Like Julia Fox, Ive Been Dressing To Reject The Male Gaze For Years

Julia Fox joined Emma Barnett on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour recently and talked about her change in style; how she no longer dresses for the ‘male gaze’. She told Emma “Men hate my outfits. They're so mad that I'm not like how I was on Uncut Gems. I hear that all the time, but I don't care…because the girls love it. The girls and the gays love it!” she said.

What Fox said resonated with me, as it's a journey I have also been on over the last five years; a journey of rejecting expectations, of pushing against the ways patriarchy controls fashion, and focusing on how I define desirability, not how society does.

“Whether I was realising it or not, I think my appearance is very much to please the male gaze in way. And then something happened, I don't know if it was motherhood or being thrust into the public eye. And I was like, I don't want to uphold this anymore,” Fox said on the radio show. “I want to dress for the girls. And that's really who I am.”

This idea is not a new one, in 2010 Leandra Medine Cohen launched ‘Man Repeller’, a personal blog-turned online magazine. It closed in 2020, after criticism that the company lacked diversity and had treated former POC employees poorly. The style peddled by Cohen and her writers was a balance between high-fashion and a quirky nerdiness - over-the-top sleeves, wide framed glasses, socks with sandals, culottes and hats galore. It wasn't revolutionary, and it catered very much to thin, white, abled-bodies, but it did spark a vital question: who, and what, are women dressing for?

On the surface, this all might feel a little outdated and patronising. Women are autonomous, they are free-thinking and fashion forward, and they do not think about men when they dress! A lot of this is true, on a conscious level, but I don't think it accounts for certain realities: we live in a patriarchy, men still run the fashion world, and that is going to impact how we dress on a micro level. More than 85% of students from top fashion schools are female, but only around 14% of the top 50 fashion brands are run by women.

I've always loved fashion, and had a sense of personal style from a young age. I remember one ‘non school uniform' day, aged 11, my friends wore near-identical denim skirts and ugg boots, whereas I'd spent the night before hand sewing a velvet look with a net-crop top. It was by no means cool, but it was unique - and I was still at an age where I dressed purely on child-like impulse and without concerns about how other people perceived what I wore. Somewhere in my teens, I lost that, and I began dressing for others. Specifically, boys.

This continued into my mid-twenties. Don't get me wrong, I regularly wore things men and boys absolutely hated but that was never my intention and I always felt embarrassed if said man would point this out. At University, I was fond of fedoras and loud, printed two-pieces. One night, I wore a simple black dress and had my hair down; a male ‘friend’ said “you're much hotter when you dress like this.” That stuck with me, and if I was going into a party or situation where a lot of straight men would be, that would impact my fashion choices.

I always felt most like myself in queer spaces and around women. Now, at 28, most of my social life exists away from enforced heteronormativity; I've carved out a life that suits me, and makes me feel safe. With this, I have been empowered to dress how I want to because I am not performing for anyone. I am not making myself smaller, less loud, more plain to fit in.

The male gaze is, of course, not about men on an individual basis. I am dating a man who loves how I dress, my dad has always encouraged my sense of style, and - generally - I don't think the average joe I meet on the stress gives a shit how I'm dressed. The male gaze is more macro, less tangible; it seeps into our decisions and is peddled by mainstream media, fashion brands and porn. The term 'male gaze' became popularised in relation to the depiction of female characters in films; how often they are overly sexualised, not given agency, and exist only as objects of male desire. This experience extends to how women are viewed in society, and how relentlessly we are sexualised against our will in public spaces. Margaret Atwood, in The Robber Bride, said it best: “As You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”

Fashion that rejects the male gaze, to me, is often kitsch, cutesy, feminine and sexy- but as defined by women not men. The below items encapsulate this: