... There is the idea that if the outfit looks good on a woman, it will make a CDer look good too...
Here's my point: it is not really the outfit that a man may feel looks 'cute' in the first image (compared to the outfit a male would wear), it is the 'feel' of the woman who is wearing it that attracts CDers, IMO. It is her hair, face, body, lips, tiny waist, small feet, etc. True, the outfit is tailored to fit her body. But, put the outfit on an average woman's body and it just doesn't look as good. Yet a CDer during the 40s would have ignored how ordinary women who wore overalls looked and would have preferred to wear the model's welding garb over men's overalls (thinking of the model's body), and further thinking that wearing such an outfit might transform him. If that makes sense.
So, the same is true with catalogue pics and online shopping site images of the clothes as they appear on gorgeous models. Yet put the same clothes on the average genetic male (or even on the average female who has shorter legs, squarer torso, smaller breasts, not a mode's face, and who might not have a well defined waist), and the look is entirely different. To achieve the same results, the CDer must be of similar stature as the model (or his vision of the "ideal" female) that he wishes to emulate. This is a difficult thing to accomplish for the average genetic male, especially if he is older than 25. To accomplish this, he needs to shape his eyebrows, wear forms, cinch his waist with corsets, etc.
I don't know what my point is, really, other than it appears to me that even though the average CDer may think it is all about the clothes, in reality it is about becoming the sexy woman that his guy self admires: the ideal woman who, if she has a model's looks and stature, would look good wearing a burlap bag as long as it was cinched at the waist and showed some leg. If the only images of women dressed in women's clothing ever available were of the average women that don't turn men's heads, I wonder if there would be as many CDers.