Love & Passion Quote by Brenda Holloway

There is a brutal honesty in Holloway's phrasing, and it lands like an accidental confession: the stage wardrobe wasn’t designed to serve the performer’s comfort, range of motion, or self-definition. It was engineered to sell desire. That small preposition shift - for sex appeal, not for women - exposes an entire entertainment economy where “woman” is treated as a brand asset, and “sex” is treated as the product.

Coming from a singer whose prime years overlapped with the late-60s/70s soul era, the line reads as a corrective to the nostalgia machine that remembers the glamour but forgets the labor. Costumes are often framed as empowerment after the fact: sequins as agency, short hems as confidence. Holloway punctures that retrofit. Her point isn’t prudishness; it’s authorship. Who decided what she would look like? Who benefited? Who had to perform inside that decision night after night?

The subtext is also about misalignment: men (and the industry structures built around male attention) defining what “sexy” should mean, while women are left to inhabit the discomfort - physical and psychological. The line suggests a split between the artist and the image, between music as craft and presentation as leverage. It’s not just wardrobe critique; it’s a quiet indictment of how often female performers are asked to be both the voice and the view.