The Importance of Dressing Modestly

Have you ever met someone who seems really nice but you almost didn’t talk to them–or else were distracted by–what seemed to you some sort of flaw? For example, did you think a guy wasn’t worth talking to because he had dreadlocks, or a girl was a slob because her nails were really dirty? I am proposing the frame of mind we try to avoid but yet can’t fully avoid–don’t judge a book by its cover. We start making assumptions about people before we even talk to them. A big area this factors in is the area of fashion. We look if the clothes people are wearing are fashionable or sloppy, clean or dirty. Here’s what I ask you: what does immodest dress give an impression of? It doesn’t matter if a clothing item is at the height of fashion, because if it’s immodest, it’s immodest regardless of its popularity. Women have a particular need to be modest because men are more easily aroused by immodest dressing than their female counterparts. If we dress immodestly, we buy into the media’s and fashion industry’s lies that we must dress in revealing clothes to show off our physical assets and gain attention from men. Or men might find that they need to go shirtless or wear tight muscle shirts and tight jeans to appear desirable to women. We allow ourselves to be exploited and marketed to others as sexual objects and to see others the same way. Women, I know it’s hard. I struggle with this issue too. I try really hard to dress modestly, but I too have a couple of clothing items in the grey area. But I really strive to keep improving, to dress modestly, and make immodest clothes modest with camisoles, slips, etc. We don’t need to dress in sack cloths, and by no means should dress sloppily, but we must dress modestly to cover our cleavage, cover our midriff, cover a good portion of our legs, and not overly accentuate our curves. By doing so, we show love and respect for our own sex, as well as for our Brothers in Christ. We look chic and classy, instead of looking provocative and cheap. As I used to always say, the young girls are marketed the clothes that “Juniors” should be wearing, and the “Juniors” are marketed clothes that no one should wear. If you stop and look, you’ll see young girls are wearing clothes that also are sexualized and make them look much older than they are. Our own youth–being used by the fashion industry! In the words of a great article by Rev. T. G. Morrow, “A MODESTY PROPOSAL”: “Women, do you want to be remembered for your legs? Your navel? Your chest? Your figure? Or, do you want to be remembered for your warmth, your personality, your decency, your goodness, your holiness? If a woman over accentuates her physical values, she will surely drown out her other, more personal, more significant, and more lasting values.”