Why was a dress shop chosen as the setting of this short story?
The setting of the dress shop was appropriate for the story as dresses are symbols of femininity, serving as a distinct and soft contrast to the horrors around the women in Machado’s short stories. Dresses that are designed to adorn and showcase the body, begin outlasting the women themselves as they slowly fade away. Placing the story there allowed for Machado’s exploration of beauty ideals, consumerism, and ways women are erased in society.
Dress shops are traditionally spaces in which multiple generations of women, mothers, daughters, and grandmothers, come together. Together they shop for dresses for formal occasions such as proms or weddings, where they bond and reinforce shared experiences of femininity. While this specific situation isn’t outwardly presented in the story, the protagonist does mention girls across age groups as well as Petra’s mother being the seamstress. Through this, Machado can present beauty ideals since these shops are places where it’s openly discussed, reinforced, and passed down.
The protagonist imagines “toddlers, faded girls” since the news said they were getting younger, then a situation in which a little girl asks for a pretzel, where her mother says “Pretzels are junk food. They will make you fat.”. Towards the end of the story, she even mentions seeing her co-worker Nathalie being thinner than before, when she goes to try to set the faded women free from the dresses. Throughout the whole story, being in the dress shop allows for them to constantly be around thin mannequins and shapely bodices that serve as fragmented renditions of a female body, through the lens of beauty ideals. Since age isn’t entirely a factor in the fading of women, body size is presented as one. The protagonist mentions a group of teenage girls carelessly trying on dresses and states “I can see the faded women all bound up in them, fingers laced tightly through the grommets. I cannot tell if they are holding on for dear life or if they are trapped”. The visual of female bodies being layered on one another highlights the aspect of many people trying on the same item in clothing shops, highlighting the individual women and their humanity, but presenting a situation in how only one of them is fully visible. The teen girls were being watched by the male characters lustfully. The same male characters that discussed not wanting to be intimate with a fading woman. In this situation, the teen girls were seen as desirable while neither they nor the men seemed to acknowledge or see the women in the dresses’ seams.
Petra’s mother the seamstress, presents an older woman similarly to the protagonist’s boss. Petra states that the fading women approached her mom and would just fold themselves into the needlework. Even after telling them to stop, they didn’t listen and instead was told by her boss to keep making them because “those dresses do so well—they sell more than anything my mother has ever made before. It’s like people want them like that, even if they don’t realize it”. This could be interpreted as consumerism, where women who can’t even wear the dresses are seeking out seamstresses to be sewn into them, since its the only way they are visible to others. This could describe how beauty trends influence women into over-buying products and clothes to still be “visible” to others as long as they fit the ideal. This represents how the beauty industry and these specific seamstresses are exploiting women through targeting their insecurities. I also see those characters as representative of older women in families that still believe in beauty ideals, even if they themselves no longer fit them. Since they were subjected to that in their youth, there are situations where some may try to push that rigid thinking onto younger women in the family because they were never presented with as many other options of being as we are now. I think the fading women represent women that aren’t visible to society for whatever reason, and the emphasis on various generations serves as a way to make them aware of this harmful cycle.
Media:
The Fear by Lily Allen
The lyrics of this song critique consumerism and the pressure to conform to societal expectations for women. In the song, Lily Allen voices a shallow girl who seeks fame and wealth, but is also aware that she isn’t able to tell what’s right or what’s real. This mirrors the almost unbothered sentiment towards the fading women in the story.
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