Lately, as a woman, looking at a man can feel like looking at full-length mirror: sneakers, sweatpants, Birkenstocks, slides, shawl collar jackets, the cut of our trousers. Our jeans is the same, and is this shirt from your section of Supreme?
The idea of "borrowing from the boys" has long haunted women like Casper on Christina, but this is something different. It's not that women are taking items from your closet and swimming in them to erogenous effect. And it's not that designers are just making good on that insipid advertising trope: His blazer, tailored for her. It's that designers, and the people who make a business out of getting dressed, are increasingly looking to menswear to indicate what's next, to its cast of characters as a kind of aesthetic cognoscenti.
Alexander Wang is obviously looking at Supreme. Women's fashion blogs are obviously looking at men's. There's a "graceful mom" look, epitomized by marquee brands like Céline and The Row, which hints at both the "dad style" that overtook menswear a few years ago, and at the monkish limits traditionally placed on men as they get dressed.
Most tellingly, the two buzziest American designers, Public School and Hood By Air, started in menswear. What made their forays into womenswear successful was that they took the DNA of their menswear collections—a Japanese-influenced layer cake of sportswear for Public School, the uniform of the moon's first co-ed football team for Hood By Air—and applied it to womenswear. It was not a rote translation of men's silhouettes into women's, but an appropriation of that which gives these designers their singularity. As menswear designer Alexander Olch told the Times earlier this month on the shirt he's designed for women, "This is not your boyfriend’s shirt. This is your shirt."
The relationship is platonic, and the appeal is something divorced from the simplistic contrast between men and women's clothing that fashion has long called on for intrigue.
What gives those designers, and the trends that have migrated from menswear to womenswear, their power is not "masculinity" as a concept. As a result, a woman in track pants, Birks and a baseball hat doesn't look like a woman dressed in men's clothing, but rather—stay with me here—a woman dressed in menswear. The relationship is platonic, and the appeal is something divorced from the simplistic contrast between men and women's clothing that fashion has long called on for intrigue.
This shift is well illustrated by the tuxedo. Yves Saint Laurent famously poured his impossibly French, grown ass woman into a tuxedo in 1966 and gave it the sensual moniker "Le Smoking." It was titillating, this brazen experiment in cross-dressing. It fashioned Bianca Jagger, the look's biggest patron, as an erotic sophisticate, the languid tailoring rendering her sexuality a talisman rather than a vulnerability. But now, a woman in a tuxedo, such as Aymeline Valade's striking Pallas tux at Cannes, looks neither seductive nor gendered, but cool (Valade, for her part, looks like androgynous beauty Andrej Pejiç). So devoid of its past power as the most potent vessel for gender provocation is the tuxedo, that ten-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis wears one in her first campaign as the face of Armani Junior.
The result of this shift is that the most exciting menswear designs and products are divested of a sense of primal masculinity. This makes it easy for women to copy, but it also means the aesthetic is asserting something more nuanced than "Me Man Because Me Buttons Go This Way." At the moment, the appeal of menswear to the larger fashion community seems to be that it is engaged with the problem of what it means to get dressed in a world that craves comfort. It's firmly casual, but wants to appear attentive to appearance that obsesses not over references in design ("This collection was inspired by the late Renaissance paintings of..."), but awareness of cultural touch points (streetwear has a populist veneer that makes caring about fashion feel less irresponsibly sybaritic).
In short, whereas womenswear clings to a tradition occupied with fantasy, menswear seems to be dealing in magical realism.
Rachel Seville is a writer living in New York who believes in miracles. Read her blog, Pizza Rulez, here and follow her on Twitter here.
