Useful note via Margarita Lau: it is white Western women that usually can get away with this, because the ability to violate social norms is a form of privilege. You can see it at conferences, where woc/non-Western women are dressed more professionally than white women, and white men are the sloppiest of all. Steve Jobs got away with wearing the same thing every day not because he was so above such nonsense as clothes but because he was a powerful man.
Also, the whole railing against traditional femininity thing is such a second – wave phenomenon. Like, fighting the patriarchy by adopting masculine modes of dress, speech, etc is really missing the point, and it has a quaint side-effect of casting feminine women as the enemy, instead of the whole machine of gendered oppression. Very common in academia, especially sciences, where traditionally feminine pursuits are scoffed at as superficial, and a woman loses 10 points of perceived IQ for every inch of heel. Put it together with the previous point, and you get a fun situation where the least privileged get shit from the mainstream for being “non-professional” if they step outside of the acceptable, and they also get shit from white feminists if they don’t! — via Ekaterina Sedia
(…I think Steve Jobs and others in Apple who dressed the same as he did were into differentiating Apple in branding, rather than the power aspect, although he still has a point with him, IMHO…)
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