“We’re all going to die. So let’s mess it up”. It may not be the most profound of life philosophies, but Brad Pitt’s words on the red carpet in 2022 sought to answer a much more basic question: why was the Hollywood star wearing a skirt? Indeed, perhaps the more incisive question would have been, ‘Brad, why does anyone care that you’re wearing a skirt?’.
If gender identity has become a hot-button topic of late, the gender divide in the way a man and a woman dress has been prevalent for much longer. Challenging the codes—received ideas as to what constitutes "masculine" and what "feminine" in dress—has been commonplace since the 1960s, when rock stars the likes of Mick Jagger and David Bowie started picking at the fabric of the debate. Of course, arguably they had licence too: as with Pitt—or Jared Leto, Lenny Kravitz or Steven Tyler, Travis Scott or Jaden Smith—being a performer gives a free pass to buck convention not afforded to the man on the street.
Yet the conventional does look to be increasingly fragile. The last few years have seen a proliferation of independent brands like Cold Laundry, Story MFG and LaneFortyFive opting not to state whether their clothing is for a man or a woman. Bigger brands—from Zara to H&M, Gucci to Marc Jacobs—have created ‘gender neutral’ lines, with designer Haider Ackermann saying he’d like his customers to wear his clothing without the notion of menswear or womenswear “dictating their choices”. Meanwhile, the Council of Fashion Designers of America—which awards the Oscars of the fashion industry—has added a "unisex/non-binary" category for its fashion week shows.
They are trying to capture a Gen Z culture that, according to a 2016 J WalterThompson study, shows that less than half of that demographic always shops according to gender, especially in specialty stores where men’s and women’s wear aren’t neatly segregated. And maybe they are simply following similar recent shifts to “de-gender” in other industries, from bedding to toys, cosmetics to fragrances.
Take, for example, the designer NickHart, best known as the man behind the Spencer Hart label, pioneering the modernising of sharp suiting, but now flipping that on its head with his new, eponymous, but still minimalistic brand, focused as it is around avant-garde, outsized and deconstructed clothing that he sees as being for both a man and a woman. There are echoes perhaps of 1980s Armani, who proposed Emporio piecesto the same end, long before “gender” had become a buzzword. But, Hart stresses, finding one style to suit both men and women need not be the only direction for unisex clothing.
“Particularly in big, more metropolitan cities, you see more and more men in floral prints, sheer fabrics, tight-fitting clothing. You see more adventurousness when it comes to hats and accessories, ”he says. “The message doesn’t have to be that this is men wearing more obviously ‘feminine’ clothing, even if these things would have been considered as much not that long ago. I think it’s probably all part of men going through identity issues more broadly now, questioning their place in the world and ideas of masculinity. That’s why Brad Pitt in a skirt is such an interesting image: it’s both empowering but also challenging to traditional men and society”.
Tanmay Saxena, the founder of LaneFortyFive, has seen both sides, having worked as a business analyst in the City of London—one of the most sartorially conservative enclaves—before leaving to launch his “gender-neutral” clothing line in 2016. “This does not mean that we make one shape/size-fits-all clothing,” he says, more that it comes from the notion of equalism, the idea of treating all things equally. That means an aesthetic that works for both men and women. That draws a distinction between traditionally gendered clothing that seeks to cross the divide that has long been there and clothing that doesn’t impose a gender divide in the first place. “Terms like ‘unisex’ or ‘gender-free’ in clothing are rather like the term ‘sustainable’ a decade ago: it was once sneered at, but now we’re more accepting of it. It’s part of the conversation now, and part of society’s betterment,” reckons Saxena. “For me, it’s a moral choice rather than a fashion trend, though it is part of style now. I’ve seen men pick up a pair of our trousers, ask if they’re actually women’s, be a bit confused by the answer and just buy them anyway.”
But is there scope for gendered clothing to cross the divide? After all, it’s hard to get Harry Styles out of his lace collars and gauzy pussy-bow blouses. He looks good in them too. But then the apparel in his own ‘life brand’, Pleasing, is mostly T-shirts, shorts, and hoodies. And therein lies one of the obvious hurdles: form and sizing. While we’re all different shapes, men and women fall into broad archetypes—broad shoulders and slim hips on men, breasts and wide hips on women—that can make fitting both a design challenge. Not for nothing have collections claiming to be unisex—sometimes for the purpose of virtue-signaling—so often amounted to little more than athleisure, long considered gender-less anyway.
Rob Smith, founder of the New York-based “gender-free” brand The Phluid Project, started out along similar lines, but Smith is bravely taking the next step with his brand’s new incarnation, launching next spring: think cropped tops, lacy shirts, and suiting with back-baring cut-outs for whoever wants them. He says that these clothes are about ditching stereotypes and applauding the simple idea of “wearing whatever it is that makes you feel good,” though he concedes that such garments are both harder to design, and to sell. “There’s a generation now that defines itself through dress very differently [from those before] and who, while many of them will dress this way as an experimental phase, also see [gender-free clothing] as being about greater openness and broad-mindedness,” says Smith. “There’s a readiness to embrace all those things that once only women were ‘allowed’ to wear—tight tops, certain fabrics, clothes that reveal certain parts of the body and so on. For a man to wear a pearl necklace or nail varnish is getting to be as ordinary as it is to see one with earrings now,” he adds, “and if you’d have asked me just a few years ago if they’d have worn those things I would have said you were nuts. I think this is an opportunity for men to embrace their sexiness more. But a lot of retailers are risk-averse and aren’t looking to the future that this generation represents.”
