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There's a word that I remember learning in childhood that I knew I never wanted to be called. I didn’t know what it meant, but from the way it was used to describe other women, I could tell it meant something embarrassing. It wasn't the b-word, or the c-word, or any of the other words typically used to denigrate women: It was the word frumpy.
Through my mother, I learned that Ethel Mertz, the dowdy upstairs neighbor on I Love Lucy, was frumpy, and so were then-first lady Hillary Clinton's headbands and pantsuits. Women’s church clothes, it seemed, were meant to be frumpy, and so were any outfits worn by female teachers, administrators, and lawyers.
“Frump” entered my consciousness again recently when I read the New York magazine profile of presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway. She’s wearing a designer shift dress with rhinestones and stilettos to the White House, and Omarosa Manigault, by way of explanation, says "President Trump doesn't like frump." Of course Donald Trump doesn't like frump, I thought to myself, because frumpiness seems to correlate with a lack of a woman’s sexual appeal.
Sometimes a de-sexualized wardrobe can be intentional — a strategy to be taken more seriously by downplaying cutesiness, or perhaps signaling one had more important matters to attend to than a flattering hairdo. Other times, it suggests a failure to grasp the ornamental aspect of performative femininity — a lack of fashion sense, a misunderstanding of shape and fit, a sloppiness, a feeling of having “given up” on caring about one's appearance.
Not surprisingly, the rules of frump are harsher on older women. The Duchess of Cambridge and the Queen of England are surely subject to the same sartorial guidelines, but only Kate is considered one of the world’s foremost fashion icons because she’s shiny and new. Likewise, Taylor Swift and Blair Waldorf on Gossip Girl have rocked headbands to enviable effect, but if Hillary Clinton wore one in public again, Twitter might explode. The biggest sin of frumpiness appears to having dared to age — or to be poor. Take, for instance, how one woman’s oversized baggy T-shirt and sweatpants pushing a cart down the aisle at Walmart differs from another woman’s Lululemon athleisurewear in a 7am SoulCycle class. The two outfits are essentially the same and both meant for comfort, but they signal two completely different worlds inhabited by the women wearing them.
While frump implies a multitude of "sins" in general, its specific meaning changes with the fashion cycle. And it can be hard to keep up: The Times style section declared four years ago that low-heeled shoes are frumpy, but I happen to have bought a cute pair of gold low-heeled shoes at H&M just weeks ago. While frumpiness doesn’t necessarily mean old clothes — some articles of clothing are considered classics no matter what year they were purchased or made — following fashion dictums requires time, effort, and disposable income. It should come as no surprise that a good portion of “how not to look frumpy” blog posts are addressed to new moms — hardly a group that could be considered slothful.
And yet.
Ultimately, the concept of frump is a way to shame women — for not putting “enough” effort into beauty work, for not showing interest in being sexually appealing to heterosexual men, for not participating in the fashion economy. The fact that the standard of what qualifies as "frumpy" changes on any given day is because women are so often damned if we do, damned if we don't.
So let’s do with frump as some feminists have done with slut and bitch — reclaim it. Frump means comfortable. Frump means we have more important things to do than shop. Frump means we’re embracing age as the accumulation of wisdom, not as an imperative to scrabble toward achieving lost youth.
And if all those aren’t good enough reasons to embrace frumpiness, here’s one more good one: You know it would piss off the president.