cross dressing and gender in the workplace

[can-]

if masculine is defined as the opposite of feminine and vice versa, what does androgyny look like? does androgyny even exist?

who is designing androgynous or gender bending gear?

discuss pant suits, men in skirts. why don't they put working pockets on women's clothes?

what defines a masculine or feminine silhouette?

[sunblam]

VEEA (http://androgynousfashion.com/) is on androgynous shirts/ties/etc. right now for people with feminine bodies, I think basically just marketing shirts in a traditionally-deemed-masculine cut and smaller size to women and female androgyns. However, I think the site as a whole is sort of odd in that it pinpoints its buyers as androgynous when they could just enjoy this sort of non-traditional cut (see ridiculous "how to bee androgynous"/"are you androgynous?" sections). Their tag is "it takes bravery to be genuine," but they're marketing to such a niche group that this genuineness seems kinda exclusionary.

But more importantly, WORKING POCKETS !
I wish that all of my clothing had inside pockets.
Wearing men's coats is so beautiful because I can store all my snacks next to my heart.

[schiaparelli]

[can-]

[Bobbin.Threadbare]

[sunblam]

[UnwashedMolasses]

I don't think androgyny can be achieved without eliminating all cues from the form, which means a) using incredibly androgynous models or b) making clothing that obscures/alters the form. Obscuring is fun for a lot of reasons but also much easier. I can't remember where I saw it (I think it was somewhere in here) but somebody posted a women's runway show - maybe CDG or Issey Miyake - that had dresses with all sorts of odd shapes constructed in them. I think that approached it, but even then, it's playing the female form but still obviously taking cues from it. Rather than attempting to reach a moment of pure androgyny by floating above any gender cues, it seems to play with gender instead by taking aspects of the form and purposefully violating them, sometimes violently.

This is what I like about those shape dresses and JW Anderson's stuff (as well as the other designers in that genre, he's the only one I'm familiar with). While some of it could be construed as cross-dressing, the designer often shows some direction of disrupting the cues of the body. Rather than saying "I'm going to try and obscure the idea of gender", it says "Oh, you like how a man's torso tapers from pecs to pelvis? Fuck you, boxy crop top." On the female side, I've always loved the statue-shoulder power suits common on women in the '80s for the same reasons.

Relevant Hark, A Vagrant:



Also some good images from Walter Van Beirendonck's S/S 2000 "Gender?" collection, could be worth checking out if you're researching the topic.

[charybdis]

I remember when schia linked me to this blog of

[whinefields]

one of my favorite topics here

this is all dior homme (minus the shoes, i'm guessing)


cdg


i think this woman is incredibly handsome



snowcrash

[whinefields]

more of the same / less of the norm

think this is incredibly beautiful


two men w/o "masculine" shaped clothing



would wear all of this in a heartbeat


don't know, don't care

[Syeknom]

[balloons]

[sknss]