Wait… why do I dress like a homesteader?
Have you ever felt haunted by the people who buy the same clothes as you?
In my long list of sartorial desires, quite a few entries are dedicated to the silhouettes and fabrics that, in recent years, have dominated the collections of Simone Rocha, Batsheva, Molly Goddard, Rodarte, and Miu Miu. I share these cravings with a large number of people who probably watched a little too much Little House on the Prairie as children and read The Virgin Suicides a few too many times as adolescents.
Whether I’m daydreaming, thrift-shopping, or getting dressed, these are the textures I run my hands and thoughts through: lace, ribbons, silk, organza. I pair ballet flats with everything. I scout sales for Reformation milkmaid dresses. I have to drag myself away from racks of broderie anglaise slips because I already own too many. I don’t just dress a bit like a tradfemme; I could slip into their ranks without comment if I had more money and worse politics. Earlier this year, when the “girl” discourse reached its peak, everyone tied themselves in bows trying to decide if it was antifeminist to wear a ribbon in your hair. What was lost in the conversation (which, over and over again, seemed to focus on aesthetics first, politics second) was that there was already a whole bunch of women making content on the internet who wore ribbons in their hair to signify their genuine antifeminist views.
No one quite has my dream wardrobe like a particular breed of hyper-online, hyper-conservative, and hyper-pro-lifers. They are a group that includes both Hannah Neeleman (aka Ballerina Farms) and Dasha Nekrasova (part of the increasingly alt-right Red Scare podcast). Nekrasova, who recently filmed herself doing target practice on a dummy wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh, wore a sheer, be-ribboned Simone Rocha dress over the summer. Neeleman, the princess of the tradwife movement who breezes between birthing children and walking beauty pageants, has filmed herself wearing a milkmaid dress I once saved on Pinterest, whilst milking literal cows.
Nekrasova and Neeleman dress for the jobs they want. The job in question is, on the surface, no job at all. The “tradwife” lifestyle, advocated implicitly and explicitly by both women, embraces traditional gender roles within marriage, homemaking, and child-rearing. Nekrasova, who coats herself in silky layers of irony, tweets about loving Donald Trump and loving pointelle knits in the same keyboard-breath. Neeleman, who leaks sincerity from every pore, was recently the subject of a viral interview in the British Times in which, when asked if she was a feminist, replied that she felt her lifestyle was “absolutely” politicised by other people: “We try so hard to be neutral and be ourselves and people will put a label on everything.” While Neeleman wears practical dungarees for farmwork and Nekrasova occasionally dips into e-girl aesthetics, their dominant fashion instincts are traditionally feminine and more than a little old-fashioned, which, coupled with their politics, feel like one of those Reformation newsletters with a jarring subject line (think: HOW TO DRESS LIKE YOU’D NEVER GET VACCINATED).
Nekrasova was recently the rumoured muse of a song by Charli XCX which includes both the lyrics: “She’s out there in the sheer white dress” and “You say she’s problematic”. The implication of the song is that the aesthetic and the political are linked (Charli has since said that her music has nothing to do with politics). When Brat came out, before I knew “Mean Girls” was about Nekrasova, I strutted around London feeling like a hot bitch in my own “sheer white dress” and contemplating vaguely the politics of buying a crucifix necklace (I was raised non-denominationally, attended Catholic school, and came out of the whole thing vaguely spiritual, technically agnostic, and deeply superstitious). I’m a Lana Del Rey fan, like the titular “Mean Girl,” and I spent my adolescence on Tumblr, so I’m accustomed to the kind of cognitive dissonance required to enjoy the cultural products of people who have misread Lolita. But something stirred inside me, under the lace and the gauze: discomfort.
I wonder if I could, or even should, copy Charli, and argue that politics doesn’t feed into my fashion choices. Alternatively, I could adopt the internet’s favourite excuse: it’s ironic. I’m camping tradfemininity, I’m joking about self-infantilization, my tongue is demurely in my cheek, etc. “I am not trying to make a conscious feminist statement with my clothing,” Molly Goddard told Dazed in 2015. But I’m still wearing a tradwife’s milkmaid dress. I’m still walking miles in a Red Scare girl’s ballet flats. We know what those clothes mean when they wear them, so what do they say about my beliefs?
