I don’t know if I’m just getting punchy before the holidays or what, but lately I’ve been feeling really irritated at how frumpy so many women are. Frumpy clothes, frumpy hair – and then they wonder why no guys are paying attention to them, or they’re only getting attention from the guys they don’t want.
It’s not just frumpiness of style, either; it’s also plain old being plain. Timid. Unimaginative. If you look like the personification of beige yet remain stumped as to why a guy can’t see the beautiful personality that your mom, grandma, and all of your female friends see, wellllll.
Sometimes you got to help a brother out. Men are visual creatures. Make it easy for him, not harder.
In other words, make every day a hot day. Don’t wait for an occasion to look hot; make looking hot your regular look. If you wait for a perfect occasion for looking hot, chances are it’ll never happen. Stop looking for excuses, and just do it. You feel a little fat today? Doesn’t matter, make it a hot day. Got a zit? Doesn’t matter, make it a hot day. You’re tired? Doesn’t matter, make it a hot day. You’re not going anywhere special? Doesn’t matter, make it a hot day. You don’t think you’re pretty? Doesn’t matter, make it a hot day.
Just to clarify – a hot day doesn’t mean dressing like you’re going to the club. It means looking attractive, on top of things, classy, intelligent, and interesting. Aim for smart-sexy, not club-trampy.
Do you need a style revamp? Consider your answers to the following questions:
Do people regularly compliment your outfits?
If you are not getting regular compliments on what you wear, then you probably need to step it up a notch or two.
Has anyone complimented your haircut when you’ve just gotten it cut?
If no one has told you that your hair looks good after a haircut, then you’ve been paying someone who doesn’t deserve your money. Find someone new to cut your hair, and keep going to someone new until you start getting compliments.
Do you read any fashion magazines or blogs?
If you don’t, I recommend People Stylewatch. Its specialty is accessible (read: normal person) fashion, not couture, and showcases clothes at a variety of price points. I also recommend the TLC show What Not to Wear. Stacy and Clinton tend to style everyone the same, but it’s good for middle-America office-worker fashion and tips on how to put together outfits, and most of the people they make over are average-looking.
If you don’t have anyone in your life whose opinion your trust about your appearance, feel free to send me some pictures for a critique. I will give you an honest assessment and won’t share your photos with anyone.
P.S. This is most likely my final blog post of 2012, as I am leaving for my hometown on Friday and won’t be back until the new year. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all. Thanks for reading!
Haley's Halo 
Nice post. It’s something I’ve said, along with Ian Underwood, Athol, and others who are trying to spread the message too. Husbands may accept frump, but really want their wives feminine and putting effort into their appearance, while out in public and at home…FOR THEM! For the younger set, flip flops, sweatpants with “juicy” or whatever on the butt, and pajama pants all seem to be acceptable girl-attire these days. Dressing nice makes you look nice, which makes you more attractive to men and women. Keep spreading the word Haley!
Preach, GF!
Juicy on the rear is a not-so-subtle signal of poor taste and style, among other things.
I’d say the inverse holds true: the Average American Male dresses slobbishly…cargo shorts, ugly sneakers worn in the wrong settings, baggy everything, garrish graphic tees, pleated pants, etc. Unforch, appearance matters more for the ladies.
True and true, and context matters. Basically you need to hone in on your brand of sexy. There’s a lot more than smart-sexy. I’m more laid back, up for adventure sexy. That means athletic skirts, plaid shirts, cowboy boots, sweaters, corduroy pants, long braided hair etc are my go-to style choices with a side of classy-sexy thrown in (long skirts, boat neck shirts, tanks, cardigans, pumps, etc). The fluffly girly look doesn’t work for me, and I can’t follow trends to save my life. Sexy librarian is right out unfortunately. Just feels like a costume to me, although some girls pull it off incredibly well. Heck, there are even ways to do nerdy/geeky sexy. You just have to figure out what works, and most anything works better if it fits. Guys also dig skirts. Mine likes them long, but your mileage may vary.
What Not to Wear was a revelation for me. Wide-legged trousers with pointy heels and mixing neutrals, who knew?
