What do your clothes say about you? Do you even think that your clothes can say something? While I’m admittedly not a fashionista, I was intrigued by Dress Code, which had this promising subtitle: “unlocking fashion from new look to millenial pink.”

Divided into four parts, Dress Code covers:

1. Certain trends, like why the French girl is considered chic in America and what the deal behind Millenial Pink is
2. How fashion interacts with society, including exploring what it means to be an “IT” girl and an influencer
3. Fashion and the patriarchy/sexism, considering the male gaze, politics, and atheleisure
4. Fashion and the future, basically essays on uniforms, normcore, and working out

The first part of the book, on trends, reminded me of another book called The Classic Ten which also explored certain pieces of clothing. I generally really enjoyed this chapter and it made me want to revisit The Classic Ten (idea for my rereading month?).

Parts two to four are a bit more abstract. While the first part did make comments about how fashion related to the way the American world thinks/sees itself (I made quite a few highlights), I found this extrapolation to be much stronger in the later chapters. And let’s not be confused: Hyland definitely views things from an American lens, even if she never explicitly says as much. For example, the chapter on uniforms references Japan as a country where uniforms are mandatory, and goes on to say that uniforms are often “attempts to mimic adult professional dress“. Which is true, but in collectivistic countries like Japan, uniforms can help enforce the sense of belonging to a group, which is why there was a backlash when a school decided to use Armani for uniforms, thus creating a sense of exclusivity. Unfortunately, the nuances of uniforms were never fully explored, and it’s taken for granted that uniforms are seen as a way to remove one’s individuality.

On a side note, I found the sense of work uniforms being “meant to snuff out any semblance of autonomy” amusing because I vividly remember a Japanese friend being excited about choosing her work uniform – it was a new thing to the company and she was happy to go through the catalogue and choose something. What does that say about our autonomy and can there be people who might take comfort in not having to figure out what to wear at work?

Chapters eight (on influencers) and fifteen (on working out and the body as fashion) were also interesting to read and consider together. In particular, this line in chapter fifteen caught my attention:

“Now we have to pretend that working out, and every other part of the bodily bildungsroman we call our “journey,” is something we’re doing for our own betterment and pleasure.”

This quote works very well with the chapter on influencers, which considers how influencers as a class has risen from being the underdog to being the class to topple but I do wonder: what about the people who, for better or worse, do enjoy all this? The chapter on working out and sculpting the ideal body is based on the idea that what we do for this isn’t enjoyable – and perhaps it isn’t for some – but what if it is? What if some influencers are enjoying and genuinely think that they are offering value with their content? Or if they like the outfits that they are showing off? There is an undercurrent of cynicism in some of Hyland’s chapters which may be refreshing to those who are disillusioned with the current state of social media, but it’s hard to discern what the way forward is. Perhaps this is what I was looking for in the last section – something to tie everything together and then present an alternative model for consideration.

Going back to my point on the America-centric nature of this book – perhaps that is what the book is missing and perhaps that is why I enjoyed the chapter on the French girl so much; it’s the only chapter that tries to do some cultural comparisons. There was a time when I would have read this book and automatically agreed with everything and took it for granted that all her references are universal. But now that I’ve started exploring non-English-based platforms and, more critically, have started to learn about the history of Chinese fashion (which is easier to incorporate into a daily wardrobe compared to Japanese kimono – but that’s a topic for another blog post!), I can see that to view America as the entirety of the world is very narrow. Perhaps the antidote for this enduring cynicism with fashion/social media can come from learning about how other cultures deal with fashion/social media. I’m not saying that other countries do it better, but perhaps inhabiting a different worldview can give us ideas on how we want to craft our wardrobes and how we want to express ourselves online.

Last note, completely unrelated to what I talked about before: Hyland references designer’s fashion shows quite often as ways of exploring certain ideas in fashion. But from what I read, the clothes showcased there seem rather… unwearable, for lack of a better word. In which case, do clothes intended to be statements really make a statement more effectively than what say, influencers wear? Why would they be allowed to represent fashion’s dialogue with the ideas in society if most people might never see the clothes or wear them? I’m actually quite curious about this so let me know if you have an answer, or any books about high fashion that would shed some light on this topic!

All in all, this was a fascinating book. I highlighted so many passages while reading because I wanted to discuss them/refer to them when writing this review, and I hope my review shows how the book made me think. If you’re interested in fashion or interested in commentaries on popular culture in general (for example, if you liked Trick Mirror), I think this book might be something you’d like.