“Excuse me, do you mind telling me where you got that?” It’s a sartorial question many of us have been asked by admiring strangers, but countless undocumented glances of mutual appreciation happen between women everyday. They are part of the secret language of being a woman: we notice, we compare, we obsess, we judge ourselves – and we emulate. We take pleasure in looking and, quite often, being looked at by other women. These intensely private thoughts take the spotlight in the first installment of The Way We Dress, a four-part look at the emotional and storytelling power of clothes, helmed by four female directors.

In a bid to deconstruct “that feeling of gazing and being gazed upon,” Toronto-based filmmaker Chelsea McMullan took to the streets of her hometown with a casting call that looked for females of “any age, any body type, any ethnicity.” The 16mm-shot Notes on the Gaze, premiering today, subverts the dominant male gaze of 70s European auteurs such as Godard, Fellini and Antonioni, and ends with a playful homage to legendary cinéma vérité documentarians the Maysles brothers.   

“If the male gaze wants to possess, or overcome a fear of, women, then what do I want?” ponders McMullan, a self-proclaimed film nerd. “I think I want to be other women, to feel what it would be like to change bodies; to have a different hair texture, eye color, or body shape; to see myself through the eyes of another women.”

Part two of The Way We Dress premieres July 15.