Rethinking monogamy

I've been meaning to predict this for a while and putting it off, but since it's been showing up more and more in the news I thought I'd go ahead and put it out there. Basically, I think that non-exclusive sexual relationships are going to be getting more mainstream, and that this is going to have a huge impact on society.

The subject of nonmonogamy is back on my mind this week because it was featured in the winning essay in the NY Times's Modern Love College Essay Contest. It struck me as significant that, in choosing an essay about love in a contest specifically for young people and therefore really by definition specifically about "what's next," the Times settled on a piece that included such as this:

“The main thing,” he said, “is I don’t mind if she sleeps with other people. I mean, she’s not my property, right? I’m just glad I get to hang out with her. Spend time with her. Because that’s all we really have, you know? I don’t want her to be mine, and I don’t want to be anybody’s.”

At this stage, I guess, editors at the Times can put this stuff out there and say, "This is something young people are doing." But looking just a step ahead, what they're really beginning to say is, "This is what people are doing."

Part of the impetus for this is what I'm calling New Humanism -- a focus on our ever-growing understanding of intrinsic human psychological and biological needs as a guide for reforming our lifestyles. There's been a big increase in interest in trying to understand human sexual behavior in biological terms, which lately has taken the form of studies showing how sensory stimuli play a huge part in subconsciously influencing mate choice. Recently, for instance, there have been articles about how women's pheromones make them more attractive to men when they're ovulating (article) and how women are more attracted to men with deep voices (article). And many people are probably familiar with the "sweaty T-shirt experiment" from a few years back that showed women were more attracted to the armpit smell of men whose immune systems were different from theirs (article).

The growing awareness that so much of our sexual behavior seems to be subconsciously, biologically determined is beginning to spark questions about the extent to which our instinctive drives about sex invalidate our cultural norms regarding it. But most people are still pretty nervous about discussing this topic with reference to humans. The Times was able to approach the topic, a propos of the Spitzer scandal, with regard to animals, just hinting at the implications for humans (article). Slate went a little further on the topic of sperm competition (article). The anthropologist Helen Fisher is focusing directly on the question of what the human psychological predispositions are in the realm of sex and love and has written some cool books about it. Her basic opinion, which seems to be the preliminary consensus generally, is that humans are hardwired for long-term pair bonds -- on which they're hardwired to cheat.

I don't think that human pair-bonding or social monogamy will ever go away, because I do think it's what people are naturally predisposed to do and what they're happiest doing. However, I think that cultural norms are going to shift over the next few decades with regard to marriage, family structure, and romantic relationships in a way that will reflect at least a more open acknowledgment of the fact that lots of people want to cheat on their partners, and that lots of people do.

One change may be that the "serial monogamy" that is so often disparaged, yet is the most common love life model of young people, will become the accepted one. Serial monogamy, or something like it, is in fact what Helen Fisher thinks human psychology may be set up for, for the purpose of child-raising, with the infatuation that causes sex followed by the romantic love that leads to bonding, which is followed by the long-term attachment suitable for child-raising -- which then, after 4 years or so, at about the same time that children in primitive cultures reach a milestone of independence from their mothers (leaving the mothers in less need of help from the fathers), fades away unless another child is born to the couple. Of course, the lifestyle of a primitive culture is not that relevant in modern industrialized countries. What is relevant is the possibility that in an increasingly liberal social environment, people may be naturally drifting toward a more "natural" system of forming and dissolving multiple monogamous relationships over the course of their lifetimes. Currently the "serial monogamy" model gets a lot of criticism since it's a rather painful way of doing things under our current model of marriage and family, with its built-in reliance on parents sticking together, socially and financially, for decades. But if the current rates of divorce continue, which they probably will, it may be time to give up and tinker with the institution of marriage a bit for the sake of kids and their parents. Not sure how this would play out, but one idea is for couples to figure out theoretical child custody arrangements in case of divorce along with the financial plans they make in prenups (Op-Ed).

