In my twenties or thirties, wearing lingerie type tops was a thing. Everyone in Hollywood was doing it. It was cool.
I bought a couple of pieces in that style, one a snug little camisole with lace straps, the other a lace blouse with solid cuffs and collar.
My killjoy elderly mother made disapproving noises. My sister "rebutted" those criticisms but not to mom's face. She simply agreed with me it was "in style."
Once and only once, I snuck out of mom's house wearing the lace blouse with a sweater over it to bring dinner to my husband. I was living with my parents temporarily while my husband attended a military school and he was basically in a hotel on a nearby military base for some weeks, where he was required to be until the school was over.
My mother was right. My sister was wrong.
Other than secretly dressing sexy that one time to hookup with my own husband, I found no other place to wear this stuff, even though I was very pretty and am somewhat inclined to treat clothes as art.
What people in Hollywood wear on the red carpet, on stage or in fashion magazines is art. It's not real life and it doesn't work for "ordinary" people who are not part of the Hollywood scene to dress that way.
The social context is completely different. They aren't going to see the same kinds of social fallout for dressing like that to some red carpet event that you will see for trying to wear that to work or the local grocery store or tea with friends.
The fashion world is currently extremely broken, socially speaking. It's out of touch with reality.
Haute Couture is also art. A lot of it is stuff no one can wear anywhere, not even the Hollywood crowd at red carpet events.
I once cross-posted a haute couture pic to some sub of mine and added a lot of snark. If I recall correctly, it was a long dress with long sleeves and bare breasts. (No, there's no link to share. It was long ago deleted.)
When I was a military wife, I did a lot of volunteer work. Giving of my time was sort of the middle class housewife version of the very upper class expectations for how a married well good woman should live her life.
I was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class. I have some college and a raftload of academic awards. I always imagined I would someday have a real career and good money and be part of high society.
My mother's mother came from a low level noble family and clothes was extremely important to my mother. She learned to sew so that her daughters could dress well in spite of her own failure to be a millionaire.
My family was a microcosm of the current broken social paradigms regarding fashion. My mother's expectations for "appropriate" clothing were very upper class European and it wasn't the life we actually had.
I had some insight into this while reading a book about fundraising, something I did in anticipation of my education and track record of volunteer work leading to some kind of career in the world of charity.
It talked about designing fundraisers that would work and talked about very upper class events that would appeal to your donors. One big supporter told the author she attended such events to have someplace to wear her clothes.
So if you aren't in Hollywood and have money, you literally need to bribe charities to host very upper class social events to have a place to wear this stuff. Real life doesn't naturally provide any such opportunities.
My son once made an observation that felt very cutting to me. He basically told me fashion magazines were stuck in the checkout aisle of grocery stores to sell this crap to homemakers like me who didn't have a real career and so would believe this fairytale version of how women dressed.
He was right. When I had a corporate job, that's not how real career women dressed.
The only woman in my department who dressed remotely like the stuff you see in movies and magazines was the new big boss in charge of half of the department who came down from New York and even she didn't look anywhere near as "sexy" as Hollywood would like you to think corporate women dress.
Pro tip to homemakers, college students and other wannabes everywhere: Real career women don't dress like hookers or like Madonna on stage in her mix of suits and lingerie. That's art, not good fashion advice.
The microcosm of the issue that I grew up with in my own family was at least less sexualized, thus saner. I had power suits and such in my teens and ultimately traded half of them to my older sister who actually had a career in exchange for floral skirts and peasant blouses so she had a work wardrobe and I could dress like a teenager.
I still had to "dumb down" my wardrobe when I got my first job because I was dressed better than my bosses and looked more like the daughter of the owner than like a cashier with an entry level job.
The fashion world with Hollywood setting expectations for young fools like me was broken decades ago when I was still a young fool buying lingerie tops and finding I had no place to wear them. It's gotten a lot more socially broken with the rise of the internet.
Now, everyone and anyone can take selfies on their phone and post them to social media. You can imagine you have a "personal" relationship to people you've never met in person, including big stars and other famous people.
It's standard practice to have a photo of your face on your social media accounts to humanize them, to plug in to various brain pathways and trigger specific social things, and never mind that it's all a delusion.
No, they don't actually look like that one photo of their face you see over and over. No, you don't actually know them.
Big stars used to have a much more managed relationship to the public. It was much more formal.
Some people have proven to be talented at using this new reality to line their pockets and things have gotten dramatically more insane.
The Kardashians have a "reality" TV show -- or did back in the day. I honestly don't keep up with whatever incredibly stupid shit they are up to these days, so "oops" if that is out of date info.
Kim Kardashian sells clothes and I vaguely have the impression that several other Kardashians also sell clothes or makeup. She sells clothes but hardly seems to wear any.
She mostly seems to plaster the internet with artistic nudes and when she attends public events, her clothes is so tight, she might as well be wearing body paint, not clothes. I saw her once in a normal sweater and it was a huge shock, like "Is that who I think that is?"
Reality TV and social media make people FEEL like they KNOW these people. These people are very talented at scamming you into wanting to "be" like them and looking to them as -- cough -- "role models" that you enthusiastically emulate so you will stupidly buy their products.
You didn't get millions suing some asshole in court for posting revenge porn of you on the internet after you were already a little famous. You probably aren't half as pretty as Kim Kardashian and don't have a reality TV show and etc, so buying her clothes and taking sexy selfies of yourself all the live long day won't make you rich and powerful like her.
Odds are good that oversharing overly sexualized selfies will keep you in an entry-level job and bar you from marrying well. You won't be respectable enough in most social circles to be the boss nor even marry the boss.
I spent a lot of years reading "Stars without makeup" articles and otherwise trying to deprogram myself from my own broken ideas. I long ago stopped reading fashion magazines or trying to keep up with trends, so color me mystified by the "ripped jeans" trend that seems to go back at least a decade.
I just don't get why a 20 year old would pay good money for jeans someone tore holes in before you bought them even though I totally get the people on r/visiblemending who patch and repatch their favorite jeans that they've owned since you were in elementary school because my mom did that for my dad.
We can take one look at you and KNOW you bought them like that. You aren't old enough to have actually owned them for a decade, so we know you aren't wearing your favorite jeans that got torn up. You just think it's cool for some inane reason.
And then I read about some gal who dresses like that and feels she needs Comebacks to try to shut up middle aged men harassing her about "where'd the rest of your jeans go???"
No, I didn't leave a comment. I don't have a comeback and don't think my opinions would fit in that sub at all or be welcomed by anyone.
Most middle aged men saying that are indirectly commenting on her bare legs showing through. They are flirting or hitting on her though they don't know her and are probably old enough to be her father.
In a word, they are perverts and they are up to no good. "Witty" comebacks won't shut them down and are highly likely to backfire and be interpreted as her flirting back, a la this video where at the end the woman doctor says "I can kill a man ...", House says "I was trying to make another euphemism for sex." And she replies "So was I."
Another doctor goes "How can you flirt with him?" Rest assured, not only will the perv in question take it as encouragement, onlookers will also think you are flirting back.
She probably needs to at the very least make less eye contact with men. If she actually wanted my opinion, and I'm sure she doesn't, I would tell her to stop buying ripped jeans and only wear ripped jeans if it's your favorite that you've had for years and the rips are genuine wear and tear.
A lot of people like Cher who are infamous for wearing damn little in public don't dress that way IRL. A lot of them spend tons of time at the gym and live in sweats.
Their stage clothes are costumes and it's how they make their money, not good fashion advice on how to climb the corporate ladder or marry well.
To the best of my knowledge, I currently have no photos of myself online.
I know: I'm a killjoy and etc.