I would make another suggestion: Ladies, don’t wear jeans all the time. Non-denim pants may seem like work uniform, but well-fitted ones will beat out jeans most of the time for classiness. And of course skirts and dresses, even casual ones for the office, make you look markedly more feminine.
Jeans are fine, just don’t get into a rut of wearing them every day or night. We copied them from men when we got liberated, and they became the staple of our wardrobe, at least for youngish people. And why? They’re not more comfortable than non-jean pants and definitely not more than skirts.
Also, is there any more difficult process for a shopping woman, EVER, than choosing a pair of flattering jeans?*
*Unless you are, ahem, blessed in the decolletage department; that’s actually worse
Their outside is a reflection of their inside. And clothes can’t hide the fat. No matter how you dress it up hog is still hog.
@Richard
That’s not true. Look, for as much as we bash fat women, trying to look your best should always be encouraged. The thing that people need to keep in mind is that the road to self improvement starts with mentality.
When people in the sphere went from nerds to players, how did they achieve this? They did this not through the negs and double stacking sets but through having an alpha mentality of ‘I will soldier on’. It’s the mentality that seeks success. Then the practical applications will be found out afterwards.
With women that want to improve their appearance, Haley’s advice is spot on. Make everyday a day that you shine or seek to shine. From there the woman is focused on creating a postive self image. You know what happens when the overweight woman wants to always have an image of looking good? It inspires her to carry on with the previous success of being fashionable with good hygiene. She next wants to carry on this improvement to weight and discovers that the carbs/sugar are the real reason for weight gain and she does the difficult but doable task of cutting out junk from her diet and slims down to an attractive weight.
Ferret: its true from where I sit. Everywhere I go (Indiana and Chicago) its fat women in dowdy clothes and attitude. And I’m not talking just about the spere either. Advice is easy to dispense but not easy to execute. I am not bashing fat women. Its not attractive, at least to me. And I learned to hand out advice as a personal trainer. 90% of my clientele talked a good game but when it came to actually doing something the wheels fell off. Talk is cheap.
@Richard
The thing about personal training is that I’m under the firm belief that the diet advice is just plain wrong and if you are doing physical activity for weight control instead of increasing muscle and cardiovascular performance you are going to fail.
I’m pretty much convinced that the obesity epidemic is caused by sugar/carbs and that if you got a diet that consists of meat and veggies that you will lose the weight and keep it off.
So I think your clients are doing the weight training for the wrong reasons since proper diet (meaning sugar/carb restriction) is the key to weight loss and weight training is achieve that athletic physique. It’s just that for some reason the government is fixated on the idea that carb heavy/low fiet diets are good even though the switch to such diets corresponded with a huge increase of obesity. Also, dieting with calories restriction method almost never works. As Jack Lalane said ‘if man made it, don’t eat it’, if we all followed those very simple instructions we won’t be a land of fatness.
If all women go the frumpy route then it becomes the new norm. We are certainly headed that way. The only chicks I see dressing as if it’s a hot day are doing so for a specific reason. Maybe to pull the attention of a certain man or to a holiday party or similar situation. One they get the man it’s back to frumpy.
My wife and I find ourselves falling into the trap of feeding off each other. She goes frumpy, I return the favor. I combat that by dressing really nicely, especially on the weekends. She tends to up he game accordingly. It’s tough though when you have three toddlers at home.
Furious Ferret, you are spot on- I keep telling my girlfriends and all they do is run away…to the 5k -10 k and marathons and end up with messed up knees and ankles and still skinny fat from all the carb loading.
Paleo/low carb and weights. Its really all you need.
@Jandy
Hottest leanest woman at my gym lifts hard like a guy. All the fat cows are on treadmills. Think that over.
RG3–
The average American male definitely has style problems. Everything is so ill-fitting. Not that male obesity helps the issue, either. There’s a puffy look that a lot of guys get in their 20s and 30s from drinking that makes everything worse, too.
Strangel–
It’s def hard to find a good pair of jeans, but the right ones KILL.
FF–
I’ve seen my share of well-groomed overweight women who are not getting any thinner. The desire to style and groom oneself isn’t necessarily tied to fitness.
Austin–
Fighting the frump is an ongoing process. You will never really “arrive.” It has to become a priority.
