I saw an old photo of myself today and it was a stark contrast to these photos here.
I was wearing head to toe black, a black t shirt, black jeans and black slides. Everything looked stuck to my body with no shape or flow. The lack of levity and cheeriness looked so dreary. For all intents and purposes I was wearing what a man could have been wearing. There was nothing happy or beautiful about it.
Haha! This is it. It makes me laugh every time I see it. It looks so sad! But here I was going with typical fashion advice (except the slides with socks, that was just not caring)….dark wash jeans and a black t shirt. It is not that it is wrong, but it is not conveying femininity at ALL.
At the time, I didn’t see how odd this fashion looked because it was the cultural norm. It took parting ways with the cultural norms to embrace my femininity!
The Bible says to pray about everything but it is amazing how many things I don’t pray about. It may seem trite to people to pray about what pleases God when it comes to shopping and dressing but I did and it changed the way I saw things. I went from assessing things the way the world does to realizing certain styles really oppress a woman’s loveliness. The world has high jacked femininity and given it to men but it expects women to become androgynous and masculine. Feminine expression feels awkward to women who only practice androgyny and masculinity. My all black manly dreary clothes seemed fine to me for years because that is what my senses were trained to see as normal and attractive. Your senses can change.
At some point, I started realizing that wearing all black looked like I was in mourning whereas before I thought it looked “chic”. But it was not just the all black that looked so harsh, it was the total lack of any feminine element in my clothing. Black done in feminine shapes and styles is much better than shapeless plain head to toe black.
While I always had the instinct for lovely femininity, I did not grow up understanding what this was nor embracing it. Nice dresses are so rare people think you need an occasion to wear them now days. In fact, before living in the countryside, I wore a long white dress one morning and my neighbors thought I was walking my dog in a nightgown! How far we have gone from the days when women dressed womanly!
It starts young. Children’s clothing also suffers from gender blending. Little girls should be provided clothing that highlights femininity such as lace, pink, flowers, and ruffles. If we teach our girls that these features are silly or over the top we are not nurturing their right to their feminine senses and femininity will be trained to feel odd to them. Likewise they need to see a feminine mother. When we dress for the day we are dressing in the ambiance we want our families to marinate in. These are the things that will imprint on their senses. Babies and children love beauty and respond emotionally to it. Give them loveliness in your words and behavior but also in your appearance.
Being a feminine woman means brazenly embracing your femininity. Forge that path for your family so that your household respects feminine women instead of putting them down. Your sons will learn to appreciate feminine women and your daughters will have an example.
Do not mind being odd if you are being odd for doing good things.