I also wonder what will happen with how our culture handles cheating. This is much more difficult. Even though the biological motives for preventing cheating aren't relevant anymore because of birth control, the psychological feelings of jealousy about one's partner cheating are extremely strong and will never go away, no matter how much the polyamorists try. The most pressing need in this area is to prevent the disease and violence that can result from cheating. But I also wonder whether gender-specific norms of cheating may develop, sort of along the lines of the "double standard" -- for instance, whether women may get a little more comfortable with men having sex with other women so long as they don't show them too much affection or support, while men may become tolerant of women getting affection and support from other men so long as they don't sleep with them. Of course, this system doesn't make any logical sense, since some of these women would have to be having sex and some of the men giving affection and support. Although, I guess this is kind of what already goes on with women who're close with gay men and men who sleep with prostitutes.

The media currently kind of doesn't know what to do with the few public figures, such as Will Smith and his wife, who are supposedly in an open marriage, who practice nonmonogamy. To me, it's astounding that Carla Bruni has been quoted saying, “I am faithful — to myself! I am bored to death by monogamy.” The current public reaction to stuff like this so far is basically denial, plus "Weird!" But I think we're going to start dealing with it a little more deeply soon.

Update 5/20: Looky here, an article about just this in the 5/26 NYMag: article

The dress is dead, the pant is dead, the jacket is dead, long live the new sportswear

This Times Style piece covers the news that "the dress" "is dead."  As usual, no concrete reason is given -- apparently, “the eye is looking for something new, and so is the psyche."  Whatever.  I think all these old categories -- "the dress"; "the pant" -- are outdated, and that it's the entire dizzying, lucrative dance of separates that consumers, their eyes, and their psyches are sick of.

So, my big, long-range prediction is that old separates categories, which have been eroding, are going to finally wash away, and in their place more total-look, perhaps one-piece, minimalist, body-con-influenced outfits will come into fashion.  And as has been the way this happens since always, the new look will come out of sportswear -- actual sportswear, like you wear to play sports in.  The modern equivalent of what the stuff we call "sportswear" now used to be.

This trend has begun with the interest in dancewear and the "superhero" look.  It could continue with a revolution in material.  Comfortable, high-performance, eco-friendly, temperature-control, sweat-wicking fabric will finally cease to exist exclusively in the realm of exercise clothes and move into regular casual and formal clothes.  Design features of activewear, such as protective padding, zip-in-zip-out coordinating garments, etc., could then follow.

A really modern men's suit, for example, would be a form-fitting garment made of high-tech fabric worn over some kind of  body-shaping or -enhancing "armor."  Very Japanese, very superhero, very Aeon Flux.  Very Clockwork Orange.  Very environmentally-friendly, inexpensive, no-fuss, tough, modern.

A really modern women's outfit would, indeed, include some kind of leg covering.  (It's the extraneous fabric and modesty-related inconvenience of dresses and skirts that really makes them old-fashioned.) It would be basically along the same lines as the above-imagined men's garment, only cut to flatter a woman's body.

Update 5/6/08: Madonna may have chosen sportswear as her new look.  Her clothes in the video for 4 Minutes are a perfect example of New Sportswear.

Update 7/4/08: If even Free People is making corset-influenced clothes, something must be going on.

Long hair for men

I've been floating this idea to lots of people recently and everyone hates it.  But I still think it's a good trend.  Nothing grody, just to-the-collar or a little past.  No ponytails, necessarily (although that could be a great dirtbag look).  Kurt Cobain stuff.  It's how the high school boys wear their hair, and trends start in kid culture more and more these days (here's another youth hair trend (chunky highlights) that I think adult women will start wearing soon), so I think once those kids are in their twenties (in just a couple years) this could start to get big-time.  And with all the employers rushing to accommodate the lifestyle demands of Millennials (while whining piteously about having to do so), a less-clean-cut look will get accepted more easily than you might think.  There's already a movement towards this in the slightly-oily mini-mane that the kind of bankers who idolize Patrick Bateman have been sporting.  This also fits with the long hair trend with women.

