QotD: Do clothes make the (wo)man?

"Rage Over Cleavage!" was the headline that turned me into a Clinton booster. Other than that typically understated summation from the Times of India, last month's spat over the state of Clinton's décolletage saw wave after peristaltic wave of pious vapidity, followed by the occasional spasm of outright misogyny. In response to Washington Post columnist Robin Givhan's controversial piece on Clinton's decision to bare some breast, almost no one saw fit to recognize the immense challenges Clinton faces as a woman dressing to project authority.

Least of all her supporters. "Frankly, focusing on women's bodies instead of their ideas is insulting," wrote campaign official Ann Lewis in a fundraising letter. Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman excoriated "those media monitors who seek deep meaning in every shoe, sexual clues in every hemline, and psychological insights in every shirt collar." Appearances shouldn't matter, so why acknowledge that they do?

Forget the mountains of studies on cognition, perception, affective priming, the importance of signaling in social interactions, and the disadvantages women are known face due to implicit bias. The radical idea that clothes convey meaning is apparently something Givhan concocted in the corner of the newsroom and sold to credulous readers, every bit as cooked up as little Jimmy's heroin in the embarrassing annals of Post history.

Kerry Howley, "The Pantsuit Paradox: How do women signal power at the boys' club?", Reason, 2007-08-14