“I cannot stress enough that this is what dressing for the female gaze looks like”
So went a viral tweet by G. L. Di Vittorio. It’s the caption for a photo of Oscar Isaac, a man whom I understand from Twitter and Googling to be a movie star. It’s a nondescript photo, but I will descript it all the same: It’s of a middle-aged man, with graying beard and hair, in frameless glasses, a gray sweatshirt with button-down shirts over and under it. He’s wearing some drab but normal-fitting slacks and carrying a backpack. The pose and the tags hanging from the outer-layer shirt give the impression of a shop mannequin.
Anyway. As best as I can tell, “dressing for the female gaze” became a meme. Isaac in this photo was said to look like a professor. I’m sure there’s more but my online time these days is limited.
What I will do is address the “female gaze” question. I do like that for once this is addressed as a question of straight women doing the looking, and not as the tired discussion of how Actually (straight) women dress up for one another, and not for men. Men, or so they say, prefer the natural look. Except as everyone knows, they don’t, a well-known phenomenon I am not rehashing here. (I have been in the threads where men insist that they can tell if a woman is wearing makeup or had this or that done, where this is refuted by women pointing out that they can only tell when it’s been done badly.)
But what is the straight, or at least man-oriented, female gaze? Often, it’s two interrelated things: idiosyncratic (how’s that for a non-answer?) and natural-look-preferring. Addressing the second part first: Artifice that makes a woman more conventionally attractive tends to read, on a man, as feminizing. And not in a potentially sexy androgynous way, or in a way that suggests a solemn discussion of gender identity is in order. More like, this is a straight cisgender man who is quite simply trying too hard. Dude should have left his eyebrows alone. (That’s not even getting into incels with jawline concerns.) I don’t know why this is, and could illustrate with photos but do not want to make any handsome actors feel bad about themselves.
A look of authentic not-trying, ala that photo, appeals. It’s not that straight women are drooling over the very idea of a man with holes in his socks, but those are signifiers of hetero masculinity. (Straight women also wear decaying socks, but this is about signifiers, not sock drawers.)
The first part, the idiosyncracy, is about how male beauty for women is much less about consensus-building than female beauty for men. As in, men all get together and agree that these are the hot women, and a consensus cuts across type and subculture. Not in their minds or browser histories, necessarily, but there sort of has to be that consensus or else how could men assert status by having Bagged A Hottie? For women, there isn’t any great prize to be won for having the hottest boyfriend or husband in some generally-agreed-upon sense. Your man being sexy is more something that’s of interest to you, within your relationship. So it’s not as important if the world agrees, and besides, with rare exceptions, there’s no one the world is going to agree about.
The lack-of-consensus angle partly explains the myth that women don’t care about men’s looks as much as men care about women’s. The non-obvious crush is not an aberration but the default. The chiseled torso is for performatively ogling, not actual anything, and besides, he is pairing off with a fellow chiseled torso and not giving us a second glance.
Which is to say that the photo, while clearly of a handsome actor, does nothing particular for me (he’s doubtless losing sleep over this), and there’s no reason to think it would for the whole of womankind.
The idea that women have more heterogeneous tastes isn't new, naturally -- the evidence was even taken up in a long-ago Cracked.com article that I can't seem to find. (Perhaps it's been removed; the site's sociopolitical stance is now rather different.)
Anyway, as you say, there's no pleasing 'em all, but the above getup -- "significant status, carried casually" -- doesn't seem like a bad play.