No shoe is a good shoe

An emerging clothing trend that matches the theme of New Humanism (a reconsideration and redesigning of lifestyle around "natural" human biological/psychological needs) is the interest in shoes which attempt to replicate being barefoot, with the theory that this is what's best for feet and the body.  This week's New York Magazine has an article about it.  The aesthetics of the no-shoe shoes might need some working out, but overall I think the "barefoot" trend has good potential to catch on.

Homespun chic

The cheapest clothes are often the coolest. Subcultures tend to discover cheap ways of dressing (Edie Sedgwick's girls' skirts from the LES; hipsters' thrift store clothes; grunge rockers' work clothes), which then get knocked off mass-market style. You can still go out and try to buy "the real thing" for cheap once that happens, but the price of the original often goes up, and wearing the original is never quite the same again once everyone's wearing a copy from Urban Outfitters. There's one type of cheap clothing that can never be knocked off by mass merchants, however, and that's homemade clothing. I'm predicting that homemade clothes are going to be the next subculture fashion trend.

People are clearly interested in this. Teen Vogue has had a "DIY" section almost since it launched, I think, in which they show you how to turn an existing piece of clothing into a clone of some designer garment. Built by Wendy sells a book called Sew U, which teaches the basics of home sewing, as well as patterns. Project Runway obviously has people interested in making their own clothes, too.

I think a potential home-sewing trend would take a slightly different direction than the above examples, however. The reason more people don't make their own clothes is that sewing is so difficult and time-consuming. If more people are going to make their own clothing, it has to be easier and faster to make than conventional tailored garments. So, I think that body con will combine with the classicism of New Humanism to create an aesthetic of simple, easy-to-make knit clothing in a Nouveau-Ancient-Greek style (which has also been popular lately, with all the Greek drapery styles and the relaunch of Vionnet).

I'm wearing a dress today that I made in thirty minutes for $21. I learned how to make it by doing a little research online about how Greek chitons were made, got some fabric at Mood, and used my sewing machine (the pricey initial investment for doing this). I'll try to write up some instructions on how I did it, hopefully with a photo, sometime soon. It took me a few tries to figure out a pattern that didn't look like I was in costume, but what I ended up with actually looks pretty modern and vaguely Calvin Klein-minimalist.

Body con

I wrote earlier about my prediction that underwear would be "cast off as an unnecessary artifice standing in the way of fashion’s reimagining of the body." I now have a clearer sense of how that reimagining is going to take place. We're seeing its beginning in the body-conscious or "body con" trend, which I believe is related to the trend of "new humanism" in society and culture.

Superficially, body con is a sexy, show-off-y look. But at a more basic level, it's about the body, and letting the body beneath a garment determine the shape of the garment. No other style could be more human-, as opposed to fashion-, centric. This return to the body, after seasons of shapeless baby-dolls, sacks, and bubbles, signals the beginning of a turn away from "art" and towards "life" as the model for fashion.

In May of 2006, during the heyday of the shapeless dress, a representative piece of fiction appeared in Harper's. The story, "A change of fashion" by Steven Millhauser, chronicled the rise and fall of a spectacular fashion trend in which women's dresses grew to be as large, sculptural, and complex as houses, to a point at which women could withdraw into them and remain incommunicado for days at a time; suddenly, at the height of the trend, it reversed itself, and women went back to wearing regular, person-sized dresses. I think this story was about the overgrown artiness of our culture, for which fashion has been only one outlet.

A similarly representative piece of writing for the body con trend just ran in the New Yorker: Michael Chabon's essay "Secret Skin: An essay in unitard theory" (March 10, 2008). Although Chabon's topic was the archetypal superhero costume, his theory of its significance is just as applicable to contemporary body con fashion: "it ultimately takes its deepest meaning and serves its primary function in the depiction of the naked human form, unfettered, perfect, and free."

