I am writing this in the Smith Campus Center on Harvard’s campus, in a long skirt, high neckline, and covered arms. Here’s a curious fact about college kids in 2024: I am not the only one here who fits that description, despite the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, none of my fellow students are Orthodox Jews like me. They are, instead, what used to be called “normal.” Where modest dress once was the provenance of history books, the Amish, and those born before 1960, it can now be spotted on New York’s hottest runways, in every fast-fashion retailer’s repertoire, and among the trendiest dressers in Harvard Yard.
But even as modest dress proliferates, I think it is safe to say that modesty as a concept is still very much out of style. The gestures to modesty we see all over have more to do with fashion fads and choice feminism than with covering up. I often catch myself telling a story about my own modesty using liberal concepts that could explain why some theoretical person would layer a theoretical turtleneck under a theoretical slip dress. But palatable explanations of wanting to be “comfy” and “reclaim my body” actually have nothing to do with my modesty at all.
Perhaps it is not surprising that a fashion landscape committed to pushing boundaries would develop at both extremes of the coverage continuum. Brandy Melville’s skirt offerings consist of 14 inch micro minis and ankle-brushing prairie midis, with nothing in between. Here, covering up seems to be just as much about flaunting skin as its opposite, only this time the seductive appeal is drawn from skin’s absence rather than its presence. In the cringe words of our foremothers, the full coverage leaves something to the imagination.
Or perhaps, as clothes get ever skimpier, covering up is the only way left to shock. The New York Times fashion critic Vanessa Friedman suggested that “[once] we’ve seen it all … it now seems as if the most radical gesture could only involve donning a baggy jumpsuit or a generously cut midi-skirt.” This take on modest dressing works specifically as a counterculture, as a commentary on mainstream fashion. But what exactly is that commentary trying to say?
As a general rule, whenever women do anything, we assume it has something to do with feminism. We ask, in commentary pieces and Twitter threads: Are modest dressers trying to reclaim their bodies from the male gaze, choosing comfort and body image confidence over (potentially false-consciousness) sex appeal? Are they attempting to revalue femininity, as seen in the case of Barbie pink, via traditionally womanly wear? Are they asking to be taken seriously no matter what they wear, just like their miniskirted predecessors?
To a large extent, I agree that modest dress has something to do with feminism. Defining this trend through feminism, however, makes even clearer the distinction between modest clothing qua fashion and modest dress qua modesty. The glow of feminism is not cast onto every modest fashion choice. Trad wives in ‘50s house dresses and influencers extolling the power of giving up shorts for Jesus are unlikely to be lumped in with the Brandy models in maxis. It can only be “choice feminism” if it is a choice, whether via picking out a denim midi one day and Daisy Dukes the next, or choosing to express one’s culture through clothing.
Modest clothing may express en vogue values like cultural visibility, any number of feminisms, or being warm and comfortable. But modesty for its own sake — citing studies on bikinis leading to objectification, exhorting women to redirect attention to “what lies within” — is still taboo. Modesty as a standalone value cannot play the multicultural game by justifying itself as a way to respect other values instead of claiming its own merit. Modesty like that does not fit into a nonjudgmental landscape; modesty like that has no obvious roots in progressive values; modesty like that is propaganda from the patriarchy who want to blame girls for male weakness and think women’s bodies are sinful. Modesty, then, is only okay when it is really not about modesty at all.
This preoccupation with modesty also reflects the contemporary phobia of possibly judging other cultures for their moral preferences. As recently as 2010, progressive society rallied to “free” women from hijabs and Boushra Almatawakel’s “Mother, Daughter, Doll” encapsulated the modern view on veiling: “excessive” modesty was seen as a tool of the patriarchy used to oppress women. This view is still on full display in certain parts of Europe, most notably France, but liberal America seems to have moved on to a multicultural celebration of traditional Islamic dress as just another way to telegraph diversity and acceptance. It is probably the greater visibility of Muslim women, more than anything else, that accounts for ASOS’s modest line and the acceptability of full coverage. It is thanks to them that I can count on my Harvard classmates not to question long sleeves in summertime, nor associate hair covering with repression.
As I talked through this piece with my friend Hannah, she warned me that what I was describing was essentially just the crisis of liberalism: that liberalism can accept everything but illiberalism. Must a society grant its citizens the freedom to choose no freedom at all? Without falling down the burkini-beachrabbit hole, it does seem as though our attempts to cast all of the “right” kinds of modesty as essentially liberal choices is Sisyphean at best and fundamentally misguided at worst. Choice feminism loves its magic trick of defining any possible action by a woman as feminist, but surely we can allow that some things simply are not feminist instead of twisting ourselves into pretzels trying to explain why liberated women dress according to religious codes written in light of the male gaze. Maybe the time has come to start telling it like it is, and acknowledge that the trendy midi skirt the girl next to me is wearing is a fundamentally different skirt than mine.
