The most common icon indicating “women’s room” in a public space has long been a silhouette of what appears to be a woman wearing a dress. But Axosoft, an Arizona-based technology company, has re-engineered the dated gender indicator. Now the flow of what was once a skirt is a cape, because the dress no longer makes intuitive sense. And because women, the company says, can be superheroes.
Anyone with a curious young child has fielded the question: why does the women’s room show a picture of a woman in a dress? The question is often enough put to a mother wearing jeans or yoga pants–to drive home the point. (That mother is often a sort of superhero, too, to drive it home again.) The Axosoft campaign is called It Was Never A Dress.