Women, Fashion, and the Impossible Question

Before I begin, let me make one thing very clear. This article is not about my wife. If you think it sounds like her, that is entirely your imagination. My wife is a rare exception to everything I am about to write. I value my peace, my dinner, and my place in the house.

Now that we have settled that.

There is a fascinating mystery that men have been trying to solve for generations, and I do not believe we are any closer to an answer.

A woman decides she needs a new dress. She visits three shops, rejects twenty dresses, returns to the first shop, and buys the second dress she saw. Somehow this all makes perfect sense to her, and somehow, by the end of the day, it makes sense to the shop attendant too. I am still the only person in the transaction who is confused.

Or she visits her favourite fashion designer with a picture on her phone and a long explanation that includes the sentence, “I don’t want exactly this, but something like this, only different.” The designer nods slowly, as though this is a perfectly reasonable instruction, writes nothing down, and somehow produces exactly what she meant.

I have never understood how that conversation works. I suspect it is a language men are simply not licensed to learn.

The dress is made. Then comes the hair appointment, which takes long enough that entire empires have risen and fallen in less time. Then the makeup. Then the shoes, tried on with three other pairs first, even though everyone in the room knew from the beginning which pair was coming home. Then the handbag, matched with an intensity usually reserved for peace negotiations. Then the jewellery, chosen and rechosen, until the final version looks remarkably like the first version, only now everyone agrees it is correct.

Finally, she stands in front of the mirror.

This is my favourite part.

She smiles. Not the smile she gives other people. Not the smile for the camera. It is the quiet smile that says, I look good, and knows it, and has decided not to announce it to anyone. She turns left. She turns right. She adjusts one little thing that no one else could possibly have noticed. She smiles again.

At that moment, I know she is happy. Case closed, I think.

I am wrong.

She walks over to her husband.

“What do you think?”

Now, gentlemen, this is not an ordinary question. It is a multiple-choice question disguised as an essay, and there is no marking scheme published anywhere.

If you answer too quickly, she wonders whether you really looked. If you pause too long, she assumes you have found a problem. If you say, “It’s okay,” you have just cancelled your own happiness for the rest of the evening. If you say, “It’s nice,” she asks, “Just nice?” If you say, “Beautiful,” she smiles, then immediately asks, “Really?” You say, “Yes.” She says, “Are you sure?” At this point, some men have been known to develop a slight stutter for the first time in their adult lives.

Then comes the famous follow-up.

“Does it make me look too…”

Too what? Too tall? Too short? Too fat? Too thin? Too bright? Too plain? Too much like the dress you already own? Too much like the dress your sister-in-law wore to the last funeral, the one everybody is still talking about?

Every husband, standing in front of that question, knows exactly what it feels like to sit an examination paper he never studied for.

You try to answer honestly. Danger. You try to avoid answering. Even greater danger. There is, as far as I know, no safe third option.

And if you actually tell the truth, because you genuinely believe another colour would have suited her better, prepare yourself. You will immediately be reminded that you are not romantic. You do not appreciate beauty. You have no fashion sense at all, and never have. Then, evidence from twenty years ago will appear from nowhere, filed and ready, as though it had been sitting in a folder marked exhibit A.

“You remember when Mrs. So-and-so wore that blue dress at that wedding in 2004? You said it looked nice!”

Gentlemen, how do they even remember these things? I cannot recall what I had for breakfast three days ago. My wife, allegedly, has full and instant recall of a dress worn by someone else’s wife two decades ago, along with my exact commentary on it at the time, submitted as evidence against me.

Meanwhile, there is another observation worth making. After a wedding, a funeral, or a church service, a man may describe someone by saying, “The tall gentleman sitting near the entrance.” A woman describing the same event will say, “Oh, you know, the lady with the makeup, the green dress, the gold earrings, the silver heels, the curly hair, the red handbag, and the shiny lipstick, the one who was sitting two rows from the choir, not the front protocol, the side one.” By the time she finishes, I still have no idea who attended, but I could apparently pick the woman out of a police lineup based on lipstick alone.

I am still wondering whether they have hidden cameras built into their eyes.

There is also the group chat that appears before any major event, a small but highly efficient intelligence unit whose only mission is to establish, in advance, exactly what colour everyone else is wearing, so that nobody accidentally clashes and nobody accidentally matches too closely either. I have watched entire outfit strategies negotiated over WhatsApp with more diplomacy than most peace treaties. Meanwhile, my own event preparation involves finding a shirt that still fits and hoping for the best.

Eventually, after enough encounters with the impossible question, I discovered the safest response of all. Whatever the outfit is, whatever the occasion, whatever the colour.

“It is beautiful.”

“It looks lovely.”

“You look amazing.”

In fact, I have reached the point where I believe it was beautiful before I even saw it. This is not a guess. It is a policy. Peace has returned to my household, my dinner arrives warm, and my place in the house remains secure.

To my fellow husbands reading this and nodding quietly to yourselves, I want you to know something important. This is not surrender. This is wisdom, earned the hard way, the way all real wisdom is earned, usually through at least one honest answer that went badly.

Finally, to my dear wife, if you are reading this, please remember what I said at the beginning. This article is not about you. It is about other people. Very, very other people, none of whom I can currently name, all of whom sound suspiciously familiar to everyone else who reads this.

And if you ask me how this article looks, let me answer in advance, before you even ask.It is beautiful.

One more small detail, and I say this with love, no shade at all, just an observation. The dress, the hair, the makeup, the shoes, the handbag, the jewellery, and yes, even the fashion designer who nodded so wisely at “something like this, only different.” Almost all of it, at the end of the day, somehow finds its way back to my account. I am not complaining. I am simply noting, for the historical record, that beauty is priceless, except it very clearly has a price, and I already know whose name is on the receipt.

It is beautiful.