Gender Bending Fashion

For 100 years, women have embraced fashion that was once only considered appropriate for men, like suits, military jackets, blue jeans, and brogues. Why hasn’t it become the norm for men to take on traditionally feminine clothing? Will it ever be socially acceptable for more men to wear skirts and dresses?

These are some of the questions that Michelle Finamore asked as she curated the Gender Bending Fashion exhibit at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition is a psychedelic experience. The space is moody and dark, with green, yellow, and red neon lights illuminating faceless mannequins, crafted by the MFA’s in-house designer Chelsea Garunay. Finamore chose to take an ahistorical approach to fashion: Outfits from different moments over the past century sit beside each other, with ’90s men’s kilts next to a women’s bicycling ensemble from 1900. Interspersed among everyday looks are clothes by designers that have played around with gender norms, including Christian Siriano, Yves Saint Laurent, Rick Owens, Rei Kawakubo for Commes Les Garcons, and Alessandro Michele for Gucci.

This allows the viewer to see the outfits out of their context — and better identify patterns. And it quickly becomes clear that there are recurring motifs. The dark suit, with its boxy shoulders and sharp angles, comes to represent masculine dress. Meanwhile, colorful patterns and flowing robes embody the feminine. But these two forms of dress are slowly colliding in our current moment. The future of fashion appears to be neither masculine, nor feminine, but an intriguing hybrid of the two.

The dark business suit is a relatively recent phenomenon. Finamore, who studies clothing in the 20th and 21st century, believes that our culture has transformed the suit into a symbol of patriarchal power. Before the 19th century, European aristocratic men tended to wear colorful, frilly outfits, along with wigs that gave the appearance of long hair. But then, in the early 1800s, wealthy men began wearing well-cut tailored suits in somber colors, like black, gray, and blue. This is still true today, particularly in male-dominated industries like finance, consulting, and law. The shift occurred during the period after the industrial revolution, when middle-class women were increasingly relegated to the home, while men were out in public spaces working. “There was this idea that colors and patterns were frivolous, and something that women cared about,” Finamore points out. “So these things came to be characterized as feminine.”

As I’ve written in the past, women have tried to access patriarchal power by wearing the suit, particularly in workplaces where women are in the minority. Startups like Argent and Dai specialize in creating suits for women. Even Savile Row, which emerged in the 19th century as the go-to place for wealthy British men to have suits made, is now reinventing itself to cater to women.

While women have gladly taken on the iconic male garment of our time, men, for their part, have not been as adventurous. In fact, men seem to be clinging onto the suit — and offshoots of it, like the blazer and the chino—as their standard form of dress. Not only are these clothes carefully designed to facilitate movement, they also project power and authority toward others. “The business suit has become so entrenched in Western culture and now in non-Western cultures, too,” says Finamore. “Men are loathe to give that up.”

But even as men have stubbornly stuck to traditionally masculine clothing, women have been eager to adopt the clothes of their male counterparts. As the exhibit shows, women often adopted male garments because they were more practical and allowed women to move more freely. For instance, women first gave up their skirts and petticoats because they wanted to take part in outdoor activities, like bicycling or fox hunting by horseback. Under neon lights, there is a painting of a young woman from the late 1800s wearing a man’s horseback riding getup, including trousers and boots. Her long hair is in a ponytail, and her face is delicate and feminine. The message seems to be that it is not particularly transgressive for a woman to wear men’s garments. It is just a matter of functionality.

World War II fast-tracked women’s adoption of men’s clothing. When men went off to fight, women took up the work they left behind, like joining the police force and becoming mechanics. Suddenly, it was normal to see women wearing men’s uniforms, which included suits and jumpsuits.

All of this has paved the way for women of our time to pick from any part of fashion history they like. This is perhaps why women’s fashion weeks around the world are a far more colorful, exciting, and creative experience, with designers mixing traditionally masculine and feminine silhouettes from different eras.

Consider the women’s fall 2019 ready-to-wear shows at New York Fashion Week. The dark business suit was very much in vogue. Chanel, Alexander McQueen, and Balenciaga all played around with suits, sending women onto the runway with boxy blazers. One Rick Owens ensemble featured a blazer on top of a bodysuit and no trousers. But other designers created highly feminine outfits. Paco Rabane sent models out in flowing floral dresses. Rodarte created frilly white gowns full of lace, as well as headbands that looked like halos and shoulder pads that looked like angel’s wings.

