One thing men and women have in common is that they both spend a great deal of time thinking about their weekends. They do not, however, spend an equal amount of time thinking about what they are going to wear.
If a guy is headed for the beach, he thinks mostly about the function of the clothes he wears and little or none about how he looks. He chooses a swimming suit, a tee shirt and a pair of sandals simply because they are appropriate for the beach. Obviously he’s not going to wear brown boots to the beach. True, he will wear a certain style of trunks, depending on his lifestyle, but he doesn’t give them much thought and just takes the ones that are nearest the top of the clothes in his drawer.
For instance, if a guy is into surfing, he’ll have several pairs of boardshorts. He will be drawn to a certain brand because his favorite professional surfer wears them. He’ll choose a color subconsciously, based on whether or not he’s an extrovert or an introvert. If one pair of surf trunks is still wet from the previous day, he’ll just wear a dry pair.
In contrast, a surfer girl will own several new two piece sports swimsuits and also own several bikinis. She wears one while she surfs and very likely goes and changes into a bikini when she gets out of the water. She gives a lot of attention to the suits she’s going to wear on any particular day.
All a girl or guy needs for surfing are their swimsuits and their boards. When they go to the beach to socialize or relax, though, they take other accessories with them. While this is easy for the guys, who just shove their one and only wallet into the pocket of their boardshorts, girls have to decide which hobo bag or other handbag to take with them that day.
Think of any activity or lifestyle and you can see these differences still apply. When a man goes for a hike in the woods, he wears hiking boots. Women’s brown boots, however, are not just hiking boots, they’re a fashion statement and they give them thought even when they’re hiking into a deserted wilderness area.
While these differences between how men and women choose their clothes are common knowledge, they make a deeper statement, as well. How did these differences come to be?
It would be simplistic and wrong to say that men are less vain than women. That’s hardly the case. It would be equally wrong to say that men are naturally confident and so don’t need to worry about what they wear. The answer is probably far deeper than either of those suppositions. It probably lies somewhere in our primitive roots, when survival dictated what men and women did and how they thought. If that’s the case, we probably haven’t evolved as much as we would like to believe we have.