Power of the dress

Since moving to the land of athleisure and minimal upkeep, I sometimes forget the power wearing a dress wields. You give in to flowy pants and breathable t-shirts, and before you know it, you’ve been defanged.

You walk differently in a dress. You can’t trudge or march. Your hips take over and you instinctively sashay. Your posture changes and you become acutely aware of every curve and dip. You move softly and deliberately, like a cat, consciously basking in yourself.

When I have a dress on, I feel like a woman first, and a function later. Worker, mother, wife – all of that is queuing behind me as I sway my butt around and enjoy being female. Some days, it feels like snapping out of a trance. Like waking up in an efficient dystopia of similarly dressed people in techy fabrics and realizing, oh, I’ve forgotten who I am.

It’s curious to frame feminine clothing as weakness or somehow demeaning, because personally, wearing the utopian unisex comfort-wear is what often feels disempowering to me. You grow accustomed to being a sexless little cog, hurrying along with all the other sexless cogs. Quick-drying! Moisture-wicking! Clothes you can’t feel on yourself - no distractions for the busy ant, pure productivity.

At the Dressing-Table. Self-Portrait. Zinaida Serebriakova, 1909.

There is something otherworldly about being a woman: a dark undercurrent of yin, an estrogen-fuelled, bleeding softness, the power to suck men into an abyss and spit them out, giving them life. The deep soil that nurtures the seeds and swallows the corpses. The mitochondrial thread sewn through centuries, from daughter to daughter. As old as time, in every culture and religion, a fear and addiction to female energy and a desire to harness it, neutralize it, plug into it. You can’t grind it up, regurgitate it into conveyor-belt molds or wear it like a costume. Womanhood is too primal, too real. No matter how you attempt to camouflage or erase it, it will always be there.

Putting on that dress feels like fluffing out your long, shiny porcupine quills for all to see, getting a kick out of them glistening in the sun.