Why I Dress Simply

A friend who is not a Christian read my post about AWSA. “Some of those Christian ladies wore more jewelry and make-up and had bleachier-blonde hair than I ever would,” she said. “I was very amused.”

I don’t know if she was amused by the contrast between them and me, or if she thought their style rather flashy for a Christian.

Regardless, her comment got me thinking about why I choose to dress the way I do. And it is a choice. At Mountain View, the church Ivan and I attend, there is no standard like the one in my childhood congregation, that says women should wear cape dresses. I choose to sew cape dresses or, more often, hire someone to sew them for me, because for me they are the easiest way to dress tastefully, economically, and modestly without going to a lot of trouble and spending hours shopping (which I don’t enjoy). And Ivan likes cape dresses best, which is another great reason.

I’m not touting a certain clothing style. Dressing simply and modestly is more than a clothing style and can be done in pants as well as a dress, as my feisty old lady friend Char illustrates. Jeans were part of her uniform. They didn’t draw attention to her money, her body, or her trendsetting proficiency. On her, they were simple, serviceable, and discreet.

Neither am I criticizing my AWSA friends. Their clothing is as normal to them as mine is to me. Our cultures shape us to a large degree. But our choices also shape us, and each of us make deliberate choices about what we will wear. Our clothes say something about who we are and with what worldview we wish to be identified.

I love the verses in 1 Peter that call women to a depth of living and inner self-worth that is countercultural. “Let your beauty not be external—the braiding of hair and wearing of gold jewelry or fine clothes—but the inner person of the heart, the lasting beauty of a gentle and tranquil spirit, which is precious in God’s sight.” (1 Peter 3:3-4 NET)

Think about the messaging we hear for women in movies, books, and advertisements, subtly and overtly. We women are called to look good, to be sexy, and to be strong.

I am okay with strength, but most contemporary messaging positions strength as an individualistic, I-am-who-I-am-and-don’t-mess-with-me quality, whereas Biblical teaching positions strength for both men and women as springing from a life of faith and trust, displayed in humility, and made perfect in unity. However, the subject of this blog post is not strength, but simplicity.

Biblical teaching calls women to put a greater value on what is inside of us than on our appearance. It calls us to stop all our stressing over how we look and how we compare, to put most of our time and thought to cultivating the beauty of our inner person.

And I’m like YES! There is so much more to a woman than her looks. Many people before me, both Christian and non-Christian, have talked about how detrimental to women is the strong sexual and appearance-based messaging in our society. Professional women or women in the public eye live with comments about their appearance, their clothes, and their sexiness that men never have to consider.   I’m not necessarily a fan of Hillary’s politics, but in this news article where she refuses to discuss her clothing style in a business interview, I say “Go, Hillary!”

One adolescent girl told me she felt she was really male because she wasn’t “girly”; she didn’t like to dress up and do all the things she associated with being feminine. How wrong is a society that makes a young girl feel if she doesn’t fit a certain model of femininity, she must be transgender?

To me, dressing simply isn’t adhering to a rule or squishing myself into a box that dictates what a woman can be. Dressing simply is a way of saying and of feeling deep within myself that I am worth more than my clothes or my sex appeal.

In a similar vein, I don’t personally like make-up because to me make-up says that a woman believes the beauty God gave her isn’t good enough. For others or herself to feel she is attractive; she must cover and smooth her face. She must put on a façade. I like genuineness…so much so that I almost never choose a filtered option when I share photos on Instagram. I WANT to see your face with the moles and freckles God gave you, the lines and the wrinkles come with a hard-lived but good-lived life. I want to see the natural softness, the mobility of your skin. In my mind, make-up makes a woman look more fake. (Like my clothing choice, my choice not to wear make-up is personal, and I don’t hate you if you wear it.)

Women love beauty, and that is good. The ancient Greeks believed men to have the ideal body image, and statues of women were basically fashioned like mini-men. I am not suggesting that women should look and act like mini-men. God made women to be women, and women often seem to care more about the small details of beauty in everyday life than do men. Even though I am not a very stylish woman, I find great satisfaction in matching my underclothes to my outer clothes. No one else sees it, but I love the sense of beauty and harmony that color-coordination brings me. Ivan would have never thought to notice such a thing.

I am not saying a woman should not follow her desires to dress beautifully.

God made women beautiful. But of all the gifts we are given, physical beauty is most temporal.

God gave us other gifts as well. A brain to analyze math or science, to remember facts, to imagine, dream, understand, make connections, create. Hands to accomplish or nurture. Feet to take us to fields of work where we can contribute to the needs of society or to quiet resting places where we can mull and parse and dream and come out with wisdom to enrich the world.

As we get older, our beauty fades, and then it is these other depths of skill, wisdom, and being that will beautify our spirit and make people like to look at us. A woman’s smile, her warmth, her caring, her competence, her humor…these are the things that make her beautiful as she ages. She has so much more to offer the world than sex allure. When I wear simple clothes, I am trying to make that statement. When I wear simple clothes, I am trying to choose to cultivate inner beauty over outer show in a visible, visceral way.