The men’s shows, on the other hand, were largely variations of the suit. Alyx created a suit out of leather. Berluti created a suit with a bronze polished exterior. Alexander McQueen created a suit out of layers of houndstooth fabrics. There were only a couple of outliers. Palomo Spain sent a male model out in a floral bohemian gown, and Thom Browne created long white futuristic gowns. But these were exceptions that proved the rule: Men’s fashion is more reluctant to bend gender norms.

What does it take to get men to abandon their loyalty to the suit, and become more adventurous with their clothing? Finamore says that the last century offers a couple of clues.

What does it take to get men to abandon their loyalty to the suit, and become more adventurous with their clothing? Finamore says that the last century offers a couple of clues.

In her analysis, she has observed only a few moments when men have been willing to embrace color, patterns, and flowing silhouettes. The most obvious example is during the 1960s and 1970s, which is sometimes known as the Peacock Revolution in menswear. Men began growing out their hair and wearing colorful, often sexualized clothes that were unlike anything men had worn over the previous century.

The exhibit features pictures of young men wearing floral patterns and trousers with bell bottoms that added curves to an otherwise very staid garment. The most extreme version of this trend can be seen in the 1970 David Bowie album cover for The Man Who Sold the World, which features Bowie in a long floral dress, boots, and long, curly hair. “Ideas about masculine clothing were challenged,” says Finamore.

As Finamore tells it, these moments are related to larger cultural developments. During this era, the rejection of traditional masculine clothing was a way for young men to express their opposition to the establishment, particularly suit-wearing politicians and corporate leaders. Again, the suit was symbolic of patriarchal power, but young men at the time were uneasy with what their patriarchs were doing.

By the 1980s, this challenge to traditional menswear had faded away. In fact, Finamore sees a kind of overcorrection to these more flamboyant styles, as menswear brands reverted to much more traditionally masculine looks. For instance, the high-end Italian suiting company Brioni created colorful floral suits in the 1960s and 1970s, but from the 1980s onward, Brioni suits have rarely strayed from dark colors and angular cuts.

Finamore proposes that we are currently in a moment when young, politically active people are pushing back against the authority, fighting for things like stricter gun laws, women’s rights, and marriage equality. And yet, strangely, we’re not seeing the same kind of radical rejection of traditionally masculine clothing. “We haven’t seen men adopting more colorful attire on a wide scale,” she says. “We haven’t seen them wearing skirts, for instance.”

But we are slowly moving toward a more gender-neutral aesthetic in culture as a whole. This is partly because our culture is slowly beginning to reject the suit, and the male power it represents. Workplaces have become increasingly casual, with tech and creative industries ditching suits, chinos, and blazers. In its place, activewear and jeans have become the norm, and in both cases, the looks are fairly similar for men and women. “Today, there is nothing more androgynous than jeans and a T-shirt,” says Finamore.

The future of fashion, then, is a more subtle blending of masculine and feminine looks. Men and women are already wearing very similar clothes, and every so often, traditionally feminine colors and silhouettes have a way of sneaking into menswear in almost imperceptible ways. Take, for instance, the work of Jordanian-Canadian designer Rad Hourani, whose work is on display in the exhibit. He describes his clothes as genderless, which means creating an aesthetic that doesn’t look particularly masculine or feminine. He’s known for his coats, which have a flowing drape and seem both reminiscent of a military trench coat and a gown. It’s neither here nor there.

The message is telegraphed from birth. Infant girls are swaddled in pink. Boys in blue. Girls wear skirts. Boys pants. The clichés fall easily from our lips. “Clothes make the man,” we say; “who wears the pants,” signals dominance. “A basic purpose of costume is to distinguish men from women,” Alison Lurie writes in “The Language of Clothes.” Dress, traditionally, is the membership card of gender.

In an era of gender fluidity, all bets are off. As the binary of male/female falls by the wayside, fashion follows suit—and has done so periodically since 1507-1458 BCE, when the Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut ruled Egypt as pharaoh wearing male regalia and a false beard. More recently, the Italian designer Alessandro Trincone created an elegant ruffled dress that so captivated rapper Young Thug, he wore it on the cover of his 2016 album: No, My Name is Jeffery. The subject of gender and fashion takes on particular immediacy in the current setting of LGBTQIA+ rights and the impact of social media in community building and self-identification.

