14 DAY TRIAL // That women are addicted to shopping and fashion is no longer something many are ignorant of, but the greatest mystery related to this compulsive behavior, as it’s been deemed, meaning, for whom women dress, still remains unsolved. A couple of days ago, the girls from fashion-oriented website TheFashionistaDiaries and WWD tried to come up with an answer to the ever burning question during fashion week.
Despite their efforts, they still came up more or less empty handed. After performing the admirable task of asking front row celebrities and fashion insiders about what they thought about whom women dressed for, the conclusion was still the same: it’s not certain, but it could be that women are most likely not dressing for themselves but for the people around them.
“Most women dress for their most fashionable friend,” actress Anne Hathaway said, refraining, however, from saying in what way and to what extend she saw that happen. French Vogue's Carine Roitfeld stated she dressed for herself and herself alone. Designer Isabel Toledo was perhaps the most honest and, according to WWD, the closest to the real answer. “Women dress for men. I do dress for myself because it makes me feel empowered, but I’m definitely looking for [my husband's] expression, not his approval,” she said.
While the last part of her statement could be easily subject to debate (the useless kind because of the privacy of the matter), the first does seem to apply best to real life. It’s not like a woman confined to the solitude of her own house gets all prettied-up only to watch TV, the girls from WWD say, which must mean that we’re all doing it for someone else, or more specifically, for a number of specific persons that we want to see us in a certain way.
“Different women dress for different people. […] When we think about self-presentation of any kind, it's with the ideal of our perfect selves in our mind's eye - but this itself is a mutable concept, varying depending upon the movie you've seen or novel you've read or, yes, the company you keep. Even Toledo's statement seems to suggest that she wants - rather than ‘approval’ - to see reflected in her husband the person she is trying to project,” reads a piece on WWD.
In the end, we as the people others see every day are just the projections of our real personalities coming from behind the mirror, the impromptu “survey” concludes.