WHAT’S YOURS IS MINE
With more and more designers creating gender-fluid clothing, Elle’s Daisy Murray explores what it’s actually like to share a wardrobe with your boyfriend
As more brands move towards gender-fluid clothing, one couple spends a week styling it out
An indeterminate thing hangs in our wardrobe. Part sexy blouse, part clerical shirt. It has a slightly open neck, enough to expose a strong collarbone or the soft nape of the neck, and there are two ties that can be left tantalising open or piously knotted. This morning, both my boyfriend Samuel and I are deciding who gets to wear it. We stare at it. ‘You can wear it,’ I mumble. ‘I’ll wear it tomorrow.’ He looks relieved. Effortlessly, he slips it on. ‘Bowed or knotted?’ he asks, holding the ties up for inspection. ‘I want to look professional.’ We have been sharing a wardrobe for just over a week. And when I say wardrobe, I don’t just mean a physical cupboard. I mean, we wear the same things, day in, day out. We fight over who gets to wear the boxy blazer. And we have become gently competitive about who looks better in the pearl earrings. (I do.) Why are we doing this, you may ask? Well, give it a year and you may be doing the same thing, as the fashion world clamours to produce gender-fluid clothing. This is different to androgynous clothing – which is technically genderless clothing that hints at neither sex, though when you think of androgynous dressing, you probably think of women in suits and boyish cuts, made famous by Coco Chanel’s subversive tweed suiting in the 192Os. Gender-fluid dressing, however, is something altogether different… It could be spied at the menswear SS2O shows earlier this year, as a new kind of ‘sexy’ dominated the catwalks of Saint Laurent, Prada, Givenchy, Raf Simons and many more designers. There, men sauntered out in tunics, skorts, floaty fabrics and tops slashed to the navel or with wide necklines, exposing acres of décolletage. Off the catwalk, celebrities have been flirting with it, too. At the Venice Film Festival, Timothée Chalamet wore a silver Haider Ackermann suit that was cinched at the waist, with a boat-neck silk top and heeled boots. And who could forget the sheer Gucci blouse and drop pearl earring that Harry Styles wore to the 2O19 Met Gala? As for women, Gwendoline Christie chose a pink Dior Homme suit in which to party the night away after the Emmy Awards earlier this year, while Héloïse Letissier of the band Christine and the Queens continued to rock her boyish hair while wearing a leather two-piece to sit front row at the Dior SS2O men’s show in Paris. Fashion has long looked into the crystal ball of culture and created clothes that mirror the shifting sands of change. Take Yves Saint Laurent’s ‘Le Smoking’ tuxedo suit, designed in the 196Os, which saw women wear masculine tuxedos and bow ties just as the women’s liberation movement was taking hold. Or look to Giorgio Armani’s power suits, designed in the 198Os, which accompanied women’s entry into the corner office with their distinctly masculine trouser silhouettes and broad lapels. And now? Men’s fashion is heading in a more ‘feminine’ direction, as the stereotypical roles of men are questioned and dismantled.
So, in the name of journalism, my boyfriend (inveterate wearer of Universal Works T-shirts and Camper lace-ups) and myself (lover of a vintage Laura Ashley dress) have decided to try a gender-fluid wardrobe for 1O days, borrowing rails of kilts, silk shirts, pearl jewellery, suits and three-inch ankle boots, all for us to share. The experiment began with the photoshoot you see on these very pages, as a team of stylists preened us for half a day, telling us how utterly great we looked. And Samuel honestly did. He sat, hairy and muscular, legs spread, a Le Kilt skirt grazing his knees and a feathered earring swinging from his earlobe. We laughed as he searched, fruitlessly, for pockets on a Ludovic de Saint Sernin trench coat and while he blanched at the discomfort of a tight waistband on a pair of perfectly tailored Jaeger trousers. I attracted far less attention in the suiting and skirts, and secretly missed the comfort and roominess of my normal dress and boots combination. But once we’d left the studio and the team of stylists and make-up artists behind, the true challenge began. We are sitting across from one another at our local pub. Samuel looks coy as he hangs over his pint. He is wearing palazzo trousers and a midriff-baring shirt. Icy stares come from burly regulars and swanky
“WE FIGHT OVER WHO WEARS the BOXY BLAZER AND GET COMPETITIVE ABOUT who LOOKS BETTER IN THE PEARL EARRINGS”
punters alike. Though he is hardly a lumberjack shirt-wearing ‘bloke’, it is nonetheless fascinating seeing Samuel’s body in a new light. That is to say: semi-naked. We are accustomed to men either buttoned-up and ready for the office, or tops off at the beach. But when I looked at Samuel, his pale skin with an inch or so of dense black hair peeping out from beneath his shirt, I didn’t fancy him any less. In fact, he seemed to embody a new vulnerability. Undeterred by people’s glances, he gamely rose to the occasion. For someone who owns three French worker jackets in different shades of blue, he sure did take to a jewel-encrusted sweater by & Other Stories. He also exudes enviable confidence slipping his size eight feet into heeled ankle boots. Of course, he had his ‘issues’: wearing the kilt in the ‘real world’ was a bridge too far – he was worried about flashing his underwear – and he couldn’t get to grips with the lack of pockets in everything, which lead to the excavation of an old-school rucksack. As for the oversized, billowy shirts… They made him feel a little too childlike for his liking. But the main difference is the reactions of other people. Bowling up to our local corner shop to buy milk in sumptuous knitwear and straight-leg trousers, the lovely shopkeeper declared he looked ‘fabulous’, but also ‘funny’. In fact, laughter was a theme. You’ve never seen a London street so neighbourly as when a 25-year-old man is learning to walk in heels. ‘Heel, toe!’ a mother offered, while rushing her son to school. ‘Straighten your back, son,’ a bus driver coming off a shift suggested.
