The Bandage Dress: Bodycon? Or Self-Con?
(Via GreatGlam; These all seem to say the same thing to me...)
Amid the new years revelry, I played a little game with myself called "spot the bodycon dresses." This was hardly a "where's waldo" thing, because the bandage dresses were apt to be out and about on the biggest freakum' dress night of the year. What I observed was not shocking, although slightly counter to the sartorial norm in Williamsburg, where the usual female “going out ensemble" casts the chick as a vintage-clad indie ingenue rather than a club vixen. But in a major upset, the streets were festooned with girls wearing skin-tight bandage dresses and clivesdale-platform heels.
Because on the eve of the year’s biggest hangover, the bodycon dress communicates one clear message—I’m down to heavily pet tonight. Even the compound word, "bodycon" suggests the very utility of the dress to make every heterosexual male in the vicinity "con" of the souped-up Ferrari that is your "bod." And as a social tool, it is hardly limited to New Years. Everyone has either seen or done the homeward march in the early morning hours wearing a skin-tight minidress or some permutation thereof. Whether American Apparel or Herve Leger, for your Snooki costume or for that one night you accompanied your tourist friend to the Meatpacking District, the bodycon dress is a coded garment that most of us have experimented with in one form or another. It’s a great leveler. For better or for worse, the bodycon dress enables you to take on a different persona. And we all need a bit of an escape sometimes. Momentarily, or for a couple of hours, you can flee the rigidity of workplace decorum(depending on your workplace) and hope to get a little bit of attention. Whether or not it is the right kind, really. And, lest we forget, bar culture is creepier than anything. Imagine recounting to your grandkids that fateful day when Pop-Pop saw you at the end of the Turtle Bay bar in a painted-on Forever 21 minidress and calling it love at first sight. Bull.
But my question is, why the bodycon dress? As a girl with a body I consider to be normal, I feel like 130 pounds of lumpy schmaltz stuffed into a chinese finger trap in bandage dresses. Even the same with bandage skirts! They leave absolutely no lump or thigh dimple to the imagination, and seem to highlight the errors on my body in bold red ink. The only bodies that these dresses really flatter are waify, modelesque bodies. This goes without saying, but rather than bodycon these dresses make the female feel self-con. This is why I tend to favor loose, overgrown toddler dresses with cinched waists, particularly when I go to the watering hole/meat markets. Friends will often ask with a raised eyebrow, "That's your freakum dress?" I respond "It's the freakiest thing I have." And I'm going out to have fun with my friends in the first place, maybe to talk to some charming strangers and flirt a little, but do I really need a sort of nightlife armor uniform to do so? For this reason, my "going out" clothing doesn't look like "going out" clothing.
The truth about the bodycon dress is that it reinforces the constant self-surveillance that is encouraged in women in our society. It puts the female body in a glass case of scrutiny. The idea seems to be that the wares can be easily inspected through a thin film of lycra before the pairing-off occurs. And that has its use if a female is owning her own sexual agency. Because sometimes all a girl really needs is a non-verbal sexual contract.
(Via EntertainmentWise.com; But if it weren't for Bodycon dresses, what would the Kardazzians kardazzle about in?)
But, a skin-tight dress is the most facile, banal way of showing sexy. It sets up a trope in which men are encouraged further to see women's bodies(and thus women) as objects, and thus makes women impose this view of subjectivity on themselves. Granted, the men are being seen as objects as well, but in a much less subjugating way. Not to mention, it seems to make all these girls at bars look almost exactly the same. It's sort of like a flashback to tenth grade, where throngs of girls flooding the hallways with straightened hair and Abercrombie tops looked indistinguishable from each other. But the reason for stylistically opting in is essentially the same: to showcase a body that gets you what society tells you to want-- someone to kiss, someone to bed, or maybe if you wish on a falling star, something a bit more long-term.
Not that there's anything wrong with wanting any of these things, but it means that emotionally, the relationships people have now may not be much more complex than they were in 10th grade. And while I'd like to think that most people have emotionally matured between 15 and 25, maturity from point A to point B for many people is little more than the acquisition of a bank account and perhaps a house. Within this mass state of arrested development, the "sexy" dress mentality prioritizes coolly transactional relationships, leads to very little but further insecurity, and requires the purchase of 40-dollar Spanx.
(Via DailyMail; Courtney Love leaving a Soho club in July 2011 shortly after her split from long-time boyfriend. Getting right back on the horse with a bodycon dress)
I don't mean to sound like some sort of blue-law fundamentalist or anything. Every woman has the right to feel sexy however and with whomever in whatever dress she pleases. But the bodycon dresses really do get to me. Mostly because it's such an uninspired idea of sexy, heavily informed by male control and spectatorship. It is not the chintzy bandages or the uncomtortable thigh-clinching, or the aesthetic of the dress itself. It is the larger issue that it is symptomatic of. It's the fact that the silhouette of this dress is suited for prepubescent or anorexic bodies. This brand of "going out dress" encourages self-consciousness while focusing attention away from the self and towards the female body as an object. While this has been happening since the days of Cleopatra, it seems that in our age of supposed stylistic pluralism there should be a bit more open-mindedness. A girl should be able to feel sexy and freakum' dress-ish in a paisley poncho, opera coat, or pair of overalls and at any size. The day that we have Spanx-burning rallies, I will say we've made progress.