Just as the ancient Greeks celebrated their humanistic worldview by wearing draped garments and exercising in the nude, we are beginning to manifest a return to a human-centered view of things by wearing human-centered clothing. But also like the Greeks, we're striving toward not a completely "natural" human form, but an idealized one. This idealization is evident in two currents within body con: the unification and re-shaping of the body.

The drive toward unification is evident in the trend toward one-piece garments. Prada, Halston, Stella McCartney, Betsey Johnson, and many others showed jumpsuits for spring. The "one-piece" category at American Apparel is also going stronger and stronger. This new enthusiasm for all-in-one garments indicates a high regard for the aesthetic of the body-as-a-whole -- a regard high enough to overturn the shifting collage of separates that has been the basis of styling for decades now.


The re-shaping tendency is showing up in the growing popularity of all-in-one shaping garments. This got started a couple of years ago when a retro-ish corset trend showed up. But now, with Spanx, which celebrities are always talking about in tabloids, and products like the Dreambody, which I learned all about from a mesmerizing infomercial at the gym, there's a new market for undergarments that take a lumpy, out-of-shape body and magically streamline it.


The new unified, reshaped body is a sign of what the new humanism is looking for: a way of life modeled on the icon of inherently-perfect homo sapiens. I'm predicting that the "body con" trend will continue and extend past its roots in sexiness and provocativeness into a more general wide-range, long-term, minimalist, form-fitting trend in clothing.

Update 4/9: The Met is planning a May exhibit that "will explore the symbolic and metaphorical associations between fashion and the superhero" and "reveal how the superhero serves as the ultimate metaphor for fashion and its ability to empower and transform the human body."

Update 4/17: The NYT reports how designers are being influenced by the comic book aesthetic

Six human needs

Recently I've become a big fan of Ellen Dissanayake and her book What Is Art For?. Dissanayake defines modern art as distinct from the "primitive" arts in that modern art sees aesthetics as an end in itself, whereas humans originally used aesthetics as a means to the end of "making special," or emphasizing the importance of certain important rituals, objects, and occasions.  The reason "we" (really Western elites) invented modern "art for art's sake" is as a method of self-transcendence in a world in which literacy has destroyed the old ("primitive," "superstitious," "magical") ways of transcending ourselves.

Towards the end of the book, Dissanayake speculates about exactly what it is that modern Westerners are missing that makes them need art.  She identifies six "human needs," which are not being well met in our text-centered culture:

• Humans tend to construct, accept, and share with others systems that explain and organize their world as perceived and known, and feel uneasy without such explanation and organization.
• Humans tend to require the psychological (as well as physical) security of predictability and familiarity of knowing and accepting their role and place in life, and feel uneasy without such predictability and knowledge.
• Humans require psychological ratification or certification by others--by being an integral part of a group or family--and feel uneasy without this certification.
• Humans tend to bond or attach to others, and feel incomplete without this attachment.
• Humans recognize and celebrate with others of their kind an extraordinary as opposed to ordinary dimension of experience, and feel unsatisfied without it.
• Humans tend to engage in play and make-believe, and feel deprived if unable to do so.

She thinks that if we reorganized society with an orientation towards meeting these needs, we would all be happier and less alienated.  And, presumably, we would no longer need art, and aesthetics would retreat back into its role as a tool for "making special." 

Even though not needing art would mean we were "healthier," I still hate the idea.  I don't want to accept that something I grew up thinking was one of the big points of life is actually just a symptom of our civilization's sickness.  But then, I'm a classic alienated Western elite, and my feelings about art probably put me in a tiny minority of people worldwide.  Most people are probably better off not feeling a need for art.  And yet, the artification of culture worldwide (see Head-to-toe for my reactionary rant about that) seems to be proceeding at a quick pace.  Before too long everyone may be alienated out of their skulls.

