Gender is simple really, right? Pink is for girls and blue is for boys. It stretches outside of colour to everything from what you wear, what you like, and how you act. I’m a guy, so that means I like wearing trousers, playing with Action Men, and suppressing all my emotions.
Yikes.
Ok, well I cried watching Call Me By Your Name last night, so maybe not. I hated Action Men too, and totally would have taken accessorising Polly Pocket over making explosion noises any day. I also snuck into my mother’s wardrobe once and paraded around the house in a lemon pencil skirt when I was 13. When life gives you lemons? Idk, all I know is that I’m not the traditional masc man starter pack.
My skirt days were back in 2007. Fast-forward over a decade, and things are different. Now we have GQ’s Teo van den Broeke’s declaring that the “fashion buzz term for the past three seasons has been 'gender fluidity'.” Today, both high-end runways and emoji keyboards are leaving the binary group chat and shifting away from stale, strict gender expectations and into something a whole lot more personal.
Ungendered, gender-neutral, genderless, agender, non-binary, enby; these terms are being fired out in all directions by fashion folk and Gen Z kids alike. And the binary-busting buzzwords are also being taken up by brands globally, from the big industry players like Burberry, to Zara and River Island’s quiet entries into the neutral clothing market a couple years back. The move is reflective of a culture that is dis-articulating the ways in which we perform and politicise gender. Simone de Beavoir once declared that, “One is not born, but becomes a woman,” – a quote tagged into many a gender undergraduate’s theory paper, and which suggests there’s a moment in which we can avoid “becoming” our gender altogether and instead become something, well, different. Step 1: wear the clothing you want to wear. It's actually pretty simple.
But it's also about business. The battle for fast fashion has proved more important for the likes of Gucci and Burberry than to keep forking men and women’s rails to either side, and so the big players have strategized gender-neutrality to take on the social media-driven world of the modern catwalk. The ‘see now, buy now’ line has made a splash, as men and women’s catwalks are combined into a single event for shopping ease and clicks. Wow reacts only.
Back in 2016, Jaden Smith became the face of the luxury lynchpin Louis Vuitton, and tore apart gender conventions in the process. "Why does Jaden Smith star in this campaign? He represents a generation that has assimilated the codes of true freedom, one that is free of manifestos and questions about gender," commented Vuitton’s creative director Nicholas Ghesquière in a press release.
“Wearing a skirt comes as naturally to him as it would to a woman who, long ago, granted herself permission to wear a man’s trench or a tuxedo”.
Meanwhile everyone's favourite cult controversist Vetements has shaken up the Paris fashion calendar by combining its men’s and women’s collections into one, and venerable brands such as Gucci have followed suit by unifying their catwalks into a single co-ed show. Gucci’s creative director Alessandro Michele says the new strategy "seems only natural" and "will give me the chance to move towards a different kind of approach to my storytelling." The story being one of forging its own path outside of calendars, procedures, and binaries. With such big names on board, you can’t help but think you don’t need a listicle (or even this essay) to explain why gender-neutral clothing is something to get hyped over. We're already there.
Besides, these are just the headlines. Beyond the runway, a more egalitarian approach to fashion is coming about. Kids can be kids again as stereotypes have been shoved out of the childrenswear lookbooks at John Lewis, and heaps of digital spaces exclusively dedicated to unisex clothing are opening up (see: Not Equal, Muttonhead, and Ataraxi). It seems by removing the choice of shopping men’s or women’s, we’ve actually got more choice than ever before. Now we can shop not for our gender, but for ourselves.
Header image: Gucci menswear spring summer 2016 collection, Milan