Haley’s My Momma.
I was puffy in my 20s. My wife regained her hotness and more after the last baby. It took me a year to year or two before I figgered I better catch up.
Pushing 40, its hard. Five days in the gym with an average diet equals maintain. Six days plus a half assed paleo/slow-carb diet loses one pound a month (after switching to Coors Lite).
I flex my swag at work. The ladies love it; I catch shit from the fellas daily. And it’s not peacocking, its just a step up from the corporate uni. I guess my point is that sad shape is self-reinforced culturally. Warpigs want to assimilate their sisters into the BoarBorg rather than get fit. Which is sad. After losing eight pounds in the last few months, nothing tastes better than being skinnier.
Ferret:
Regardless of what works and what does not work my point is that the average person is big on talk and very lacking when it comes to actually taking action. Just like women persusing the fashion mags and men checking out the manly man mags. Lots of daydreaming and zero to little transformation.
Whether its fashion, health, character building or anything else I believe the average person, based on my experience and research would rather daydream than actually do the very hard work of starting the path towards transformation. If your ass is so big that it looks like two midgets wrestling under a tarp you have a problem. Whether you choose to do anything to correct that problem is up to you. I would say that 90%+ of people would rather woulda, shoulda, coulda than do.
RG3:
I think the main guiding point is to reach the potential you have physically, mentally and spiritually. I never looked, and still don’t look at scales. As long as I am picking up the pace of my workouts and forcing my body to adapt its all good. I’m 52 and, through consistently working out for over 30 years I regularly get offers from girls in their late 20s. Even though its a nice ego boost thats a no go area for me because I want more than the sex. I have little in common with them. Congrats on starting the transformation.
I don’t where you guys are looking, but I have to tell you I haven’t seen the majority of women looking “frumpy” in public. Quite the opposite, in fact – in workplaces like healthcare that are 80+ percent female, most of the women make themselves up every day, perhaps because they feel the competition more acutely. The general principle expressed in the OP is thus spot on: “hot” days should be fairly common, because rest assured if your husband goes to work every day with attractive, done-up women and comes home to… you, you aren’t making him very happy or doing your marriage any favours,
As someone has pointed out, in practice it’s tough to do – more so when you’ve got toddlers at home, and more so because naive Christian wives often don’t understand that their husbands even have this struggle. It takes work to get to a point where there is mutual understanding on this issue: work by the husband to communicate his needs (harder than it seems; men often feel this is somehow something they shouldn’t have to express, and work by the wife to actually do it. Expect this in your marriage and learn to solve it..
1. Agree about appearances, Haley… and guys, women are visual too.
2. Have a happy remainder of Christmas and a good break.
I’m not so sure about that. The religious couples with very large families are typically frumpy(Michelle Duggar, anyone?) while hot women have 1 or 2 children at the most, often not without years of trying. Perhaps hotness is a mechanism to compensate for less fertility.
Michelle Duggar isn’t stylish, but I’m not sure I would call her frumpy. Frumpy has a connotation of lack of care/attention/engagement, and as unstylish as Michelle Duggar is, she doesn’t have the look of someone who doesn’t care for her appearance.
You can debate whether she is frumpy or merely unstylish. The fact is, she has a husband and children, and you don’t.
If you’ve ever watched the show, you’d know that she played the dating game before she was married…and her husband didn’t. She’s probably frumpy or whatever post 18 money making children, but I’ve the feeling in the ’80s when she got married she was pretty hot. Those frumpy woman are also a little bit more humble and are willing to marry the guys that are attracted to them.
Michelle Duggar definitely has an outdated hairstyle, but she looks like she was probably pretty cute when she was young.
I’m all for looking nice. However, in life sciences grad school a lot of the girls wear a t-shirt and blase bluejeans (typically unflattering skinny jeans) every day. I usually wear a casual top and a nice pair of jeans with flats and basic makeup. A couple of times a week I’ll wear a nicer top, or a skirt instead of jeans, but that’s about as dressy as I feel I can safely go without looking like I think I’m the Molec Bio Princess. So at what point does dressing better than your peers start looking ridiculous/snooty?
I would be interested in your thoughts, Haley