Frump goes mainstream
Tired: "flattering." Wired: not.
As a kid I wanted to dress like an American Girl Doll, specifically Samantha, the bitchy orphan. I don’t know what it was exactly about all that velvet, those ruffles, the pinafores and patent leather Mary Janes and cloaks that spoke so deeply to my soul. Pictures of me in high school reveal the belief that two hair clips, one on each side of my head, had a slimming effect on my face (to be fat! a fate worse than death!). Ankle-length red plaid skirts, blue tutu skirts, yellow converse high tops with flames on them. A lot of polar fleece. I gravitated towards the poles of the age spectrum — little girl, granny.
A few years ago, after realizing I’d lost this style somewhere along the way for REASONS, I wrote a piece called “Notes on Frump: A Style for the Rest of Us,” riffing, of course, on Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp.” In it, I tried to define my authentic personal style and called it Frump. “The dominant sensibility of femininity, which we will call Sexy Adult Woman (SAW), values flattering-ness, attractiveness above all else—pleasing the eye. In common parlance, ‘frump’ is the defective result when a feminine person tries and fails to achieve SAW,” the piece goes (I was feeling very fancy and academic in 2017 apparently). “But Frump is a whole sensibility in and of itself, entirely distinct from, and in valid alternative to, SAW.”
“This idea is not a new one,” Glamour UK wrote in October 2023, pointing to 2010 blog turned magazine Man Repeller by
.“The style peddled by Cohen and her writers was a balance between high-fashion and a quirky nerdiness - over-the-top sleeves, wide framed glasses, socks with sandals, culottes and hats galore. It wasn't revolutionary, and it catered very much to thin, white, abled-bodies, but it did spark a vital question: who, and what, are women dressing for?”This question got its newsy teeth from a September 2023 New Yorker interview Jia Tolentino did with model and actress Julia Fox. “I think I was going for grotesque,” Fox says. “I wanted to look a certain way where the girls would appreciate it and the men would despise it.” Riffing on this idea in another interview with Emma Barnett on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, Fox says, “And men hate my outfits. They’re so mad that I’m not ‘hot’ like how I was in Uncut Gems. I hear that all the time. But I don’t care because the girls love it. The girls and the gays love it, and that’s really who I’m dressing for.”
Julia Fox’s idea that it’s possible to stop “dressing for the male gaze” has been making the ROUNDS on TikTok, used by some of the biggest cool girl fashion, lifestyle, and book accounts, and shows no sign of slowing down. Creators don kitschy, cutesy, bright and/or oversized clothes including scrunchies, bucket hats, tie dye and other “loud” prints, socks and sandals, balaclavas, chunky scarves, wide-leg or baggy jeans, neon colors, glasses, puff sleeves, velvet, lace, ribbons, bows, puffer jackets, and oversized coats and outwear of all kinds!
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These videos were clearly in conversation with the #CopenhagenStyle or Danish Fashion Influencer trend from early last year consisting of: “a maxi dress, the more ruffles and patterns and volume the better, a pair of socks or tights in a color that doesn’t match the dress, your ugliest running shoes, a knit layer (a vest or cardigan works), a balaclava, some ugly chunky glasses, an oversized dress coat of any color, a slouchy neutral oversized bag.”
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The only conclusion I can draw from all this is that Frump has gone mainstream, a truth that feels both bizarre and bizarrely liberating. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I want to present myself on book tour as a human and a body that wrote this book. I was lucky enough to do a few events for my first book, and for those, I wore a lot of Universal Standard clothes — simple, tailored, a-line, v-neck; in short “flattering” according to conventional wisdom about what kinds of clothes look good on fat, feminine bodies.
I still value and appreciate the clothes I wore years ago as basic, investment pieces but this time for book events and in life, I’m excited to try out some outfits with Man Repeller, Ms. Frizzle, or Bitchy Victorian Orphan vibes.
For folks who are doing some deep thinking about how to unlearn how the male gaze overlaps with fatphobia and diet culture, I love
‘s , and ‘s Fat Girl Gets Married). I also love ‘s account on TikTok, where the former Buzzfeed writer famous for that piece about meeting her spouse on a lesbian cruise shows off what this mainstream Frump style looks like on a gorgeous plump body.
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Where do you get your anti-male gaze, anti-flattering, anti-diet culture style inspiration?
Toppings
The Atlantic did a list of 136 books that their editors feel make up the canon of Great American Novels. It included one book about a fat person and that book was about, per the publishers description, “a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd” named Oscar Wao! Not great!
I’m reading
/Lindsay Hunter’s Hot Springs Drive which came out recently from ‘s imprint at Grove. It’s excellent. Slippery and smart and eerie and propulsive. I’m learning a lot about plot from it!Did you know there is a show that just lets you watch as wounded yet resilient British dogs frolic and heal in a bougie round paddock of clipped hedges until equally wounded yet resilient humans are matched with them and then both human and dog live happily ever after together on the sofa? It’s called Dog House UK on Max and it’s currently my main reason to live.
Jewish Currents’ bleeping stellar winter 2024 issue landed on my stoop and I ate it up and thought and cried and donated to eSims for Gaza. The issue is called “After October 7” and it “collects a selection of pieces from our archive that foreground the often-obscured context for the October 7th attack and its aftermath—with exclusive new introductions by the Jewish Currents staff—alongside a number of pieces published online in the weeks following 10/7. This special print issue includes contributions by Noura Erakat and John Reynolds, Peter Beinart, Hala Alyan, Hannah Black, and more.”
Book Scoop
If you live in or around Philadelphia, I’m working with the lovely folks at indie The Head & The Hand for a special local-only pre-order campaign. The first 100 folks to pre-order Housemates from them will get a signed copy of the book plus one of a set of film photographs capturing some of the special West Philly places in the novel, taken by my best joyfriend, Art Phung.
If you’d like a signed copy of Housemates shipped to you anywhere in the US you can order one from the wonderful Books Are Magic.
Housemates is gonna be an audiobook! Performed by the queen, the legend Marin Ireland (Nothing to See Here, Leave the World Behind, Pineapple Street, Three Women, Anxious People). Pre-order the audiobook here. If you review/amplify books or audiobooks and want an advanced listening copy, hit up my audio publicist Ellen Folan, at efolan@penguinrandomhouse.com.
Full tour dates are coming when the act is fully together, but save the dates for hugs, conversation, and fat fashion: 5/28 Philly (The Free Library w/Jennifer Wilson, register here), 5/30 Manhattan (The Strand w/Torrey Peters, buy tickets here), 6/4 Hudson Valley (Oblong Books), 6/6 Chicago (Women & Children First), 6/18 Providence (Riff Raff Books), 6/21 Los Angeles (Skylight Books), 6/24 San Francisco (Green Apple on the Park), and 7/10 Portland (Powell’s).
much love til next time,
Emma
I get my inspiration from fellow sewists on Instagram and Indie pattern designers around the world. I love that I am no longer limited to this season's colors or cuts, and I can make items that are even more meaningful to me and will last much longer (quality materials + actually fitting my body = reduced wear and tear) and therefore impact the environment less than fast fashion. Indie pattern designers have been pioneering size inclusion and sewists have always been a little zany... The result is incredibly comfortable clothing with a lot of personal style.
Aren’t there always conflicting feeling when the style vibe you’ve been doing goes mainstream? Like, finally people are catching on to how awesome this is, but also I’m not the only special one doing that thing anymore. Like when the world discovers your fave indie band 😢