Or maybe the artification trend will reach saturation and reverse itself automatically.  As I mentioned in B.O. is the new perfume, I do think that people are getting very interested in a "New Humanism" which looks to our natural, instinctual, inherent human qualities for guidance as to how we should live and structure society.  So maybe the "six basic needs" will get some attention after all.

B.O. is the new perfume

Two trends are converging right now:

1. Decreased perfume sales as a result of market oversaturation and the growing social unacceptableness of wearing perfume
2. Increased scientific knowledge about and popular interest in the role of natural human scent in sexual attraction

The outcome, I predict, will be that fashion-forward people will start wearing their own body odor as perfume.  It's the easiest and cheapest way to wear fragrance: just wash with unscented soap, wear no deodorant, and let your happy glands do the work of cranking out some naturally-attractive-to-the-opposite-sex smells.

Note that I say "fashion-forward" people.  The taboo against body odor in America is strong.  So, were the trend to become mainstream at all, I'm sure that most adopters would go with unscented deodorant instead of none at all.  Arguably that's what everyone trying this out ought to do in the summer.  Consumer products companies can cash in on this trend by offering new or expanded lines of unscented deodorant.  Or perhaps the midday armpit-wash will become a new ritual.

This trend would make sense in the context of the trend toward an increasingly "natural"/"animal" dynamic in sexual relationships that I'm predicting and think I will call "New Humanism."  (Basically I think people are getting interested in "humans as animals" again and that this will manifest itself in culture in myriad ways, one of them this trend in scent, another in romantic/sexual relationships.)

The "B.O. as perfume" trend also fits with the trend of the growing prominence of non-American and especially developing countries.  Americans have long made fun of Europeans for their more relaxed attitude toward hygiene and body odor, but the street goes both ways and they make fun of us for being so uptight about keeping squeaky-clean, too.  If the euro continues to dominate the dollar, maybe The French & Friends will start smelling better to us.  People in developing non-European countries have even less interest in, history of using, ability to afford, and possibly need for deodorant than Europeans do.  The increasing importance of these countries is an argument for America to try out their beauty traditions for a change.

The trend might also be more palatable if B.O.-wearers would Eat to Live, as vegans supposedly perspire less and smell better than meat/dairy-eaters.

Eat to live

When I read articles about obesity like this one, I feel really frustrated because I'm pretty sure I know about the solution to it and many other health problems. It's called Eat to Live.

Eat to Live is a diet developed by Joel Fuhrman, a doctor whose specialty is reversing disease through nutrition. The concept behind it is very simple and intuitive:

Health = Nutrients/Calories

In other words, the more nutrient-rich your food, the healthier you will be. This means minimizing or eliminating processed foods with "empty" calories as well as meat and dairy, which are not only nutrient-poor as judged by the formula above, but also raise the risk of heart disease, cancer, and other illnesses.

I know from personal experience and my friends' experiences that this diet really works. When I started it, my weight dropped rapidly and kept dropping until it stabilized right at the number Dr. Fuhrman's weight tables recommended for my height -- and has stayed right there for months. My BMI went from 22.4 (within the normal range) to 18.6 (on the low end of the healthy range). And it was really easy. You can eat as much as you want, so long as you eat a variety of whole vegan foods.

This diet seems weird and fringey to most people now, but I'm convinced it will eventually become very popular. I hope it will even change the majority of Americans' diets for good. It works too well not to be a success; it just has to reach its "tipping point." It seems like the momentum is gathering. A book called The China Study, which urges an almost-identical diet, was published in 2004, the year after Dr. Fuhrman's book. And Michael Pollan's book that just came out, In Defense of Food, has this message: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

I encourage everyone to read Dr. Fuhrman's book, Eat to Live, and to try the diet! Even if you're a healthy weight, it's nice to see, written down, a guide to exactly how to eat in order to be as healthy as you can be. Then, you can decide whether to eat that way or not -- but at least you'll have good information about the optimal human diet.