In “Gender Bending Fashion,” which runs from March 21 through August 25, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston explores the relationship between fashion and gender—the first time a major museum has addressed the subject (the Trincone dress is one of the costumes on display). Cathy Newman spoke with the show’s curator, Michelle Finamore, of the Museum’s Department of Textiles and Fashion Arts. (Read: A photographer explores the link between color and gender.)

CN : The scribed line separating gendered clothing has blurred. Target, the Wall Street Journal reports, has removed gender labels from in-store signage. Boyfriends and girlfriends raid each other’s closets. Let’s talk about the social zeitgeist that led to the exhibition.

MF :  Originally I was looking at what was going on in contemporary menswear, but then I realized something revolutionary was happening; there was a bigger picture. Designers are responsive to the moment. They respond to the street, to the Millennials and Generation Z ...so they are responding to the new energy of rethinking gender expression through clothing and the idea of not wanting to be boxed into a particular gender. You see this melding and blurring often in moments of youthful rebellion, like in the 20s, 60s, 70s and now.

CN : Let’s start with the proverbial question: “Who wears the pants?”

MF :  There have been blips in history when women have tried to wear pants and failed or were unable to shift the paradigm. In 1851, women’s rights activist Amelia Bloomer [who promoted pants for women inspired by Turkish attire, hence “bloomers.”] tries to offer a more rationale dress for women and failed. As women took up bicycling, tennis and golf, clothing for those sports affected the acceptability of pants. Civil War surgeon Dr. Mary Edwards Walker wore pants despite eight arrests for “inappropriate attire.” In 1993, Carol Moseley-Braun [also Barbara Mikulski] wore pants on the Senate floor. “Until I walked in the door I had no idea there was this unwritten rule,” Moseley-Braun said. Now we have Hillary Clinton’s white pantsuit as a political symbol.

CN : That unwritten rule persisted. In 1968, New York socialite Nan Kempner famously turned up at Le Cirque in pants. When refused entry, she shed the pants and wore her long jacket as a mini-dress. In the early 1980s, when I started at National Geographic, skirt and stockings were de rigueur.

MF :  A woman came up to me recently and said: “I worked on Wall Street in the 1990s and it was dresses and skirts only.” There are still judges who do not permit female attorneys to wear pants in the courtroom. (Discover the world's oldest dress.)

CN :  The show focuses on contemporary 20th and 21st century fashion—designers like Rei Kawakubo, Ikiré Jones and Freddie Burretti, who dressed David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust era—but includes historical context. For example, you display the top hat and tails Marlene Dietrich wore in the 1930 film Morocco.

MF :  The director Josef von Sternberg had to fight the studio for Dietrich to wear that. The studio thought it too radical. She wasn’t the first to do that on film. There are many silent film stars wearing the same thing in the teens and twenties, when the standard female body takes on a more boyish silhouette and bobbed hair. It was driven by a younger generation challenging convention, and women moving into the workplace achieving the right to vote. It’s related to social and cultural change.

CN : There’s an erotic charge to the Dietrich outfit. Didn’t Calvin Klein say: “There’s something incredibly sexy about a woman wearing her boyfriend’s t-shirt and underwear?”

MF :  It’s slightly transgressive—suiting yourself as a man. But it follows her curves and she still has the hair and make up. It mixed it up in a way that was uniquely sexy.

CN : Men wore heels in the 18th century. Not so much now. Elizabeth Semmelhack, a shoe historian, suggests that one might ask because of the implications of dominance, why men don’t wear heels more often?

MF :  It’s true. But then designer Rad Hourani makes the same high-heeled boot for men and women. Many years ago I saw comedian Eddie Izzard perform. He comes to the stage in jeans, make-up and heels. One of my favorite quotes is from him. An interviewer asked: Eddie why are you wearing a woman’s dress? “It’s not a woman’s dress,” he replied. “It’s my dress.” I think at the opening you’ll see a lot of men in heels.

CN :  Joan of Arc appears in the show’s timeline. Her male attire was contentious and factored in her conviction for heresy and execution in 1431.

