Feminism and Sad Beige

Fashion has always been subversive. Throughout history, it was used as a means of control. Sumptuary laws lasted well into the colonial American period and showed how individuals were ranked in society. Certain dyes were forbidden to commoners, such as Tyrian purple, which was only for kings and queens. Buttons were strictly regulated. Color was hierarchy you wore on your body. It was used to keep you in your place, and if you tried to dress above your station, you were punished by law.

Around the early 1900s there was a shift in gender fashions. Men stopped wearing lace, embroidered silk, heels, and bright clothing, and they started dressing in darker, more muted colors. This is known as the Great Masculine Renunciation. Their change in dress was meant to denote seriousness, rationale, morality, and masculinity. Any decoration and color that remained in women’s fashion became synonymous with frivolity and femininity. Suddenly, muted and restrained menswear was equated with respectability. Where did that leave women, whose fashion hearkened back to a way of dress men had since renounced? They were subsequently pressured to tone things down and match the drabness of their male counterparts. It was never an aesthetic choice, though. They were simply being told that they were too much, too loud, too seen.

Women did try to rebel against the dress codes from time to time, especially during times of political upheaval. During suffrage movement, for example, they used color as deliberate political branding. The British Women’s Social and Political Union chose purple, white, and green for dignity, purity, and hope. They coordinated their dresses so marchers read as one disciplined, respectable, UNMISSABLE body. Similarly, American suffragists wore purple, white, and gold. Their wardrobe was more than just decoration; it was strategy. Color was how women made the movement impossible to ignore and impossible to wave off as a fanatical few. The language of color remains prevalent to this day. Red is for power and also revolution; white for both purity and surrender; purple for dignity; black for mourning, austerity, sophistication, and rebellion.

During World War II, women went to work in factories wearing trousers and utility clothes. Rationing kept clothes plain, but it was a plainness built for work and public life. Then, in February 1947, Christian Dior came out with his “New Look.” It featured nipped waists, padded hips, vast yards of skirt, structured undergarments. Some women loved the return to femininity, while others saw the garments as wasteful and were offended by them. Women in America protested them with signs that read, “Mr. Dior, we abhor dresses to the floor.” While these dresses were beautiful, they were tight fitting and made labor and movement harder. This all came just in time for the postwar order demanding women to return to the home and out of the workforce. The 1950s housewife silhouette proved to be soft, pretty, and physically constrained just when politics called for “re-domesticating” women who’d had a taste of independence. Fashion was being used as a tool to make women smaller both literally and figuratively. The tight waists of their dresses constrained them, the heels on their shoes, kept them close to home, and the sudden unpopularity of women’s trousers discouraged them from seeking function over form. They had helped the world expand only to be relegated to the home and pressured into seeing independent working women as unfashionable.

The 1960s rebelled with color and rule-breaking. Mary Quant’s mini skirt, the mod movement, psychedelics, second wave feminism, the return of women’s pants. Yves Saint Laurent put women in tuxedos and introduced androgyny to fashion. The punk movement of the late ’70s brought with it lots of black, tartan, and safety pins as anti-establishment aggression. In the 1980s, women wore power suits (anyone remember the movie Working Girl?). Women were armored in should pads and “power red” as they commanded corporate and political authority. I remember sewing shoulder pads into my clothes in the ’80s. The fact that women had to use masculine silhouettes to be taken seriously tells you the Great Masculine Renunciation was still running the show.

The 1990s beige was introduced hard. Helmut Lang, Jil Sander, Calvin Klein, greige minimalism… all of it read as intellectual, modern, cool, and even avant-garde, not repressive. Coco Chanel’s LBD was sold as liberation from constraint. Minimalism was a tool of freedom. Then, in the early 2020s, we entered the era of “sad beige.” The oatmeal and taupe baby aesthetic, the wooden toys, the lack of primary colors. Brands like The Row and the Kardashian aesthetic were drivers. The premise was that serious, somber products could create a calm, collected society. Brands leaned into quiet luxury, clean girl, old money, and coastal grandmother aesthetics.

Muted palettes have often gone hand in hand with periods of conservatism, and “quiet luxury” carries a command that falls harder on women than men — be tasteful, be discreet, don’t be loud, don’t be flashy or trashy. The “sad beige” aesthetic holds tightly to motherhood and the tradwife/pronatalist revival, which is explicitly political. It feels like the dominant aesthetic right now has gained its popularity from making women who are expensive, pleasant, and barely there.

Sad beige reflects and reinforces a conservative, anti-risk, self-erasing cultural mood. And, because restraint has been sold as a feminine virtue for centuries, it lands more on women than anyone else. While it feels planned, it’s not a conspiracy. The look pushes a certain set of values, but nobody sat in a room and decided that. This makes it all the more insidious because we don’t have any one person to blame. We are doing it to ourselves. Fashion encodes politics, and drabness arrives when women are asked to shrink. While it isn’t necessarily designed to keep women in their proverbial place, it does reward them for it.

The good news is that the pendulum is swinging back. We have recently had Barbiecore, maximilism, dopamine dressing, and “brat” green was really popular in the yarn industry. All of these are in direct opposition to sad beige.

Vivian Westwood, the MOTHER of punk aesthetic once said “the only reason to be in fashion is to destroy the word “conformity”. But I like Alexander McQueen’s quote better.

Alexander McQueen said, “I want to empower women. I want people to be afraid of the women I dress.” I want the same thing. I want women to feel the power we hold. I want us all to stop making ourselves small so others feel important.

So please, wear all the colors, wear them all at once! Paint your nails. Paint your walls! The dopamine of surrounding yourself with your favorite colors will make you feel better.