Unhaircuts

I think the next hair trend, for men and women (either concurrent with long hair or right before it) will be the "unhaircut."

The unhaircut is a nontraditional haircut in that it's not designed from the perspective of what would look good when the person is sitting upright, looking straight ahead, as all haircuts are today.  Instead, the unhaircut can be performed with the cuttee in any position -- lying down, with the head tilted to the side, or upside-down.  Once the hair is in position, it's simply grabbed at a certain point and hacked off, so that when the cuttee resumes an upright position, the hair falls into a semi-arbitrary, "wrong"-looking configuration.

This haircut is a lot like the emo haircut, except it's less studied and will not necessarily have to obscure the face or be dyed black or excessively styled.  I imagine the hair just hanging there, in whatever shape the cut gives it.  And I think the hair will be longer than most emo haircuts are--even on men, who might wear it shoulder-length.  The unhaircut's other antecedent is the grown-out look that's so popular among the New York private school boys and their ilk across America.  I'm sure they have a name for it, but I have no idea what it could be.  The "prep school mafia hairstyle"?  Anyone know?

The unhaircut says, "I realize that everything is just a construct, including haircuts," and in that way it's very postmodern.  Yet ultimately the unhaircut is post-postmodern, because it makes no distinction between hair and haircut: they are one and the same.

Long hair

Long hair is going to be in. And I mean really long hair. Think Lady Godiva. Think Rapunzel.

Actually, those women’s stories are quite relevant to the trend. In both tales, a woman’s long hair simultaneously symbolizes chastity and sexuality; I believe that when a long hair trend occurs in the future, it will be associated with a similar set of semi-contradictory attitudes toward women.

Women are going to become both more and “less” sexual in the coming years. They’re going to be more sexual in the sense that they will become more informed about, comfortable with, and outgoing about their sexuality. I think women are going to be more sexually aggressive with men than they are now. But at the same time, I they will be more picky, and the hook-up culture will decline as women get better at enjoying sex for its own sake. (Yes, it’s just like with the hippies and their hair—only I think it’ll go further this time. If you think about it in terms of the “waves” model of social change, the sixties were a little wave of hair and sex, and we are now approaching another, bigger one.) Long hair will be only part of fashion’s response to women’s increased sexual sophistication, which will be manifested in a generally more organic, soft, tactile femininity.

Let’s look at where we’re starting from. The most recent hair trends have been the Jean Seberg/Rosemary’s Baby pixie cut and the bangs phenomenon. Both of those are little-girl looks, which went well with all the little-girl fashions of the past year and a half. They are also both very specifically centered on the cut, not the styling, of the hair.

I see the long-hair trend as a continuation of those styles. First of all, the little girl will become the pubescent girl. The women in our culture who are most likely to have long hair, currently, are tweens and teenagers, and therefore women who wear their hair long will be identifying with adolescence and sexual maturation. Secondly, the turn away from aggressive styling will persist and deepen in the long-hair trend, which will be actively anti-style. Instead, long hair will be worn loose. And I don’t think it will be kept fussily combed, either, but will be a little tangled and thicket-like (sexual symbolism again). Cory Kennedy has been an important innovator in this regard.

The anti-style element brings me to the other important precursor of long hair, the no-shampoo/Devachan movement. That haircare style, with its focus on working with hair’s natural texture and oils, is a step in the direction of a kind of hair-worship that will be part of the long hair style. I think that women will begin to re-identify with their hair, and what is now an often antagonistic relationship between women and their hair will become one of nurturing and enjoyment. Women’s healthy, natural hair will symbolize their healthy individuality and confident sexuality.

Sorry, straight-hairs, but curls will fashionable this time (opposite of in the sixties). Also: the Afro is on its way back.

Burn your bra

Okay, here's the first fashion prediction I want to share with you: bralessness is going to be in.