As for me, I found his transformation surprisingly reassuring, rather than funny. His sensitivity – he was brought up by a single mother, who I credit with this – has always been what I value most in him. Sharing a wardrobe seemed to accentuate this softer side: he needed help putting in a fiddly earring, and sought sympathy when wearing restrictive high-waisted trousers. More than changing Samuel, it has helped to magnify what has always been there: a tenderness that I love. I’m reconsidering things, too. I desperately miss dresses, which are my daily shield. Often loose and capacious, they take up physical space, demanding attention, while covering my body. They make me feel empowered, in a feminine way. Strangely, when wearing a dinner suit by heritage brand Hawes & Curtis with a silk black shirt, I feel compelled to apply bronzer, mascara and lipstick before I go to the office; something I rarely do. It’s as though I want to define my gender… and if I can’t do it through clothing, I’ll do it through make-up. Once upon a time, if you said the word ‘genderless’, most people wouldn’t know what to think. Not any more. According to global fashion search engine Lyst, searches for key terms such as ‘genderless’ and ‘gender neutral’ have collectively increased 52% year on year. Gender neutral is not about eliminating gender altogether. It is about acknowledging that there is a spectrum of identities that exist beyond the gender binaries and that individuals are able to move between and around those perimeters as they choose. What that means in fashion is enmeshing the feminine and masculine. It means the bias cut is for everyone, cleavage-baring tops are for whoever fancies them and vertiginous heels are no
“SHARING A WARDROBE HAS MAGNIFIED what HAS ALWAYS BEEN there IN SAMUEL: A TENDERNESS THAT I LOVE ”
longer have to be the sole domain of women. It means cuts that were once only ever to be found in men’s tailoring can be found in women’s suiting and even jeans designs. It is less about women wearing men’s clothing and men wearing women’s. It’s more about the wardrobe becoming a place where gender completely and utterly collides.
In 2O15, Selfridges hosted a unisex pop-up: Agender. In the same year, Scottish Central St Martin’s graduate Charles Jeffrey launched his label(less) LOVERBOY brand. Jeffrey, pioneering the mainstreaming of this style, started putting street-cast models of varying gender identities in an array of designs, from suits and kilts to gowns and knits, on his catwalks. ‘I’ve seen the fallout,’ Jeffrey told me, of the reaction to his clothing. ‘People who wear the clothes and tag the brand tend to look like they’re experimenting with their identity, which is incredibly rewarding.’ If there’s one brand that’s really captured its younger audience, it’s Gucci. Since 2O15, creative director Alessandro Michele has been embracing all that is ungendered. The Italian house’s shows regularly feature models of indeterminate gender in a plethora of vintage styles, be it 17th-century-style ruffled shirts, 194Os wide-leg trousers or late 19th-century favourite gigot sleeves. Part of the power of this clothing is that it sublimates gender. Luxury retailers are similarly responding to the shift. Browns Fashion buying director Ida Peterson explains that when Browns East opened in 2O17, it merchandised men’s and women’s collections together, rather than separating them by rail. ‘We want customers to fall in love with the item, regardless of the section it came from,’ she explains. And, while Peterson says Browns has ‘some strong male consumers who are happily embracing so-called traditional women’s styles’, she admits that ‘most commercial s uccess is coming from women buying into men’s’. To decide whether a piece of clothing is for men or for women, you might observe which side the buttons are on, the fabric’s density, the slope of the shoulder, the length of the cut or the presence of pockets – but these are only signifiers of perceived binaries. In reality, a T-shirt can be worn by anyone if it physically fits them, whether the hem is curved, the neckline scooped, the colour bright or otherwise. But tell that to my supposedly enlightened friends, who giggle at Samuel wearing a slip skirt. Dressing in more male clothes made me move in a new, quieter way, while Samuel, at times, appeared near-sensual when wearing draped necklines and beaded necklaces. Selfishly, wearing more ‘male’ clothing (since it is relative and fluid) for a week has thrown my bountiful closet full of voluminous midi-dresses into new light: how lucky am I to so freely express exactly who I am, simply by getting dressed each morning? As for Samuel, the experiment has piqued his interest. Yesterday he asked me if we could split the cost of a pair of Issey Miyake Pleats Please trousers, which we can then share. And, while I doubt we’ll be venturing out in matching knee-high socks and pink eyeshadow, as seen on Maisie Williams and her boyfriend Reuben Selby at Thom Browne’s SS2O show in Paris, perhaps I’ll borrow one of Samuel’s buttoned shirts this winter, instead of buying my own. But I’ll probably still pair it with a skirt.
“IT’S ABOUT the WARDROBE BECOMING A PLACE WHERE GENDER COMPLETELY and UTTERLY COLLIDES”