THE ROM-COM EFFECT

Growing up, rom-coms were always my favorite kinds of movies. Watching them gave me a sense of comfort and hope that I seldom felt with movies like The Dark Knight Rises. Don’t get me wrong, I loved action movies and movies about mind-bending concepts like time travel, but when I found myself in need of a movie to relax with on a Friday night after a whole week of school, rom-coms were where I would go. I loved to look at the ways the main characters dressed, how they acted, how they dealt with their qualms, and eventually, how I could be more like them. I wanted to be everything these iconic characters were, from the way they looked and dressed to the way they acted. To this day, I still love a cheesy romance movie, but I like to think I now possess a more nuanced understanding of how women and people who grew up female came to be so swayed by this genre of movies (and no, it is not because we are more emotional

I first came to realize there is so much more to romcoms than I initially thought when I watched BestDressed’s video on the portrayal of women in the media. Hearing this fashion YouTuber’s thoughts on feminism in the media made me realize that fashion in the media doesn’t have to be seen as something mutually exclusive from feminism. In the video, BestDressed explained that in the media of the 2000s, rom-coms were the only types of films in which women were able to see themselves onscreen as protagonists. Other mainstream movies like The Avengers and Inception often cast women, but only to fill in the role of the love interest or the unimportant sidekick. Media has much more of an influence on us than we might think, and as a woman who was an adolescent in the years before Greta Gerwig came to the frontlines, I know for a fact that rom-coms made me believe that a woman’s only purpose was to find the perfect man. Though the initial pull of the rom-com is the woman-centered storyline, the underlying messages and understandings we got from these movies were much more misogynistic than one might expect. Our younger selves went to the movie hoping to find new ideas for our wardrobes and, possibly, the ability to put ourselves—women—in the main character’s shoes but left with the feeling that our lives weren’t quite complete without the company of a man. The link between the influence rom-coms had on fashion and on the mindsets of young women is, of course, fairly psychologically complex and I won’t claim to know much about it since I am not a psychology major. I can, however, talk through my own experiences of fashionistas in movies relaying problematic ideals to me in my formative years.

If you tell me you don’t recognize this outfit, you’re lying. Cher’s plaid yellow suit from Clueless is one of the most iconic looks of rom-com fashion history. But what did that mean for the fashion trends that came about at the time? I did some research about the most iconic fashion look to emerge from romantic comedies and there was an undoubted consensus among all the friends I polled that Cher’s fashion was it. If you still don’t believe how iconic Cher was, a simple Google search for 1995 fashion trends will give you everything you need to know.

The very first image you see is Cher from Clueless in her plaid outfit. How influential would a movie have had to be to define the fashion of the entire era of the mid-90s?

However, when we take a closer look at the ideals that Clueless portrays, we can start to see some of this movie’s problematic elements. Along with popularizing the phrase Ugh, as if, it depicts Cher as a teenager who is shallow and self-absorbed until a man comes along, sweeps her off her feet, and shows her how to be a caring person. Naturally, Cher and her best friend also have to fight over a man—the only reason why two women would ever fight, of course—and as soon as Cher gets with her man, everything in the world falls right into place. A truly accurate and fully logical portrayal of real life, if you ask me.

Though I could probably point out a dozen other movies of this genre that employ this very same trope of a helpless woman being saved by her boyfriend or love interest, I must stop myself from critiquing every romantic comedy that made up my and millions of other women’s childhoods. Rom-coms are undeniably wonderful and entertaining to watch, but having grown up with the inherent misogyny these movies can perpetuate through the bleeding of their influence from fashion to societal standards, I must caution you to look closely at what the romantic comedies you watch are making you think. Today, we certainly have many more rom-coms centered on women empowerment such as Lady Bird, but we still have a long way to go before the media stops brainwashing us into the misogynistic mindset we are already so conditioned to have.

Written by Meera Kumar | Illustration by Grace Filbin | Graphic Design by Rino Fujimoto