While slogging about the house and yard, I like to wear sweatshirts. They are warm, soft (not scratchy) and they don’t snag on puppy-dog teeth like knitted stuff does.
Last fall, my old much-loved purple Russell Athletic sweatshirts finally more or less fell apart from wear and tear, so I went looking for new ones. Somewhere between the time I last shopped for sweats and now, they stopped making proper, thick, warm, sweatshirts in nice colors. There is something called “sweatshirt sweaters” which are just … sweaters. And there are sweatshirts that are made of “terry cotton” … which are about as thick as three layers of toilet paper.
Just in the nick of time, Lands End produced what they advertise as a super-duper sweatshirt, which is really just a regular sweatshirt, like they used to sell back in the good old days. But they are only for men. Because they are only for men, they come only in manly colors. That means gray, dark burgundy, forest green, navy, red, and black. I ended up, out of desperation for a nice thick sweatshirt, getting the forest green one. It’s so ugly that I only wear it in the early morning when it’s really cold and too dark to notice the color (also, I can usually wear a men’s small, but this one has sleeves that are at least six inches too long).
Why do mens’ clothes, even casual things like t-shirts and sweats, come in such ugly colors?
Do men really like these shades? Is this also true for non-clothing color choices? Looking at the (random) queue of critique requests for abstract photos at Photo.net, I don’t see any correlation between the gender of the photographer and what I see in their images — assuming a photographer will be attracted to colors he or she prefers when making abstract images (as opposed to subject matter that itself determines color content).
Recently there was a news release, covered by many news outlets including The Economist, about a scientific report that concluded that gender color preferences are real and have an evolutionary source.
This was followed by howls of protest from many scientific quarters. For example, this article at Bad Science presents a pretty good debunking of the evolutionary argument. I especially enjoy the follow-up comments posted at the bottom of the article at Bad Science.
