By which I mean "femme" – though some might say "faggy". Let's dish about the recent men's shows, sex, and the science of self-expression.
A few weeks ago I asked my mom to help me choose which black lipstick selfie would be the cutest choice for Instagram. She laughed and said, "My sister and I used to do that." It was like I was five years old again, sneaking into my parent's bathroom to marvel at the sea of compacts laid out on the counter and the powder-caked puffy heads of makeup brushes—except this time, I wasn't afraid of getting caught.
When people ask me what my blog is about, what the focus is, I always feel left in the lurch. It seems wrong to say I’m a menswear blog, not just because I post about other stuff, too, but...“menswear”? Really? I'm coming around to calling it a "queer men's style site." When I was a kid I had no other associations for that word—queer—outside of its rhyming with “smear”, but nowadays there's something like comfort in the term. I like that it says other. I like that it suggests something amorphous, something unexpected, something that deviates. I like the idea that you can use it as a verb and a noun. I like that it's open and inclusive and ambiguous. “To identify as ‘queer’ is to be at ease with your own masculinity and femininity,” said writer Rohin Guha in his viral essay, On Gay Male Privilege. “You’re not constantly having to fear for your own gender expression.”
There was a time when the idea of sharing that side of myself that likes to play with makeup would have terrified me and made me feel unbelievably vulnerable. Now I'm broadcasting it to not just my mom, but to two thousand strangers on three or four different social networks. It's a bit self-indulgent, admittedly, but I'm just glad that the stigma associated with being open about what makes me different—or, really, the same as any eight-year-old girl—has dissipated.
Which brings us to the fall collections. In any season, there are designers who are refining an idea that's been presented before, maybe a hundred times before, and then there's J.W. Anderson. The designer’s AW14 collection reconstituted the male form—or at least our preconceived notions of it—and forced the audience to consider the wearer in a queered context. "I feel that in a modern culture, if it’s about gender then it’s a very dated concept," the designer told Dazed Digital's Tempe Nakiska. "I wanted to achieve something awkward, less comfortable.” Is that an evolution of masculinity or something outside of masculinity? A third sex? "We should be thinking about the anti-man and the anti-woman," declared Nakiska, to whom the clothes represented, "a different kind of expression – one tied to the liberation of sexuality, placed firmly above the gender issue."
What does it mean to be liberated from ‘sexuality’? In this context it would appear that the inchoate aesthetic Anderson is redefining and revising each season tackles the idea of orientation and preference. "It's not about a girl in boys' clothes and vice versa,” he told Vogue’s Sarah Mower in May of last year. “It's more about clothes that look good on both."
All 39 looks were shown on "moiré vinyl hobby heels" that brought to mind this very 90's chunky-heeled loafer thing that I remember being popular in the fifth grade (which is currently having a renaissance, according to The Cut.) It looks a bit clownish and kind of beautifully exaggerated, though I doubt we'll see them outside editorial. The accessories, on the other hand—those box clutches are to die for (and are similar enough to Acne's hard case clutches to have something of a built-in commercial viability) and the bracelets simply shout duct-tape roll DIY.
I'm all for moving beyond that distracting butch/femme polarity, but no man is an island: aren’t we all still very much attached to our sexuality—our capacity for sexual thoughts and feelings? And, more acutely, our desire to be wanted by someone? I’m not saying sex and the avant-garde are inevitably at odds, but this is the same problem "women who dress for other women" are always bemoaning: that men really, at the end of the day, don't want you in Comme des Garçons—they will always prefer you in Michael Kors, preferably with your top off. Would you be attracted to a man in one of these outfits? Does it turn you on? Is it conducive to being turned on? Does that matter?
"Gay male culture—as it is currently being packaged and replicated—doesn’t want to personify or lend much import to femininity," writes Guha. "It’s telling that such a large swath of gay men view being feminine as being antithetical to self-empowerment or self-actualization." I could go deeper into this, but I feel like I've already dealt with the problem of femininity vs. perceived normalcy in previous essays, here and here. Other men might interpret your aesthetic choice to wear something coded as feminine as a liability. Should you be together, they'll worry about what your choices mean for their self-presentation
But the sexual side of a person isn't necessarily going to be right out there for everyone to see all the time, and I think it's hard for some people to accept that fact—especially, dare I say it, gay men. We're not really known for being complex creatures or for having layers, which is frustrating, to say the least. And I'm saddened that it seems we do a lot of this to ourselves—online, on an app, face-to-face. I once had a friend try to set me up on blind dates with two totally different, totally random guys, and they both said they weren't interested after seeing my blog. Trust me, people—I'm not writing this shit for my sex life. You have to be yourself, for yourself. It's not your job to make other people want you or like you in spite of who you are.
Whether or not we can come to a decisive, applies-across-the-board conclusion about human sexuality as it relates to how we choose to adorn our bodies in this one blog post, I will say that it does feel like men's fashion is finally coming to a place where someone such as myself can feel better represented. Each season I feel more and more like young designers are trying to find an ever more nuanced approach to dressing. Trying to shade in that gray area, trying to carve out a comfort zone, trying to give someone like myself another stone to step to where I can say, "I feel good here. Better here. More myself. More of myself. Happier." And that's why I love the work of a designer like newcomer Sebastiaan Pieter, whose label PIETER quietly debuted this season.
I'm drawn to PIETER because it's clever, it's casual. The clothes are rooted in gay culture, but don’t exist for it. (Charlie Porter's review of the collection is complete with Grindr and Chatroulette references.) There were skirts and oversized clutches and sneakers and button-ups. They all got along in perfect harmony. Were they feminine? Not really, but sort of. Porter described it as "super butch," which I don't think everyone would necessarily agree with, though I see where he's coming from. They were ambiguous, maybe a little bit androgynous. When writing about Pieter's collection in his trend report on the "man skirt," T Magazine editor Bruce Pask described it as "provocative" and "mildly salacious"—I think in a fun way.
In that same breath, however, Pask referred to Christopher Shannon's presentation of a pair of extra-long layered sweaters that closely resembled a knit skirt (above) as "anything but femme." He meant it as praise—the whole clip is laudatory—but herein lies the problem with a lot of the popular (mainstream) men's fashion discourse. Men still seem to need a lot of reassurance when getting dressed, reassurance that comes at the expense of queerness. "No worries, take a chance, you won't look like a fag—I swear!" I wish we could talk about menswear without talking about fear. The fear of being thought of as anything less than a man (whatever that means) for working in, writing about or thinking about clothes. Is it so much to ask that men clean up their image and their act? Can those go hand in hand? In the words of Lily Allen, "Forget your balls and grow a pair of tits."
Anyway, I digress. My point is: don't be afraid. Don't be afraid to get it wrong sometimes, because people learn from mistakes. People who think they're right all the time are assholes, anyway. Don't be afraid to have fun and play dress up and share it with the world. It might be "femme" of you, but that's better than being a "fuckface." As men's fashion expands and becomes more inclusive, we should strive to grant each other—and ourselves—the freedom to experiment with shape and color and proportion and layers, with clothes, outside of gender constructs, just because it feels right. If it does, when it does. We're in a gray zone—a queer zone—where things aren't black and white or yes or no. If we can embrace that ambiguity instead of running from it or lashing out at it, we'll all be better off.
You can read even more of my thoughts on gender identity and queer self-expression in the following essays: The New Masculinity, Brave New World (On Men In Skirts), Men Without Pants, Some Boys Like Me. First image © Johnny Dufort for Metal magazine. Behind-the-scene images from J.W. Anderson AW14 © Kasia Bobula for T Magazine. Runway images via Style.com.