The history of the brassiere tells us that the modern bra evolved out of the corset. In the late nineteenth century, concerns about corsets’ health risks and physical restrictiveness led to the invention of a new, supposedly more comfortable undergarment. This new underthing was like a corset split in half, with the bottom part cinching in the waist and the upper part supporting the bust. Over time, the waist corset evolved into the lighter, elasticized girdle, which in turn fell almost completely out of usage in the late 1960s, when control-top pantyhose rendered it obsolete. Today, of course, most women’s below-the-waist undergarments consist of nothing more than panties. The top half of the corset, in contrast, changed very little over the course of the twentieth century; most bras retain the corset’s boning (underwire) and rigidity (padding). The brassiere’s function, as well, has remained the same as that of the corset: the reshaping of the breasts into a desirable, artificial shape. The bra remains, essentially, a corset for the breasts.

If the top half of women’s undergarments had kept pace with the bottom half, then today, instead of brassieres, most women would be wearing the upper-body equivalent of panties: camisoles. Why did it not happen that way? It seemed for a time that it might: in the ‘60s, some women stopped wearing bras, and many continued this trend into the 1970s. In the ‘80s, though, the switch to “power dressing” and a backlash to feminism caused the bra to regain its status as a crucial foundation garment, which it retains today.

In my opinion, wearing a bra is extremely uncool. Apart from being shockingly old-fashioned, bras are uncomfortable, prudish, ugly, and expensive. So why do most women still wear them? I’ve heard large-breasted women say they find going braless uncomfortable. There’s also the aesthetic factor: bras can disguise the appearance of breasts that are droopy or asymmetrical. But why do women with nice-looking, regular-sized breasts still wear bras?

It all has to do with sexual repression. Un-bra’ed breasts are very sexy; they have shape, personality, and a natural bounciness. Breasts in a bra are comparatively much less sexy; molded into perfect, geometric hemispheres, “supported” and held in place, they are sanitized, and, I think, desexualized. The contemporary “hottie,” with her skintight T-shirt over her Victoria’s Secret bra, has transformed herself into a safe and unthreatening visual treat for men. Her cartoon breasts—nippleless and immobile, like Barbie’s—give no hint of their actual functions as secondary sexual characteristics or milk-producing organs. Bras do the same thing to breasts that corsets did to waists: they objectify them, turning them into symbols of femininity by distorting and destroying their natural, feminine shape.

I think it’s time for women to stop wearing bras. It’s “been time” for a while, but I think American culture might actually, finally, be ready for it. There aren’t that many clear signs that the trend is coming—the most obvious is American Apparel’s promotion of the no-bra look in its ads and online product photos—but I think that bralessness would extend and resolve too many existing, long-term trends in fashion not to become a fad. For one thing, the women most visually associated with fashion—models—do not wear bras. That's partly because they don’t need them because they’re so skinny and have small breasts as a result. But it’s also just not the convention for models to wear bras on the runway. Why should it be any different in real life? Women are getting more and more interested in high fashion, and wearing clothes just like runway models do would be another way of being authentically stylish. Secondly, I think that small breasts in themselves should become trendy because of their above-mentioned association with thinness—which, of course, continues to be quite the fashionable body type for females. A bralessness trend would give thin women yet another way to show off how thin they are. Finally, I don’t understand why bralessness hasn’t been “in” despite being so inherently rebellious and punk. In a society where we are constantly searching for the new, hip thing, the no-bra option is just too obvious of a potential fashion statement to be ignored.

Something is currently brewing in fashion regarding women’s underwear, and it’s all bound up in this transparency thing that is so big for spring. I predict that within a year, that theme will be carried to the next level. Underwear has been revealed and examined, and next it will be cast off as an unnecessary artifice standing in the way of fashion’s reimagining of the body. But I suggest adopting this trend now, before it happens, when it is still weird, naughty, and utterly cool.