During a recent shopping trip to Nordstrom, 11-year-old Ella Gunderson became frustrated with all the low-cut hip-huggers and skintight tops. So she wrote to the Seattle-based chain's executives.

"I see all of these girls who walk around with pants that show their belly button and underwear," she wrote. "Your clearks (sic) sugjest (sic) that there is only one look. If that is true, then girls are suppost (sic) to walk around half naked."

"We like to call this new girl Miss Modesty," said Gigi Solif Schanen, fashion editor at Seventeen magazine. "It's such a different feeling but still very pretty and feminine and sexy. It's just a little more covered up." Shoppers are starting to see higher waistlines and lower hemlines, and tweeds, fitted blazers and layers are expected to be big this fall, Schanen said. "It's kind of like a sexy take on a librarian," she said.

The article goes on to name some new Internet merchants of "modest women's clothing," like ModestApparelUSA.com, whose website states,

"In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel........" --- 1Tim 2:9

We believe that a modest woman is a beautiful woman. It is our intention to provide women with a wide selection of modest clothing. There will be more dresses and culottes added soon, so check back often. If you are interested in FREE BIBLE STUDY to print out for yourself or a group feel free to download and make as many copies as you would like of our bible study on "Ladies conduct and modesty".

Given the visual and texual cues here, "modesty" appears to translate to "socially and religiously submissive" - and "Modest" seems almost too mild a description for their clothing. Most of the garments featured on the website wouldn't look out of place at an Amish gathering, or a Colonial-era reenactment. All flowery prints and gingham or coverup maternity-cut dresses, no trousers and not a knee or ankle in sight: it's garb for the "barefoot and pregnant" crowd.

The span from belly-baring low-rise jeans to Puritan togs seems extreme, and one can't help but ask if there's something else at play here besides simple rejection of over-exposing girls' fashions? Are we experiencing the re-emergence of the Madonna-Whore Complex dressed up as sartorial backlash? Some girls and women who enjoy the revealing sexy look say it "lets them use their feminine power." But, does it? I've always considered sexual appeal to be a decentralized power at best, since beauty is "in the eye of the beholder," and subjective to its target. Alexander Nehamas puts it well:

Beauty, just as Stendhal said, is a promise of happiness. We love, as Plato saw, what we do not possess. Aesthetic pleasure is the pleasure of anticipation, and therefore of imagination, not of accomplishment [emphasis mine]. The judgment of taste is prospective, not retrospective; the beginning, the middle, but never the end of criticism. If you really feel you have exhausted a work, you are bound to be disappointed. A piece that has no more surprises left—a piece you really feel you know "inside and out" - has no more claim on you. You may still call it beautiful because it once gave you the pleasure of its promise or because you think that it may have something to give to someone else. But it will have lost its hold on you. Beauty beckons.

The "modest" looks of conservative religious groups appear to achieve this preservation of anticipation by leaving feminine pulchritude to the imagination, for sole access by a woman's husband: by postponing "exhaustion of the work" the concealment postpones connubial overfamiliarity.

Not too long ago, the ideals of contemporary fashion seemed a tad more 'unisex' for lack of a better term; today, youthful fashions have split their male and female paradigms into the impossibly baggy, contour-concealing guy's look contrasting with girls' exposed midriffs and barely-covered curves. On closer examination, the male/female fashion gap looks a bit imbalanced.

While boys and men can hide their size and shape (as well as anything else - legal or illegal) in their oversize baggy tops and trousers, the female fashion counterpart leaves no room for subterfuge, not even a pocket for personal "power and preparedness" items like lipstick, money - or condoms. With nothing to hide and no place to hide it, the briefest of today's women's fashions seem to shout "I'm sexy - but harmless and dependent."

The obvious assumption is that today's male physique and sexual appeal relies less on easily-visible body contours, while women's attractiveness is still judged by how sleekly and bouncily she can fit into her clothes - but is it really a case of power differential between the watcher and the watched? Wouldn't the males of the species also benefit by being able to show off their physical endowments in the search for sexy mates? Some of the trendiest fashions from the 60's and 70's boasted crotch-and-chest-hugging items for both men and women, but today, the skintight look for men is chiefly seen in the gay and 'club' scenes.

Perhaps the key lies more in the subtext of power and attractiveness signals and their concealment. While a loosely-garbed male of the hip-hop persuasion comes off as a potential power player by virtue of the unknown quantity hiding within his garments (i.e. the mystery of the concealed offers more to the imagination than the openly displayed), a female who dresses similarly may not only be perceived as "butch" or masculine, but possibly criminal: what's she hiding in there? A gun? Drugs? Anecdotal reports say girls that wear baggy concealing fashions to school may be targeted for searches and disciplinary action more frequently than their belly-baring compatriots. After all, they may have something to hide.

As is characteristic of many womens' issues, solutions and responses to fashion "gray areas" are often culturally answered in black-and-white terms without the subtleties of individual variation; I've often felt that this reflects how women are perceived, as homogeneous "all-or-nothing" beings with identical thoughts, emotions, abilities, desires and needs. How far from the truth that is.

Methinks Miss Modesty can take back some of her identity and power without resorting to Victorian, Communist or old-fashioned religious paradigms, going the opposite extreme by covering women's entire bodies like the Puritans or the unisex olive-drab quilted suits of the Maoist Chinese. Perhaps in striving to de-emphasize sexuality (or its concealment) as womens' chief social defining characteristic, rather than trying to corral the female body like a dangerous creature, we can succeed in redefining the old monochrome Madonna/Whore female iconography and achieve beauty without powerlessness.

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