Political movements from every part of the spectrum have employed specific aesthetic signifiers as a form of both recognition and protest: the Nazi brownshirts, the pussy-hatted Slutwalkers. Dress reform was an important part of the Suffragette movement: crinolines and corsets had and have specific associations with female subordination. Through time and change, sometimes those signifiers retain their affective power — MAGA hats, keffiyehs — and sometimes they come unstuck, floating into the mainstream. It’s the latter I’m interested in, the items of clothing whose associations are a little more blurred, which we might choose to wear without any political intentions. It’s just a milkmaid dress! It’s easy to start sounding like that one tweet: “Is [pop star] a feminist? Is Mastercard a queer ally? Is this TV show my friend?” (Are puff-sleeves crypto-fascist?). But dressing yourself does not exist in a vacuum.
“We live in a society” is a truism we’ve come to accept to the point of meme-ification (in slightly more legitimate terms, the feminist scholar Clare Chambers wrote that “there can be no subject without social construction”). The way we dress is never an isolated choice, because none of our desires exist in isolation. Fashion does not make it easy to address these choices for what they are (see: the Ouroboros of the “girl” discourse). In their essay, “Fashion, Representation, Femininity,” Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton call the application of feminist theory to fashion a “perverse” project, where “a meaning-generating system” is applied to a “meaning-destroying” one.
So let’s be perverse for a moment: let’s talk about the milkmaid dress.
The milkmaid silhouette can be found in the pandemic-era Hill House nap dress, in Molly Goddard’s tulle fantasies, and in Reformation catalogues; it continued to (nevertheless-she-)persist through Fashion Month this year on the bodies of Simone Rocha and Batsheva and Rodarte models. Nekrasova wears sheer versions over lace bras or nothing at all, and Neeleman tends to opt for something more demure, but there are obvious, instant signifiers embedded into this design: femininity, tradition, pastoralism. But before the dress was bought up by tradwives and Dime Squareans and cottagecore brands, it belonged to actual seventeenth-century milkmaids.
A Western woman working on a farm in the 1600s woke up to a similar set of responsibilities to those in Hannah Neeleman’s “day-in-the-life” vlogs, only with more blood and less Dyson Airwrap. The milkmaid dress as we wear it today — pristine, white, expensive _ would not have enclosed her body as she squeezed, beat, and cleaned the animals whose lives and deaths she depended on to survive. What floats down runways and hangs on Pinterest boards is a fantasy, one which has long been used to corroborate a specific trad vision of femininity whilst erasing the reality of working-class women’s lives (the arduous physical exertion required to carry milk pails; the inherent violence of farming; the very real threat of sexual assault). As the Wellcome Collection’s article on the subject records, some of this dream was cultivated by the milkmaids themselves, who, on May Day, dressed up in their best clothes and “played up their wholesomeness and beauty to help boost their trade and entice donations from the wealthy elite.” By the eighteenth century, this marketing gimmick had worked its way into the increasingly embattled aristocracy, from Marie Antoinette’s farm retreats to English noblewomen dressing like peasant girls to have their portraits painted. As the ruling class felt its foundations crumbling, it’s unsurprising that they clung to conservative visions of serenity and tradition that had never really existed. In 2018, the New York Times reported on a trend amongst white supremacists for chugging gallons of milk. A very popular tradwife, who films herself twirling in puff-sleeved dresses under captions like “aborting your baby is not worth climbing the corporate ladder,” goes by the username @GwenTheMilkmaid (she lives in suburban Ontario). Duchesses and queens, like alt-right figures today, fed gluttonously at the teat of the milkmaid myth, which emphasised the connection between traditional modes of feminine labour and the purity and wholesomeness of milk itself. That symbolism is still used by Big Dairy today. It sells milk, dresses, and reactionary politics.
