down to hospitals and reason with whole ass institutions that want them dead.
I wish it wasn’t this way. I wish that showing up as we wanted, in whatever sense, had no effect on the treatment we receive or the healthcare our loved ones endure or any other outcome that is at the mercy of medicine, the police, or capitalists that rely on exploited labor.
If this pandemic has reinforced anything, it’s that if we ever want to have the privilege of showing up as want, of “dressing for ourselves”, that will involve dismantling the structures that make that impossible in the first place.
First published on Medium.