In this fantastic interview for Rawr Denim, William Gibson talks about clothing and fashion: “There’s an idea called “gray man”, in the security business, that I find interesting. They teach people to dress unobtrusively. Chinos instead of combat pants, and if you really need the extra pockets, a better design conceals them. …[T]here’s something appealingly “low-drag” about gray man theory: reduced friction with one’s environment.” That made me wonder: “What does a ‘grey woman’ look like?”, which made me think about how Deborah Tannen used the linguistics terms marked and unmarked to describe gender and clothing. Just as many English words are default male (unmarked), with a changed ending to connote female (marked; think ‘actor’ vs ‘actress’), she argued that men’s dress can be unmarked but women’s dress is always marked. That is, there are decisions that men make about what they wear that are defaults, that aren’t even seen as a decision. In contrast, every decision that a woman makes about what she wears—heels vs, flats, pants vs, skirts, the length of a skirt and the height of a neckline, haircuts, jewelry—is freighted with cultural baggage. Take makeup. Especially in professional settings, for a woman, not wearing makeup is a noticeable, and notable, decision: marked. But for a man, not wearing makeup is not a decision—nobody notices when men aren’t wearing makeup: unmarked. (Of course, a man wearing makeup is very marked indeed.) […]
The roots of the ‘Grey Man’ lie in the Great Male Renunciation: the period around the end of the 17th century, in the middle of the Enlightenment, when society collectively decided that men’s clothing, previously as colourful and ornamented as women’s, was to be dark, sober and serious. What’s kind of astonishing is how we’ve never really gone back—a quick scroll through red-carpet photos makes that clear—and how we mostly just accept this sexual dimorphism as the norm. Just why men’s clothing has never returned to pre-GMR levels of finery is something I’ll leave to historians and sociologists, but it’s almost certainly related to the harsh enforcement of gender norms—while women can wear colours and clothing styles indistinguishable from men’s (as I write this, I’m wearing black jeans, a black t-shirt, and Camper high-tops), the slightest hint of femininity in men’s self-presentation elicits verbal abuse at best, and the worst is far worse.
But they still are. I work in a relatively dress-casual profession, yet I do choose a general clothing style and people comment on that. So in the hysteria-speak of the article, I guess that means that I am ‘marked.’
Very few people wear red carpet clothing daily and many people normally wear casual clothing. Ever since men were allowed to wear casual clothing in public, they have been increasingly colorful and ornamented. T shirts are an especially rich form of self-expression through clothing for men.
Furthermore, the article is guilty of cherry picking when ‘proving’ that men’s clothing was as colorful and ornamented as women’s when it offers a link referring to European upper class clothing. Peasants had ‘Sunday clothing’ and daily utilitarian clothing. I think that the latter was often fairly bland (especially for men).
Yet I can’t remember anyone commenting on a colleagues’ makeup at any of the places I have worked.
I’ve worked at a place where a guy liked reaaaaaally deep V shirts. As in: count all his chest hair deep. Yet he didn’t get verbal abuse for showing ‘cleavage’. So it is an absurd claim that ‘the slightest hint of femininity in men’s self-presentation elicits verbal abuse at best.’
Male engineers get asked if they are going to a funeral or a job interview if they dress ‘too pretty.’ And they get taken less seriously if they dress to well (perceived as managers, rather than knowledgeable). So the author claims a gender difference that I fail to see.
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Anyway, I’m not saying that there aren’t differences in clothing or judgement based on dress between men and women, but this article is sloppy, generalizes based on exceptional examples, cherry picks (picking makeup, which isn’t even clothing and obviously not typical for men to use, to compare men and women :/ ), arbitrarily defines terms that paint women as victims (‘marked’), lacks knowledge about the male perspective and in general lacks nuance.
Here in Israel, there is an obvious cultural gradient:
Men of Ashkenazi background largely adhere to the Great Male Renunciation.
Men of Sephardi (North African) background are the most flamboyant, wearing colorful shirts – and sometimes Hawaiian-style embroidered shirts – for Shabbat instead of white.
Men from South America and Southern Europe are kinda in-between. And this group wears the tightest clothing.
My inner peacock envies the effortlessly macho Sephardim wearing hibiscus pink floral shirts…. But I am certainly dressing more colorfully than I did back in the States.
There is no safe space for women with certain body types. For example, with big boobs, if they are covered up enough for no one to deride you as too sexy, they are covered up enough for someone to deride you as too dowdy. In my experience, this is usually done in a sidewards way, by commenting negatively on another woman who is very similar in body type and dress. I don’t think men who are not marginalized on some other axis experience this total lack of space to be right.
@Aapje, I do want to mention, for the record, that “marked” is neither arbitrary nor invoking victimhood in this case. It’s linguistics terminology that has a very specific meaning: a linguistic form that is marked carries meaning by inflecting or otherwise changing form, while something that is unmarked carries meaning by its lack of inflection or adherence to a “default” form (the “null” form).
Consider cat, dog, house vs. cats, dogs, houses: the singular is unmarked, the plural is marked by the -s suffix. A linguist who wanted to talk about the singular could still write it as a suffix this way: cat.∅, dog.∅, house.∅. It’s definitely there — you couldn’t argue that “cat” is not singular or that singular is meaningless and has no effect on grammar — but it isn’t marked.
Sociology often borrows terms from adjacent fields and uses them by analogy, and the marked/unmarked dichotomy of how social forms carry meaning has been analogized to the same dichotomy in linguistics. It’s not a reference to target practice or Mafia hits or whatever else the word “marked” sometimes means.
Late to this, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to talk about “correct” and “incorrect” clothing choices rather than the somewhat more obtuse metaphor of “marked” and “unmarked”
I would say that in most cases women can be criticized for any sartorial choice they make, whereas for men there is a point where viewers look at them and go, “Okay, that guy is properly dressed, I’m not going to think about him anymore.”
The thing is, there’s this idea that since men’s fashion can be unmarked, that men can be unconscious about it. In fact, the correct choice in men’s fashion is often extremely narrow, and it’s very easy to fall out of it by, for example, wearing a tie of the incorrect width.
I take issue with the idea that mens fashion choices become more marked as they become more feminine, or that men can get away with not caring how they look. A beard is in probably the least feminine fashion choice around, but a man who does not trim his facial hair is incredibly noticeable and especially unwelcome in any professional setting.
Late to this, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to talk about “correct” and “incorrect” clothing choices rather than the somewhat more obtuse metaphor of “marked” and “unmarked”
But that’s not really what it means. “Marked” basically means that you stand out, to some degree, not that the way you stand out is disallowed or frowned upon necessarily.
I take issue with the idea that mens fashion choices become more marked as they become more feminine… A beard is in probably the least feminine fashion choice around, but a man who does not trim his facial hair is incredibly noticeable and especially unwelcome in any professional setting.
And it especially does not mean “more feminine”. IIRC Deborah Tannen specifically uses a beard as example of a “marked” trait. Similarly, if you are a bodybuilder and visibly much more muscular than average that would be coded as “more masculine” but would also be “marked” because it would cause you to stand out. I guess you may have been getting “more feminine=marked” from this bit from the OP:
But this doesn’t mean that being feminine (specifically, being feminine in a way that it is considered unusual for men to be, though the point of the quote above is that most ways of being feminine are in that category) is the only way to be “marked”, just that is one of the ways to be “marked”.
OK, I just looked up “Marked Women, Unmarked Men” by Deborah Tannen–here’s what she says about beards: