Thread by @CZEdwards

#TailorSnarkWar

Battle 3.1: the 1st Women’s Wear Air Assault.

It’s much easier to show behavioral fashion going wrong than getting it right.
I’m giving this a caveat: for once, it’s not her politics driving my snark. It’s her background. For that, I pity her.

A thread.

2. I present Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Modesty Culture, and the perils of trusting yourself or your stylist without having any fluency in the language of fashion. It makes you susceptible to ridicule & scams.

3. I’m trigger warning this. Sarah comes from Evangelical televangelism, in Modesty Culture’s stronghold. (Duggars are friends of the Huck fam...) In a separate thread, I’ll detail how that likely influenced SHS’s character & relationship with clothes, makeup & fashion.

4. Modesty Culture is deeply destructive of women’s sense of self. For now, trust me when I say she’s been brought up to think being attractive, & fashion generally, is itself a sin. She was taught she’s ugly & it’s God’s will & blessing & punishment & she shouldn’t fight it.

5. Let’s just say that the more I dug into her history, the more I realized that, while she’s a terrible person, she didn’t get this way alone. She’s had a lot of help becoming THIS awful.

(Does this remind anyone else of 🍊💩 looking at Ivanka?)

6. I have very little sympathy for Sarah as a press secretary, GOP operative or political voice. I think she’s well aware of the lies she tells& the crimes she helps cover. She’s complicit; she abandoned Jesus to follow her father’s idol.

7. From her religious perspective, if there’s a Hell, her soul is in peril and faith alone will not save her. She’s conscious of her acts and commits them willingly. She’s culpable!

There is THERAPY capable of modifying her behavior. She chooses to behave this way.

8. But I find I have a surprising amount of sympathy for her as a person completely out of her depth, in a hostile place, with no one she can trust to have her back. She’s living the nightmare scenario of ‘women are bitches & backstabbers’.

9. In her case her own actions make her Hell, since she throws women under the bus. Her contempt, her lip curling? It is worst when she’s talking about women. She’s a true example of internalized misogyny and self-loathing. She hates us and she hates that she is one of us.

10. (One can have sympathy while still abhorring actions. Therapists do it ALL THE TIME. Sympathy just says you can see their point of view and understand how they got there. It doesn’t mean approval.)

11. The big points to remember: she was born into televangelism. She has a conventionally pretty mother & she is not. She’s the only girl with two older brothers (at least one was likely a bully). She was born into the heart of Evangelical Modesty Culture.

12. She’s been on TV since she was an infant, either in church or daddy’s ambitions. She’s always been told she’s imperfect.

Emotionally, she could never afford to attempt fashion, because that would be vanity, and that is a sin.

13. She grew up in Arkansas ‘burbs, so her exposure to fashion was limited. It’s not OK for preacher’s kid to read Teen Vogue/Seventeen/Cosmo. Or watch fashion TV (what existed in 90s). Hanging at the mall requires like-minded &sympathetic friends & freedom to be frivolous.

14. She was never built like a gamine - she’s broad-boned and athletic. Finding clothing that fits into her teen girl’s life and fit her body? In the era when Bebe only stocked to size 5 and Express was pro-Ana HQ? She was doomed to frumpy (and it was safe for her.)

15. Modesty Culture takes the Fallen Eve premise -that women are responsible for sin in the world- &cranks it up. Women must cover & prevent men from lusting. It’s the Xtian version of burquah. Women are responsible for male feelings & causing them to lust is the woman’s sin.

16. And Modesty Culture version 1 peaked in the mid 1990s, while Sarah was a teen, and her beloved daddy was a (sometimes elected) culture warrior for Evangelical Conservatism.

(It’s worse this time around. Seriously. It was bad then, it’s awful now.)

17. Our teens are the most formative years when it comes to our subconscious understanding of fashion. Fashion is a language that we learn between puberty and adulthood, and like spoken language, there’s a window for acquisition. If we miss it, we never gain full fluency.

18. I think Sarah missed her fashion language acquisition window, or at least most of it, because she was a televangelist’s daughter, the baby & only girl, in the bell jar of her father’s ambitions. A pious Christian girl can’t bring home fashion mags. That’s not Modest.

19. (The academic word to describe this is semiotics, but that can get way out in the weeds. If you want a primer, I like this Emily Parker essay web.archive.org/web/2013071103… Roland Barthes and Pauline Thomas are the deep thinkers.)

20. Since the 90s, Sarah’s either campaigned, or spent a lot of time pregnant, with little recovery time. (3 kids in just under 4 years.) Her body took a beating, even if all 3 pregnancies were normal & she followed doctor’s orders & gained not 1 oz more than allowed.

21. Hips, breasts, belly — they all change shape. Quickly. I bet she spent most of 2012-2015 in leggings, sneakers & maternity/nursing tunics & blouses. That’s the nature of motherhood within her subculture.

