Thursday, March 13, 2014

Blips: Conference Chic


Source: How to Be Visibly Femme in the Games Industry
Author: Maddy Myers
Site: Paste

So there's a big video game conference coming up –what are you going to wear? There aren't great official standards place for many of these sorts of events (for better or worse), so it's up to you to figure this out for yourself. Maddy Myers just posted an article on Paste where she recounts what it's like to attend these types of events as a woman in an overwhelmingly male-dominated environment and how clothing selection plays such a profound role in how seriously you're taken by your peers. Jeans and t-shirts are considered "professional" attire (or "professionally casual," really), a notion that feels unique to the game industry –a concept born of the programmer man-cave perhaps. In contrast, to appear "cute" is to be disempowered, and unfortunately there's a lot of truth in that, which, as Myers explains, makes for an uphill battle for a woman of short stature in a crowd of dudes. Myers story is deeply personal and touching. She talks about how she's felt pressured to dress like "one of the guys," despite more recent inclinations to don more femme attire. Please give the whole story a read; you might even learn a bit about certain fashion trends along the way (I did).

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