MF :  “In women’s clothing many transgressions were done to me,” she said at her trial. When I saw that, it put her clothes in a different perspective. Of course men’s clothes would be more protective for her.

CN : Fast forward to February 2019 and Billy Porter in his tuxedo-gown on the red carpet at the Academy Awards. “His torso looked like it was smoking a cigar with a brandy...the skirt, ready for a gothic Victoria-era coronation,” the New Yorker reported.

MF :  That’s designed by Christian Siriano, who did the Janelle Monáe outfit we feature in the show. Porter is an actor who’s been pushing the envelope through dress. “My goal is to be a walking piece of political art every time I show up,” he wrote in Vogue. “To challenge expectations. What is masculinity? What does that mean.” It’s fascinating to me that it’s considered so newsworthy. You’d think we would be beyond that...yet we aren’t because there is something so deeply entrenched about a man in a skirt. There’s a longer history of women in pants than men in skirts. It will be interesting to see where we’ll be in ten years.

CN : What gender-bending clothes hang in your closet?

MF :  I have plenty of tailored suits. We will have a pop-up shop in the museum with Phluid Project, one of the first brick and mortar stores marketing clothes as gender neutral. When I went to talk to them in New York I bought a t-shirt that says gender bender and a long sequined unisex skirt. I’m trying to get my husband to wear a skirt to the opening.

CN : Adam Tessier, the MFA’s head of interpretation, says that most shows represent the end of a conversation. He suggests this will be the start of one. Are there indications that will happen?

MF :  I have a colleague who brought in a young member of the LBGTQ community for a sneak peak in the exhibit’s early stages. “You know,” they said. “I feel like I’ve finally been seen.”

Gender-bending fashion rewrites the rules of who wears what. By Cathy Newman. National Geographic , March 20, 2019. 

The show, titled Gender Bending Fashion, presents clothing over the past century that has "challenged rigid, binary definitions of dress" in Western society. Over 60 garments are on view, from haute couture to ready-to-wear pieces. Curated by Michelle Tolini Finamore, the exhibition also includes paintings, postcards, photographs and video footage.

The show is divided into three sections – Disrupt, Blur and Transcend. Each section features a mix of historical and contemporary pieces, underscoring how gender-bending fashion is not a new phenomena. "Boundary-pushing contemporary designs appear in dialogue with historical garments, exploring moments when people have disrupted, blurred and sought to transcend concepts gendered clothing over the last century," said the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) in a project description.

The show looks at historical movements such as the garçonne styles of the 1920s, in which womenswear took on a boyish look, and the 1960s peacock revolution, in which the traditional men's suit became more flamboyant. French couture designer Jean Paul Gaultier, Commes des Garçon's Rei Kawakubo and British fashion designer Vivienne Westwood are among well-known contemporary designers represented in the show. Others include Canada's Rad Hourani, who is known for gender neutral designs.

The museum's in-house architect, Chelsea Garunay, oversaw the exhibition's design, which makes use of sharp angles, black walls and streaks of colour. Mannequins donning a range of attire are dispersed throughout the show, with some standing atop pedestals and platforms and others set within prismatic, triangular cutouts. Elements such as coloured acrylic glass and vivid light projections onto fabric curtains give the show a dynamic feel.

As visitors move through the galleries, delineated colours and structures begin to break down and merge, just like the blurring of men and women's fashion. The show culminates in a space with flowing patterns and moving light, which are meant to embody "fashion beyond the gender binary".

The show, which runs through 25 August, does more than document styles and trends, according to the museum. "The garments on view speak broadly to societal shifts across the past century," the museum said. "Together, they open conversations on changing gender roles, ongoing efforts towards LGBTQIA+ rights and racial equality, the rise of social media as a powerful tool for self-expression, and much more."

Other recent fashion exhibitions include The Met's Heavenly Bodies show, which explored ties between fashion and the Catholic church, and a show at San Francisco's de Young Museum that surveyed contemporary Muslim attire, from luxury evening wear to the controversial Nike hijab.

Gender Bending Fashion exhibition in Boston challenges notions about clothing. By Jenna McKnight,  Dezeen ,  April 3, 2019

Gender Bending Fashion.  March 21, 2019 – August 25, 2019. Museum of Fine Arts Boston