Man repeller outfits are trending

And here is a full list of items if you want to do just that

Man-repeller outfits are trending (again) on TikTok, and my feed is currently filled with girls showing off their outfits to the sound of Julia Fox’s famous clip: “Men hate my outfits”

Now, these outfits are pretty cute and a far cry from how the trend started a few months ago. The first time I saw a man repeller outfit, it was a girl wearing a goblin mask while walking home late from a bar — intended to disincentivise men from approaching her (or worse).

Since then, the trend has evolved into something more fashion-focused, centered on outfits that decenter what men find “traditionally” (massive air quotes here) attractive. (There are some fashion boys who are gunna love your tabis tho, promise.) These outfits usually feature baggy clothes, masculine silhouettes, and excessive layering.

But this got me thinking—what outfits do men actually hate? We’re out here assuming it’s baggy jeans and oversized sweaters, but is that really the case? What really constitutes a true man repeller outfit?

@lunaisabellaaMen repelling outfits since 1997 #fashion #outfit #menhatemyoutfits

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Methods

Back in 2023, I made a video where I used R to scrape over 20 articles titled “Outfits That Men Hate” (or something of that nature) and used text analysis (aka code) to count the most commonly mentioned clothing items.

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(In this video, the most-hated items were: baggy pants, pointy shoes, leopard print, overalls, high waisted anything, revealing clothes, platform shoes, suits, bucket hats, and tube tops. So not too far off of what I found this time around.)

I considered doing the same thing again, UNTIL I came across something even better — a Reddit thread with thousands of comments discussing the exact same thing.

So! I found 10 more Reddit threads on the same discussion and used Python to scrape a sample of 806 comments. Ideally, I would have pulled thousands, but Reddit’s API limitations meant working with a smaller sample.

Now, to men’s credit, I had trouble finding threads like this posted within the last two years. Have we turned a corner in gender relations? Or have these conversations moved elsewhere? You tell me. But for transparency: these 806 comments were posted between 2020 and 2023.

From there, I imported the data into R (yes, I know I should just do this in Python, but I never do), removed common stopwords (I, me, you, and, an, to), and used code to count the most frequently mentioned words, bigrams, and trigrams, before ordering them in descending frequency. Pure word counts only get you so far, and I am not the brilliant data manipulator I wish I were. So, I manually cleaned the data — removing irrelevant bigrams like “everyone hates” or “looks ridiculous” and combining terms and mention counts that were tapping into the same trend. (I had no idea there were so many ways to describe thin eyebrows.)

Results

As promised (!) here is the full list of items that were mentioned across the 806 comments.

In my first video on the topic, I pulled out the items that had high mentions but were also interesting/surprising to me: big sunglasses, the eyebrow discourse, cakey makeup, baggy clothes, and high-waisted stuff. But, indeed, there were some items that were mentioned more often than eyebrowgate that I didn’t include, like crop tops (who cares), distressed jeans (so does my grandma), capris (everyone seems to hate these), rompers (me too!!!).

Discussion

A few extra bonus points that I want to make.

1. Obviously, this doesn’t reflect all men — these are just the opinions of those who feel strongly enough to comment on women’s fashion on Reddit. It is just a sample and I don’t to alienate my male fashion friends here.

2. High-waisted being the most hated item was surprising given how prevelant it has been in our everyday wardrobes for the past 10 years. However, this may be why it was the most mentioned — because it is one of the most common elements/peices of clothing on the list. But, if you did want to know, aparently it is hated because it makes our butts look tall (lol).

3. I skimmed through a couple of the comment sections, even for threads that were too old to include in this analysis, but here are a couple of the comments that made me laugh nonetheless.

4. Hoping that some of these guys are in happy marriages.

5. And finally, if you know why men hate pointy toe shoes PLEASE let me know. I am so curious. In this sample of comments that I analsyed there was not one personal actually explaining this choice, they were often just contained within big lists of items that they didn’t like.

And that’s all — thanks for reading!!