Someone who may or may not be my mother sent me a Washington Post story by Rachel Tashjian: “Is a floral dress a political statement?” It’s the kind of headline that could lead to eyerolls among those who see fashion as frivolous, but there is rather a lot to the question. Its relevance extends beyond those who, like yours truly, own eleven vintage botanically patterned dresses.

The biggest takeaway from the Washington Post analysis is that dresses like these are in style (a relief!) and that everyone is wearing them. Contrary to what the subhed—“Why young conservative women are turning toward milkmaid dresses, florals and feminine flourishes”—had me fearing, these are a society-wide phenomenon. Nobody thinks I am conservative (or young) on the days I wear these.

But the interesting part is in the details. Different political teams are wearing similar-on-paper dresses differently. Through subtle visual cues, you can indicate whether you’re a traditional-gender-roles-embracing florals-wearer or a fashion-forward one, or even making a tongue-in-cheek reference to a gender politics you abhor:

“Both [prairie-dress designer Batsheva] Hay and her customers often wear the dresses with something unexpected: combat boots, or a baseball cap, or an outrageous lip color or hairstyle that make it clear the wearer is playing with these old-fashioned ideas about domesticity and womanhood. “A lot of women feel like they need to f— it up somehow.”

Edge—tattoos, piercings, etc.—makes it clear that you’re wearing the pretty dress as fashion and not as a sign you belong to a traditionalist religious group. This is something I have long been aware of, as a woman who loves these dresses but most days wears jeans. I don’t have tattoos or neon hair or other immediate markers of non-tradwife status. I rely on context cues: That I am a Jewish-looking woman getting on the Toronto streetcar is a fairly good indication that I am not a Mormon momfluencer.

There is a Jewish-specific version of this as well, wherein a long denim skirt will read as Orthodox on a certain sort of woman unless there’s something obviously un-frum balancing it out. If I were more drawn to denim skirts of any length, this is something I could see thinking about. Part of how we choose our clothes is as a performance for the outside world, to let them know who we are, and as a rule, we want people making correct assumptions.

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The chronology of the floral-dress trend is unusual. While you might expect that a hyper-feminine dress style would have emerged from social conservative arenas and then been slyly co-opted by social liberals working in the big-city fashion industry, it was the other way around.

Starting between 2016 (when the brand Batsheva launched) and 2020 (when Canadian journalist Isabel Slone wrote about cottagecore for The New York Times), avant-garde fashion........

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