Whim Unisex Clothing Become Mainstream?
When Kristi Paras pitches an e-commerce site for her West Village shop Personne of New York, work categories will include Menswear, Womenswear, Accessories and Everybody under the sun. “Everyone” meaning unisex, or pieces that can, and are worn by men and birds.
At her physical store, Paras stocks the Los Angeles based contract with 69 which includes trousers and dresses designed to please to both sexes. (Guys might like to call those put on fancy dresses tunics.) She also carries New Zealand-based brand Kowtow, which contains men’s and women’s pieces made out of 100 percent organic legitimate trade cotton, as well as a few looks that are gender remote. (Including the windowpane-check Anonymous sweatshirt.
Most of these be shatters are cut so far away from the body that one really can’t discern whether or not they were lay out for specific anatomy. “It’s a part of the whole movement towards easier rake someone over the coaling,” Paras says. “An awful lot of stuff in our store comes in one mass.”
Although Paras is quick to declare that unisex attires are “not a trend,” one can’t ignore that gender roles are being entertained more than ever in fashion. Particularly via the runway, where Rick Owens, Thom Browne and myriad recently, J.W. Anderson, regularly put men in skirts. And there are others. British intriguer Richard Nicoll created a capsule collection of unisex pieces, baptized S/he, in collaboration with the artist Linder Sterling.
And when Rad Hourani began accompanying couture, he designed the collection as unisex, which has become his signature. The Canadian-born, Paris-based deviser spent a full year studying male and female anatomy previously launching his unisex ready-to-wear line in 2007. “Who decided that a man should clothe in one way and a woman in another? Or that different ages should accoutre differently? Who imposed these codes?” Hourani says. “It doesn’t prosper sense to me to limit things. I’m not trying to dress a man like a female or the opposite. I’m creating a new way of dress that makes people look newfangled without any limits.”
Miuccia Prada, too, is thinking about genderless the fad. “More and more, it feels instinctively right to translate the in spite of idea for both genders,” she told Style.com at the Prada menswear arrive this past July.
And it’s not just for consumers of ready-to-wear. Unisex thoughts are permeating far beyond the rarefied end of things. In contemporary fashion, there’s Rick Owens’s Black Shadows, as well as the aforementioned Kowtow and 69. And at the mass tear down, American Apparel has made unisex sexy, dressing a guy and female in the same plaid shirt. (Guess whose is unbuttoned and depicting more than a little cleavage in the ad?)
While it’s virtually impracticable to measure the market for unisex clothes, there’s also no disaffirming that a market exists. Women, however, seem to make a big deal of up most of that market. “Women are more inclined to cautiously into that gender-neutral role,” says Johnny Pizzolato, possessor of International Playground, a chainlet of New York stores that specializes in labels from abroad that are difficult to track down in the Royals. “They’re more likely to head over to the men’s section. Men don’t homologous to to deviate.” (He carries Kowtow as well as Copenhagen-based Soulland, a menswear profession that many females buy.)
Although there are exceptions. Paras turns she has male customers who wear 69’s “Night Shirt” dress, which is get off on an elongated button down. “Mainly girls would in it, but I do think guys are more comfortable wearing drapey belongings.” Eugene Rabkin, editor of StyleZeitgeist, a magazine and an online forum that act on heavily in menswear, agrees. “Undoubtedly, men, mostly in the culturally help urban centres, now pay more attention to how they dress, and the principles on what is masculine are relaxing a bit,” he says. “You can particularly see this in elongating the covers to the level of mini-dresses. We can thank Rick Owens for that. He was also proficient to get some men into skirts for a minute.”
But can we call unisex style a movement? Or even a moment? Hourani’s work in particular is certainly thought-provoking, and has emphasized more attention to the idea of what unisex means, and what it could measly. Yet for most consumers of fashion, particularly men, it’s still a challenging classification. “I don’t think it will become any more prevalent than it has been for two reasons,” votes Rabkin. “First, the cultural gender norms are very solidly ingrained in our society, despite the wishful thinking of the politically accurate set. Most women want to be feminine and most men want to be masculine. Other, it’s hard to get away from human anatomy.
Of course, there drive always be a subset of people, let’s call them the weird and the wonderful, who on challenge and subvert gender norms, but I doubt they last will and testament make significant impact on culture at large.”
