TRANSFORMATIVE FLUIDITY
Fri 20 Jan
Words Mahoro Seward
i-D’s Fashion Features editor, writer and consultant Mahoro Seward details why menswear is arguably fashion’s most exciting space right now.
“An instigator of lasting social shifts, and not just a product of them.”
Fashion’s relationship to the zeitgeist is a mercurial one; while designers obviously echo contemporary social trends, they are just as often their instigators. In recent years, a sterling example of that has been playing out on the menswear field. You know what I’m talking about – the coterie of directionally-dressed male-identifying and/or presenting celebrities – your Harry Styleses, Steve Lacys, Lil Nas Xs – who have been using red carpet walks and stage appearances to challenge what it means to be, or rather dress like, a man.
Of course, while these notions of masculinity predate the clothes and accessories that are being deployed to articulate them, there’s still an important point to be made regarding how the emergence of new approaches to dress on menswear runways has precipitated a seismic shift in conversations around masculinity. Basically, about how we’ve progressed from viewing a man in a skirt as an eccentric, to Brad Pitt sporting one to a movie premiere in about a decade.
“I feel like we have now normalised the notion of ‘gender fluidity’ in menswear,” Charles Jeffrey, the founder and creative director of Charles Jeffrey LOVERBOY, says. Since founding his namesake label in 2014, the designer has been a staunch protagonist of the movement, placing a proudly queer irreverence towards strictly gendered notions of dress at the heart of his work. Look no further than the brand’s SS23 collection for proof, in which a wrapped khaki midi skirt is sported as naturally by a male-presenting wearer as a boyish cropped boxy pinstripe suit. “It's now quite common for men to wear women's clothing on a daily basis,” Jeffrey continues, “like cropped jersey tops, 'it' bags, dresses and skirts. These are now commonplace in self-portraiture among the youth today.”
While Jeffrey’s gender-ambivalent approach to menswear is among the more outré on the market, a similar ethos informs a good number of independent menswear brands today. As well as a dedicated unisex line, the seasonal menswear and womenswear collections of Seoul-based label Andersson Bell are remarkably well coordinated, with recurring patterns, textiles and fabric treatments implicitly encouraging customers to shop across gendered delineations. “We have a common core across our designs for both genders,” affirms Dohun Kim, the brand’s creative director. “In particular, colours and silhouettes that are commonly used for womenswear are also applied to our menswear,” he says, then highlighting the brand’s introduction of grungy pleated kilts with frayed hems for AW23.
This more subtle approach – taking classic menswear looks and pieces, and tweaking their colour, fabrication or silhouette to express a looser, traditionally ‘feminine’ sensibility – is perhaps the common means by which designers have engaged with conversations around fluidity in menswear. London-based Bianca Saunders, for example, has earned wide acclaim for its subtle reinterpretations of familiar men’s outerwear and tailored staples, introducing elegantly draped shoulder details to wide-set blazers and coats, and fluid satin backs to trousers with crisp wool gabardine fronts. Elsewhere, in fellow London label Martine Rose’s most recent collection, the namesake designer extended her practice of what Vogue Runway’s Sarah Mower dubbed ‘observational design’, drawing on the dress of the people and communities that Rose is familiar with from her life lived in the British capital and reframing them in a stylish, celebratory light. Here, Rose took an overtly queer tack, riffing on the sartorial codes of the frequenters of the gay cruising clubs that once populated the Vauxhall railway arches where she held her show. Shrunken leather vests and jackets, trousers that bunched at the crotch and chain chokers brought the fraught sexual history that permeated the space to life, introducing a new perspective on so-called ‘queer’ menswear, a fashion genre that has typically been the preserve of gay male designers.
Subversive as many of the examples given here are, what makes them so powerful is less the fact that these designers are dismantling notions of masculine dress, more that they are pluralising it – they’re adding to the vocabulary of contemporary menswear design, rather than trying to rewrite it altogether. “I feel like menswear is still so important to maintain as a discipline,” Jeffrey notes, “and from a fashion point of view, I still see LOVERBOY as a menswear brand, even though we produce womenswear and have done since the beginning,” a choice motivated by the desire to ensure that wearers of all gender identities and body types could access the brand. “I'm interested in the craftsmanship of menswear, the history and the subculture that surrounds it, and regurgitating that in a new way to new audiences,” he continues. “And that is also why it's important that LOVERBOY continues to present in a menswear context – the brand is subversive and in order to continue to be that way, it has to stay in a binary position, to thrash around and be expressive!
His words are a testament to why menswear is arguably fashion’s most exciting space right now. And that’s not due to the fact that new clothes will emerge in response to new turns in how we collectively conceive of masculinity, but rather that those clothes – and how they’re presented – will play a key role in shaping what those conceptions are. Essentially, this broadening of the remit of men’s dress beyond static norms is a reminder of what fashion looks like at its most powerful – an instigator of lasting social shifts, and not just a product of them.