The Shoulders

I love a good eighties shoulder pad, the kind that shapes you like a linebacker.

You know the ones. Big, square, structured, the jacket practically standing up on its own when you take it off. We laugh about them now. Every few years somebody posts an old photo and the comments fill with jokes.

Then I went looking for where they came from, and I stopped laughing.

Shoulder pads showed up in women's clothes in the 1890s, as enormous puffed sleeves. Again in 1931, when Elsa Schiaparelli sewed them into her jackets. Then Hollywood put them on Joan Crawford to make her formidable on screen. Then the war came, and women walked into factories to do jobs that had always belonged to men, and their clothes grew shoulders to match. Then the eighties, when women poured into corporate America, and the shoulders got wider than they'd been all century.

Read that list again.

Every single time women walked into a room that wasn't built for them, they got broader in the shoulders.

Nobody organized it. There was no meeting. No group text went out across a hundred and thirty years. It just happened, over and over, to women who never met each other. The clothes did what clothes always do. They said it out loud before anybody had the words. A century of women saying,

“I belong in this room, and I need my body to say so before I open my mouth.”

If it works like that across a hundred and thirty years of women, it works like that for one. Whatever you've been wearing lately is saying something. You've been telling the truth this whole time. You just haven't stopped to read it.

PUT ON today's outfit, then read it like a message. Bigger or smaller? Softer or sharper? No wrong answer, only information. Then decide whether the message still fits the woman wearing it

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