My partner said something the other night that caused a sort of hilarious discussion about the gender divide when talking about clothes.
I was trying on some pants I'd ordered, and it turned out that they had been cut out wrong (one leg a different size than the other) and so fit in a really wonky way. So when I showed them to him, he said something like "Oh, that is just wrong. See, the fabric there is bunched up and it's...bad. It looks really bad."
I was walking around in the pants for a few minutes, and every time I went past, he'd reiterate what he'd said. Eventually, I got a little cranky, and said "Ok. Message received, you can stop saying that now."
After I'd cooled down, we talked about it, and I tried to explain to him that even though logically, I know that he was just saying the pants were literally wrong, it still felt a little bit like criticism of me. He was totally baffled by this concept--"Wait, you are not the same thing as your pants. How can something I say about your pants make you feel bad? They're pants! And they're wrong! You are great!"