Fast fashion is a blessing for moms & maternity, but fashion, it ain’t.

22. Her culture never taught her to appreciate clothing anyway. Fashion is for worldly, flighty people, not serious faith & government nerds like her. Fashion is for pretty girls like her mother.

(There’s a lot of pain in that exclusion. It sometimes manifests as lashing out.)

23. Nobody’s ever told Sarah she’s pretty, so why should she care what her clothes and hair and makeup look like anyway?

24. No, she’s not conventionally pretty, but when she’s relaxed or caught off guard or unaware she’s being photographed... she’s striking. Dignified. Intense. She has beauty when she’s not furious & contemptuous.

25. But Fury & Contempt are her default now, because mean Democrats and mean girls have treated her & her family badly since she was 11.

Revenge never fixes anything. That’s today’s moral.

26. Even though those girls were from her own subculture, her own church.
Even though the mean Democrats were likely figments of her father’s imagination and tools of his ambition. (Other thread for this... & trigger warning for it.)

27. Now? Sarah’s on HDTV 3x a day, 5 days a week. In closeup. She never learned to dress professionally or attractively, because those are sins. She never learned makeup. Or hair.

28. At best? She’s at the mercy of a stylist from the White House pool. Someone without a reputation on the line, whose name isn’t known.

29. A woman, most likely, who has heard Sarah throw women under the bus.
A woman who lives in Washington DC, the most liberal city in the nation.
A woman in a creative industry.
Wanna bet that woman is GOP? Maybe registered GOP to get the job, but I doubt she votes that way.

30. And Sarah has no idea what looks right on her. Sarah is at this nameless woman’s mercy.
I bet this is why Sarah has consistently been a mess. Sarah either doesn’t or can’t listen, doesn’t know the language, may not take feedback & probably isn’t getting the truth anyway.

31. Can you imagine Ivanka being kind to another woman? I’ve never seen kindness from her. Or does her father’s sadistic streak come out when she can torment someone vicariously?

32. Ivanka is a narcissist’s golden child; that means she’s been taught since birth to emulate her father’s worst characteristics if she wants approval (or cash equivalent). She’s smarter than dad, but just as malicious. Seeing someone made into a fool is right up that alley.

33. KellyAnne wants Sarah’s job. No help there. Hope is gone. Even Omarosa is gone. And Oma is best known for being cruel to others. Everyone left is deep into the WH’s battle royale.

It’s Fortnite, but without even a heart emoji.

35. So. She wears this, because someone told her florals are in. But this dress is an expensive prank - no good tailor would run a seam up the middle of that floral motif, especially when it’s running right across the chest.

36. Someone told her pearls are dignified & for married ladies. But she has a sturdy neck. Instead of making her look delicate, it makes her neck look truncated & thicker.

37. Someone told her to try embellishment down the front. To draw the eye...

38. Someone said bright colors. Didn’t tell her which ones would work with her skin, or her stylist put the wrong base on. She looks both feverish & jaundiced in that fuschia.

39. Someone said green. Always bad on TV, too easy to turn into green screen mockery.

40. Someone said cardigans are more feminine than suit jackets. Sarah wants to be feminine... But they just make her look unprepared and unstructured. They’re business casual, not High Caste Professional, which is the White House.

41. Nobody praises her and tells her it’s okay to wear suits because her body responds to the structure; that a v neck (without pearls) flatters her.

This is starting to look good, if she’d ditch the pearls, but she doesn’t wear this often.

42. Nobody told her to stop chewing her nails.

43. Nobody told her that false eyelashes draw attention to her asymmetry.

44. Whoever is styling her is either

1) lying to her because watching her make a fool of herself is the only revenge possible, or

2) can’t convince her that the advice she’s getting/what she observed from KellyAnne/Ivanka/Hope is not suitable for her.

45. Nobody told her that a messy bun suits her, and the center part-mild wave-bra-strap length hair is unflattering.

46. Of course, nobody told her the press is less hostile if you don’t blatantly lie; that if you treat others like the enemy, they’ll mirror your hostility. Nobody told her that criticism of her clothes started as help for a clear neophyte & became snark when ignored or mocked.

47. And nobody handed her *The West Wing* & DeeDee Myers’ phone number. Nobody said, “Trust these people who know your job. Yes, they’re Democrats, but they too want America to thrive. If you can be polite & listen, they will help you.”

DeeDee wouldn’t let another woman drown.

48. But in Sarah’s experience, and in the myth upon which her daddy raised her, no woman is ever safe or kind or helpful; no Democrat can be kind or have the interests of nation at heart. Because contempt for sinners is safer than vulnerability.

49. I hate what she does and what she says. I despise her behavior. But I just pity her person and the circumstances that made her. She grew up in a cruel world. Nobody should live through that.

/end