Does the history of our clothes matter? On the surface, it makes perfect ideological sense for Neeleman and Nekrasova to wear milkmaid dresses. Simone de Beauvoir wrote that “fashion does not serve to fulfill [woman’s] projects but on the contrary to thwart them.” The question is: does adopting feminine dress — and particularly clothing that has as much gendered history as the milkmaid dress, or the corset, or the crinoline, or, on the other side of the spectrum, the mini-skirt — work against the project of feminism? Choice feminism gives us the easiest answer: it’s feminist to just, like, do whatever you want! But if, as Clare Chambers argues, none of our desires exist in isolation, then autonomous choice is also limited by social factors. In “How To Dress Like a Feminist,” Charlotte Knowles and Filipa Lopes emphasise that choice as liberation does not tackle women’s complicity in upholding patriarchal structures and norms. This “naive picture of agency,” they write, risks a return to traditional styles — and, I add with one eye on tradfemmes, the values they connote and sanction — while rejecting any attempt to look at those choices through a critical lens. Simultaneously, they acknowledge, to say that women should opt out of fashion or femininity is equally limiting. I love clothes! I love thinking about them, putting them together, and attempting to translate my feelings and dreams into the fabrics that touch my skin. “To deny women’s experience of genuine pleasures and creative self-expression in clothing,” write Knowles and Lopes, is to “perpetuate a misogynist dismissal.” So where does that leave us?
I think there is room for pleasure in our politics. It’s an idea I feel keenly in Vivienne Westwood’s body of work, from the bondage dresses in her Kings Road boutique to the grinning model casting off her staid grey suit, mid-catwalk, to reveal her lacey petticoat underneath. The latter image is from Westwood’s SS94 “Café Society” show, which saw models dressed in crinolines and other restrictive, traditional modes of feminine dress. Throughout, the women unbutton their cardigans, pull off their gloves, unwrap their skirts, discard their coats, and lift their dresses. There’s a sense of play that runs throughout — a delight in taking off clothes as much as putting them on — and yet this is not a straightforward rejection of traditional clothing, but a reimagining of its possibilities. My favourite part is when a topless Kate Moss, made-up incongruously like a Marie Antoinette Halloween costume accessorised with a Napoleonic hat, walks on wearing a mini-crini (half mini-skirt, half crinoline) and eats a Magnum. She drips melted ice cream and insouciant grace in equal quantities.
At the time, the journalist Alix Sharkey wrote a review of the show for the Observer (republished by The Guardian). In it, he wrote that the clothes in Café Society “intensify and refine the wearer’s sense of physical presence, provoke a reaction, charge the atmosphere with sexual and political tension; alter the physical reality of the world around them.” Thornton and Evans see Westwood’s clothes as exploring “not… what could be done, but… what could be signified”. What is at stake here is the crafting of meaning as much as the crafting of designs: for example, Westwood’s mini-crini brings together the crinoline’s “mythology of restriction and encumbrance” and the mini’s “equally dubious mythology of liberation.” In gesturing towards both, the mini-crini acts on multiple levels, raises questions, winks at the viewer, all the while — crucially — also being a beautiful piece of clothing, something you gain as much pleasure out of wearing as you do thinking about.
In feminism, we are at the wasteland of a crossroads — caught somewhere between, and in the aftermath of, second-wave sex-negative repudiations of femininity, and the capitalist sloganeering of girlboss feminism (“Eyeliner sharp enough to kill a man,” Dior’s “We Should All Be Feminists” t-shirts, empowerment as sold through pop songs and makeup collections). In 2014, when I was fifteen years old, I watched Beyoncé dance in front of a large neon “FEMINIST” sign and thought: we did it! The word that meant so much to me, which had been so belittled throughout the 2000s, was finally, irrefutably, in the mainstream. Where is that word now? People using words out-of-context for suspicious means, what George Orwell called “consciously dishonest” language, is not new. What is relatively new is the result of a combination of watered-down liberal thinking trickling into the zeitgeist and the internet becoming increasingly irony-pilled. And so Katy Perry can use the language of feminism to explain why it’s okay that she worked with Ke$ha’s abuser; the Red Scare girls can use knock-off Marxist theory to argue that a woman’s place is in the home; and tradwives like Hannah Neeleman can claim any criticism of their life is misogynistic. What is at stake here, I think, is meaning. If Nekrasova can call herself a feminist, and Neeleman (as she does in the now-infamous Times interview) can almost call herself one before she cuts herself off, does the word even signify anything at all? What does any of it — tradwives, milkmaid dresses, cottagecore, feminism — even mean? 🌀
Ismene Ormonde is a culture writer and essayist based in London. She writes about the pursuit of pleasure on her Substack.