Fashion’s new gender mash-up
International runways embrace ‘ambisexuality,’ and the hot trend isn’t likely to cool any time soon
Against the backdrop of Pride week celebrations, the U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding same-sex marriage and Caitlyn Jenner’s recent debut on the cover of Vanity Fair, last week’s European menswear presentations for spring/summer 2016 looked right on target. And yet, given the constantly shifting sands in the cultural discussion over gender, it’s a target that’s nearly impossible to pin down.
At Prada and at Gucci, where male and female models — mostly androgynous looking — shared the runway for the men’s shows, the larger statement seemed to be that as a society, we have gone beyond gender, and the old rules about what is appropriate for men to wear versus what should worn by women no longer apply.
At Gucci, for instance, where designer Alessandro Michele told the press that “People are ready to change the way they look,” it was difficult to distinguish between the men’s looks and those designed to be worn by women. As the models walked the runway to the sombre strains of Gregorian chants, the designer’s vision for men included such typically “feminine” fabrications as lace, crochet and eyelet, along with suiting in highly ornamental toiles and large-scale floral and butterfly appliqués. Summed up Michele, who has emerged as highly influential in the fashion world after only recently taking the helm at Gucci, “Fashion is not just a story about a dress or azure blue is a colour of the season. It can translate a lot of things.”
The gender discussion continued at Valentino, where designers Pierpaolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri showed a collection centred around tropical prints on Hawaiian-style shirts and grandly appliquéd birds and flowers on everything from tailored satin jackets to sweatsuits that would look equally well on women as they do on men. “I don’t think you need to show what you are,” said Piccioli. “I don’t care about man and women. I just care about people.”
Added Chiuri, “We don’t think about being a man or about gender. We think everyone can be dressed like he wants.”
That such so-called “ambisexuality” has become the new rule in fashion’s approach to the gender wars is apparent in the U.K.-based luxury department store Selfridge’s having merged its traditionally divided men’s and women’s sections onto three unisex floors this spring.
This week, Naomi Campbell and Kendall Jenner strutted the Givenchy men’s runway, and Alessandro Ambrosio and Cindy Bruna added their feminine touch at the menswear show for Balmain, part of a new gender mash-up on the runways that is unlikely to go away anytime soon. Explained Balmain’s Olivier Rousteng, “40 per cent of the Balmain business is the menswear.”
Gender-bending of course is nothing new: fashion has been playing with societal roles since the days of Bowie and The Beatles, with androgyny a recurring leitmotif that surfs in and out of fashion. But now there are high fashion models like Andrej Pejic, a fine-boned Australian man who walks the runway as a woman; Brazil’s Lea T., a trans muse for Givenchy; and Casey Legler, a French-born former swimmer who is the first female with a contract as a male model with the Ford agency.
At the same time, wander into any hipster restaurant or indie café in any emerging hot spot around the world and the male servers are dressed like lum- berjacks and macho miners of the 19th century in flannel shirts and artisanal denims, with heavy beards and carefully waxed moustaches. Certainly the word, “metrosexual” now sounds as passé as “yuppie.” Are these nouveau He-Men part of a backlash against the new gender fluidity that is simply protesting too much?
What is interesting to me about the story of Caitlyn Jenner or the Golden Globe-winning series Transparent is how much gender still matters to people who feel that they are trapped in the wrong body, and the extreme lengths they will go to fix it. Whether fashion’s move to eradicate gender altogether offers us a way out of this cultural confusion is hard to say. Karen von Hahn is a Toronto-based writer, trend observer and style commentator. Contact her at kvh@karenvonhahn.com.
“People are ready to change the way they look.” ALESSANDRO MICHELE DESIGNER FOR GUCCI