The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [150]
However, such confusions cannot be the whole explanation of why women follow fashion because it does not work for other features of attraction. Women are far more concerned with their own youth than men despite the fact that they mostly do not themselves seek younger partners.
And yet the notion that fashion is about status revolts us in a democratic age. We pretend instead that fashion is actually about showing off a body to best advantage. New fashions are worn by gorgeous models, and perhaps women buy them because they subconsciously credit the beauty to the dress and not the model. Surveys reveal what everybody knows: men are attracted by women in revealing, tight or skimpy clothing; women are less attracted by such clothing on men. Most female fashions are more or less explicitly designed to enhance beauty. A gigantic crinoline made a waist look small, simply by contrast. A woman is careful to choose clothes that ‘suit’ her particular figure or hair colour. Moreover, since most men grow up seeing women dressed and spend their critical periods seeing clothed women, their ideals of beauty include images of clothed women as well as naked ones. Havelock Ellis recounted the story of a boy who, standing before a painting of the Judgement of Paris, was asked which goddess he thought was the most beautiful, to which he replied: ‘I can’t tell, because they haven’t their clothes on.’37
But the most characteristic feature of fashion, today at least, is its obsession with novelty. We have already seen how Bell thinks this comes about, as the trend-setters try to escape their vulgar imitators. Low thinks the key to women’s fashion is novelty. ‘Any conspicuous display which signals the ability to read fashion trends’ is a clue to a woman’s status.38 Being the first in fashion is certainly a status symbol among women. Without the ability to induce constant obsolescence, fashion designers would be a lot less rich than they are.
This brings us back to the shifting sands of cultural standards of beauty. For beauty cannot be commonplace in a monogamous species like man; it must stand out. Men are discriminating because they will get the chance to marry only one, or perhaps two, women, so they are always interested in the best they can get, never in the ordinary. In a crowd of women all wearing black, the single one in red would surely catch the eye of a man, whatever her figure or face was like.
The very word fashion used to mean something between conformity and custom, where now it means novelty and modernity. Remarking on painful corsets and the hypocrisy of low necklines in a puritanical society, Quentin Bell observed: ‘The case against the fashion is always a strong one; why is it then that it never results in an effective verdict? Why is it that both public opinion and formal regulations are invariably set at nought, while sartorial custom, which consists in laws that are imposed without formal sanctions, is obeyed with wonderful docility and this despite the fact that its laws are unreasonable, arbitrary and not infrequently cruel.’39
I am left feeling that this puzzle is, in the present state of evolutionary and sociological thinking, insoluble. Fashion is change and obsolescence imposed on a pattern of tyrannical conformity. Fashion is about status and yet the sex that is obsessed with fashion is trying to impress the sex that cares least about status.
The Folly of Sexual Perfectionism
Whatever determines sexual attraction, the Red Queen is at work. If, for most of human history, beautiful women and dominant men had more children than their rivals – which they surely did because the