Skirts are having a moment in menswear again, though one wonders how long they'll stick around.
Quality clothing has been more accessible for men than women. The menswear market is much smaller. And in recent history, men's motives for buying clothes have been more practical, demanding that they have some real mileage in them. The tradeoff, I suppose, is that men haven't enjoyed as visually expressive a dress history as women. That men's clothing draws its most distinctive elements from materials, trimmings, and the infamous and ever-so-slight change in lapel width points to this comparative lack.
Covering the upper half of women's bodies can be a frilly blouse, cropped anything, a lace sweater, stuff with adornments that make them conspicuously feminine, and, not to forget, whatever a man might wear. For most of my life, neck to the waist, I've been clothed in collared or collarless shirts, blazers, cardigans, some utilitarian jackets, all relatively traditional. The other main part of my uniform consists of shorts and pants. As a man, it can be a relief; the functional emphasis of our wardrobes. It shapes our relationship to clothes as something more essential, less superfluous. But it can also make getting dressed feel a bit dull, making designers with a more expansive outlook on menswear cool, refreshing, even radical-many of them sending male models down the runway in a skirt.
Here in the West, clothes typically (and shortsightedly) thought of as women's can look contrived on men. Because "acceptable" dress has as much to do with the socially constructed eye of the viewing public as it does individual preference, if not more. Our perceptions don't belong to us wholly but rather the ideas and hierarchies we create and reinforce to comfort ourselves, particularly when it comes to gender. In Vicki Hegleson's The Psychology of Gender, she acknowledges that "Sissy has more negative connotations than tomboy" and "women who behave 'like men' are often accepted and even applauded." Of dress, she asks, "But is it acceptable for men to dress like women by wearing a dress or tights?" and "How do parents feel about giving their little boys dolls and encouraging them to play 'dress-up'?" Pertinent questions for today's potent times.
Hegleson gets to the heart of the thing in stating that "women who take on characteristics of the male gender role are moving toward a higher status, whereas men who take on characteristics of the female gender role are moving toward a lower status. We applaud the move up but not the move down." It's no wonder we don't think twice about the suit or suit jacket's ubiquity amongst women's wardrobes and womenswear collections. That any remotely feminine fashion on menswear's main stage becomes a conversation. Why I'm even writing this.
To be thorough, I have to mention the myriad skirted garments seen in parts of India, Southeast Asia, and North Africa, like caftans, djellabas, sarongs, and dhotis. The British have their kilts: quite masculine, given their associations with the military. In 2002, the Victoria & Albert Museum's Costume Gallery put on a Men in Skirts exhibition to show fashion designers' various interpretations of men's skirt forms. "Rather than using the skirt to transform masculinity, other designers in the exhibition, like Ozwald Boateng, Paul Smith, Carlo Pignatelli and Philippe Dubuc, wanted instead to reassure their customers of the naturalness of wearing skirts," literary scholar Scott O'Connor once noted. His critique of the show seeming "uncertain about what it is portending or recommending" feels prescient as the garment has come and gone and come and gone again in men's fashion. One wonders what it'll take for them to stick around. Will men buy skirts? Are they?
A$AP Rocky was the person who made me want to start wearing them, initially with his electric Summer 2021 GQ cover, which, for all its rock-and-roll editorial pizazz, was only that at the moment. I didn't yet feel a skirt - or, in his case, a kilt - was something I could pull off. In a similar vein, the widely circulated picture of him in a black leather Givenchy one didn't have me scouring the e-shelves of my favorite retailers. Fast forward to Milan Fashion Week in 2023, when he wore a hefty, plain-woven skirt in charcoal grey, which folded at the center and went to the ankles at the Gucci show-that felt real.
Perhaps elusively, the most compelling proposals feel natural yet considered, teetering on the edge of ease and intentionality. Call it "effortless" if you want. But above anything, there ought to be a sense of perspective from anyone involved in making and styling skirts if they'll have any staying power. And why shouldn't they? Never mind that they're moving menswear along for the better; skirts are also practical (breathable!) and a great layering piece. And if designers expand the scope - how it's styled and its visual beauty - the skirt has the potential to make our two-legged others feel more like a choice than the default. Even if he only breaks his skirt out every two months or so, as I do.
A khaki, twill pleated and kilted one from Lacoste's collaboration with le FLEUR* (Tyler, the Creator's brand) went home with me on a Tuesday afternoon in January. I was in a spending mood and not too far from Neiman Marcus, where I'd tried the skirt on a week prior. I suspected I might feel a little edgy in it, and I did. Surely, I thought, this must be how advanced the Japanese feel in their clothes. It felt as though I'd finally stepped into Rocky's realm of cool, too. What I didn't expect to feel was sexy. Or bold. Not to get all anthropological, but it brought about a new, genuine audacity in my style in ways only something like this could. Anything further along the 'androgynous' spectrum would be too big of a leap for me and presumably most men. Fixed over the sweatpants I'd worn that day, the skirt felt natural; handsome with its matching trousers.
Smartly, many designers who've put the garment in their collections have them styled over pants, the most brisk examples coming from labels like EGONlab and Irenisa. Despite being the strongest case for wearing one "every day," the skirt over blue jeans appears untapped. Pairing it with denim makes the whole thing more regular and approachable. Case in point: last week, I took my pleats for a spin through Manchester's city centre worn over medium-wash, slim-fit Ted Bakers. So easygoing. I mean, it's no wonder, as a 1985 The New York Times article observed, that a man in a skirt and jeans didn't catch any stares as he strolled into Tiffany & Co. in New York-an attestation to the style's enduring appeal, especially since, from the looks of the paper's reportage a year before, these were not entirely skirt-friendly times (Gaultier was right; Bernadine was not).
The more common and unmediated alternative is to wear it solo. Which, if you can find a skirt that stands on its own, makes quite an effective statement. This is, of course, territory where Thom Browne reigns supreme, with his marvellous un-uniformed uniform. As for what you might pluck and cobble together from what you've got lying around, Jun Takahashi's Undercover thinks a hoodie, button-up, and socks and sandals taken up a few notches with a long, pleated skirt so crisp it resembles something of a frosting swirl. A hoodie? I haven't wanted one of those since middle school; now I'm on the hunt for the one that’ll do the trick.
I've somehow yet to bring up Elizabeth Hawes, the American fashion designer and critic who made it her business, literally and literarily, to loosen the rigid binaries of men's and women's clothing. She not only championed the man in a skirt but insisted upon it, introducing some she designed in a 1967 retrospective of her work at the Fashion Institute of Technology. One attendee observed that the models dressed in her skirts "appreciated both the functionality of such a lightweight garment as well as its pairing with a more masculine button-down shirt." True, it even gives your most basic basics something to feel.
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