Maybe it will be different this time. For there is a history of attempts to break down the barriers between men’s and womenswear and the track record is not one of success. Jessica Glasscock, a fashion historian at Parsons School of Design, New York, and author of Wigging Out: Fake Hair That Made Real History, notes how the 1970s saw a wave of gender-fluid unisex lines, with leading department stores the likes of Bloomingdales in New York opening a unisex department. “But the result was mostly matchy-matchy outfits and looked quite awful,” she says. “They all closed within three years.”
In part, Glasscock notes, that’s because these things—hard though it may be to admit—tend to have dubious aesthetic appeal beyond a certain age; perhaps this is why the same J Walter Thompson study found that Millennials—those in their 30s and early 40s—did not tend to cross gender lines in their consumer choices anywhere near as much as Gen-Zers.
Dressing across the gender divide is an idea that has more readily appealed to the young: “It’s typically been part of youth culture because it works for lithe, youthful, more androgynous, ectomorphic bodies,” she says. Not for nothing is The Phluid Project aimed at 20somethings. Indeed, one further reason why gender-free lines have so often come unstuck, Glasscock argues, is that this same youth market doesn’t want the notion to be neatly packaged and sold to them.
“Youth culture is a resistant one. It’s not necessarily about being in political opposition to [the dominant] culture but transitioning between men’s and women’s clothing is part of that,” she explains—it’s long been considered bohemian and edgy. “[For them] it’s playful, more free, maybe about prolonging their childhood. But they don’t need unisex clothing to be made for them because they’ve already decided what unisex is.” We saw the same thing happen when designer brands tried to sell grunge style, she adds.
Paradoxically, it’s the young, of course, who, for the moment at least, are also more likely to embrace the very traditional gender divides now dominant in bodily appearance: for women, a blend of affordable cosmetic surgery and trends for hair extensions and outsized lashes, and for men, a gym and creatine culture, has led to a revival of—as older generations might welcome—women to look very much ‘like women’, and men who look ‘like men’. At least when they’re naked.
Maybe it is precisely because younger men are so overly masculine in their physiques that they feel safe to explore the feminine in their dress—without the concern that any onlooker will question their machismo. Hart calls it the Love Island Effect. It’s why nobody is wondering whether Brad Pitt is, after all, a bit fey or camp because he’s in a skirt—though he was careful to wear his with combat boots just to make sure.
And yet even with this toying with the codes of the masculine and the feminine, there are limits. Glasscock argues that, try as designers might to get Joe Average into skirts—from Jean-Paul Gaultier to, more recently, Thom Browne—it remains what she calls “a bright line” that cannot readily be crossed in developed countries (though she notes that in some still very much patriarchal cultures it’s commonplace for a man to wear a skirt-like form of traditional clothing). He can’t quite put his finger on why but Saxena can’t buy into the idea of skirts for a man either.
“Things that are made for women that I feel will look good on me—that I like—I will wear,” as Gen Xer Pharrell Williams said in 2019. “[But] I do have my lines. Like, I can’t wear no skirt. Nor am I interested in wearing a blouse. That’s not my deal.”
Maybe it can be argued that while women have now been largely, if not yet completely, free to embrace wearing a version of menswear for decades—from Coco Chanel pushing men’s tailoring for women, through to The Gap’s proposal of the “boyfriend jean”—this is one way in which men don’t have an equal right. They are not equal with women in their sartorial self-expression.
“Men have a lot of freedom but it is in a specific context,” as Glasscock explains, “and I think a lot of spaces are still fundamentally conservative. [More feminine dressing] may be more accepted in some creative professions, such as in the advertising or the graphics department, but probably not in accounting. Do men have a desire to push the boundaries of what they can wear? Maybe. But do men have a burning desire to push themselves so far they can wear a skirt to the office? Maybe not.”
It’s why, she suspects, interest in gender-fluid dressing is likely ultimately more a matter of fashion than of seeking new freedoms, with the pendulum eventually, inevitably, set to swing back to established convention. After all, the codes that define menswear—through the boardroom, formal events, institutions, and so on—are deeply ingrained. They are going to take some shifting.
While there have been utopian visions of the beautiful, comfortable unisex uniform before—or more dystopian, if the likes of Mao’s Communist China are considered—Glasscock argues it may be some time before we’re genuinely oblivious to whether a garment has been made and marketed for a man or a woman and can look on all clothing as just being clothing.
For all the interest in the current exploration, gender-free clothing—whether that be unisex, or womenswear for men, so to speak—may forever be a niche interest and little more than a recurring fad or intellectual exercise. As Thom Browne has said about introducing a below-the-knee Harris tweed skirt for a man in his winter collection last year, “I don’t really care if anybody wants to wear it, but I think it looks good, and it’s an interesting proposition for anyone who does.”
“For the moment [for a man to wear distinctly female clothing] seems to me like a very intentional, spectacular act,” Glasscock agrees. “Once it’s not confrontational and just one of your wardrobe options, well then we’ll see."
