Woman Dresses Like It's 1950 Every Day to Ensure Being Treated 'Like a Lady'
Miss Vintage U.K. 2014 does not dress like most other women in their twenties.
Holly Foster is known for her 1950s style of dress, choosing ankle length skirts and pearls over more revealing clothing.
“If girls dressed more demurely I think they would find that they would be treated more as adults particularly and treated like ladies,” Foster explained in a 2015 Barcroft TV video.
Foster grew up watching 1940s and 1950s films with her grandparents, and the styles in the movies influenced her vintage clothing today.
“I found from my male friends that the fact that I wear a sort of prim or proper dress, they’re more inclined to talk to you because you aren’t flaunting yourself,” she told Barcroft TV.
She told the U.K. Daily Mail in a 2015 article that girls her age go out in “skimpy — largely unflattering — clothing” and are surprised “when they are not treated with respect.”
“I go to a nightclub, I know what it’s like to walk into a room all the guys are looking at you, just up and down as if you’re piece of meat,” she said. “I think if girls had longer dresses they would feel more confident to say ‘no.'”
Foster wasn’t always confident in her appearance, according to the Daily Mail, and struggled with body image issues growing up.
“I definitely feel in recent years we’ve seen more coverage of why it’s irresponsible for magazines to print stick thin models,” she said. “It encourages girls to want to try and emulate that kind of figure without considering the consequences — it results in anorexia, girls looking gaunt.”
She then pointed out that vintage magazines embraced “all shapes and sizes because young women were told how to dress for their shape.”
“If more girls dressed for their figures … I believe we would have less eating disorders, less girls being so desperate to be skinny,” she told Daily Mail.
According to Foster, her mother worries that her style of dress gives off the wrong impression and that people will think she is “old fashioned” and there’s “something eccentric” about her.
“My mum struggles with it sometimes because I don’t dress like her friends’ daughters,” she told Daily Mail. “She will describe them as my ‘granny dresses,’ but overall my family are supportive of my look.”
Foster was crowned Miss Vintage in 2014 and told Barcroft TV “being treated like a lady comes from the way you dress.”
“I think there is a certain element of responsibility that comes with designing clothes and an element of responsibility when it comes to wearing them,” Foster concluded.
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