Who is it for, and who is Menswear talking to?

At 27 years old, Rick Owens emerged as the designer for Michèle Lamy's first collection. The coverage was done by Club MTV, which questioned the designer about the consumer profile for whom the pieces were intended. In this interview, which today holds almost documentary value, he explained creating for "a type of confident and slightly daring man… who knows how to have fun, but also knows when to be serious". After three and a half decades, many things have changed in Menswear.

 In the spirit of deconstruction and reduction, some of the innovations in Womenswear design were reproduced on the men's runways. Structurally, the new times have rendered addressing clothing in a binary manner outdated. The style has changed because the new reality questions gender norms and binary readings of sexuality. 

Despite much having changed, much has also remained. Menswear is still under-studied, or even neglected in consumer culture. An understanding of its status today is always reflexively made in comparison to what Womenswear is. For fashion theorist Jennifer Craik, “…the relative neglect of men's fashion in many fashion studies is a consequence of the peculiarity of Western notions of gender.” With these concerns in sight, my only goal is to propose a reflection. It starts from the following question: who is interested, and who is Menswear speaking to? 

The autumn/winter 2024 Paris Fashion Week went through a period in which fashion needed to take a step back and take a few sips of the juice of reality. First, because it was contextualized during the Israel-Hamas and Ukraine-Russia wars. Adding to these conflicts is a climate crisis and a global economic recession triggered by inflation worldwide. 

In difficult and fearful times like the ones we live in, fashion's instinctive response is to remain sober. Its movement is to preserve the commerciality that sustains the billion-dollar gears it depends on to exist. Inevitably, this is reflected on the runways. 

Brands returned to a more classic representation of masculinity: American workwear , tailoring in all formats, variations of jackets in Junya Watanabe, suits in Yohji Yamamoto. Both Pharrell's Louis Vuitton and British Grace Wales Bonner collaborated with Timberland. The shows investigated different archetypes of masculinity: the office boy of Prada, the cowboy of Louis Vuitton, the skater of Loewe, the apocalyptic warrior of Rick Owens. At Loewe, the theme was a new type of masculinity — fun and sensual. Jonathan Anderson embraced the trend no-trousers (without pants), absolute on the women's fashion runways.

Jonathan Anderson Men's A/W 2024

Until the last season, the reality of Menswear had been in an era very committed to gender-fluid. Anthony Vaccarello applied the language of Yves Saint Laurent's feminine fashion to men's fashion at YSL. This meant silk and chiffon blouses, giant bows, floor-length coats, and sky-high heeled boots. Young designers, indie and/or queer — such as Ludovic de Saint Sernin, Dion Lee, and Palomo Spain, approach precisely the overcoming of gender boundaries and masculinity in dressing. The intention was not to make men appear feminine, but rather to exceed the aesthetic limits of what is often considered traditional masculinity.

Dion Lee F/W 2022

 This new representation of masculinity in fashion is challenging. Especially for dominant notions regarding the codes of supposed virility. This is because Western society has framed fashion in opposition to masculinity. For the modern collective unconscious, the idea of what fashion is is much more aligned with the female universe than the male. Yet, if we stop to think, this realization is absolutely contradictory because fashion functions as the primary medium through which men's visible gender identities are established: not only to differentiate us from women but also from other men.

Anthony Vaccarello incorporated silhouettes from the women's fashion season into the Men's Fall/Winter 2023 show

On the other hand, Menswear is so rigid that to seem innovative, it needs to be radical. The established clothing conventions surrounding masculinity are shallow, such that any notion of advance can only be possible if men are dressed like women, or in clothes impossible to imagine being worn by other men outside of the runways. Despite shocking and definitely raising new reflections about what can be the male wardrobe, these pieces, due to their radicality, are not assimilable by the consumer. They have no commercial effect and, therefore, little alter behavioral structures. This creates a problem for Menswear because products developed in the style will always oscillate between familiarity and absurdity — based on the portrait of a man who does not exist. 

A significant part of what is behind all these difficulties involving Menswear is misogyny. Historically, with the sexual division of labor, men's social and personal identities have been intertwined with their professional identity, thus suggesting the idea that frivolous clothes would be typically feminine, while men would only need utilitarian and therefore professional clothes. Clothing plays a fundamental role in the masculine social condition, allowing the acquisition of social advantages and, consequently, preserving the gender order. In certain environments, simply being dressed inappropriately can raise personal and professional risks. Such is the complexity surrounding hegemonic masculinity. 

Naturally, Menswear is cursed by the fate of virility and masculinity. Make it clear, I do not find it reasonable to conclude that this is a problem born from the industry, but rather from the internalization in the social imaginary of what a man should or shouldn't wear. Even less do I believe it is possible to formulate a solution. The aim of this text, as argued in the first paragraphs, is to propose a reflection on the current state of Menswear from its consumers and the industry. 

Knowing who is interested, and who is Menswear speaking to, necessarily involves adopting a critical stance that understands men's fashion as a major trench of fashion. This is the first step toward discovering new paths that either ease or eliminate the constraints imposed by traditional notions of masculinity. The risk we face today is that Menswear becomes merely a less sexualized portrait of Womenswear, or an exercise in imagination that will hardly be realized.