Gender remixing

November 19, 2009
It’s All a Blur to Them
By RUTH LA FERLA

“I’VE heard that in Australia, men are wearing tights,” Chuong Pham said. Tights for men, he acknowledged, may be extreme. But Mr. Pham, 28, an engineer in Manhattan, thought nothing of combining stalk-slim jeans with a sweatshirt pinched from his mom and sexily sheared à la “Flashdance.” Raking his fingers through a sheaf of hair that tumbled in waves past his collarbone, Mr. Pham said: “There is a whole transition of men getting into women’s wear. It used to be that the people who did it were just the edgier ones. Now it’s much more common.”

Common enough that Mr. Pham and his forward-thinking cohort — urban Americans, mostly in their 20s — are revising standard notions of gender-appropriate dressing, tweaking codes, upending conventions and making hash of ancient norms.

“My generation is more outside the box than the generation before me,” said Brandon Dailey, 26, a hairstylist in Manhattan. “Our minds are more open to different things, and that sometimes means mixing it up in what we wear.” He may never put on a skirt, he allowed, but sees nothing amiss in working “a long drapey shirt with really tight pants.”

Audrey Reynolds, an acquaintance, was engaging in a bit of gender play herself. Ms. Reynolds, 25, who wore a slouchy biker jacket and beat-up clog boots, insisted: “Every line should be unisex. A good piece of clothing is a good piece of clothing no matter who was meant to wear it in the first place.”

At one time, such artfully calibrated ambiguity might have been the expression of a renegade mind. Today it seems scarcely more subversive than wearing black, just the latest countercultural gesture to be tugged into the mainstream. The look is androgynous, for sure — but with a difference.

During the 1970s, arguably the last time sartorial gender blending was as pervasive in the culture, it grew in part from the kind of feminist thinking that suggested girls play with Lego sets and boys play with dolls. “Now we have something new,” said Diane Ehrensaft, a psychologist in Oakland, who writes about gender. That something is not necessarily about one’s politics or sexual orientation or, she added pointedly, “about one’s core identity as a male or female.”

What Dr. Ehrensaft has dubbed “gender fluidity” remains in her view a form of rebellion. It suggests, she said, that “younger people no longer accept the standard boxes. They won’t be bound by boys having to wear this or girls wearing that. I think there is a peer culture in which that kind of gender blurring is not only acceptable but cool.”

Women have been incorporating trousers, biker jackets and combat boots into their wardrobes since Amelia Earhart swapped her pearls for a flight suit. But increasingly, it is men who are making unabashed forays into mom’s closet, some for fashion’s sake, others for fit. A few may be taking their style cues from Pete Wentz, the emo rocker who demonstrates on YouTube how to slick on eyeliner; or Adam Lambert, the “American Idol” runner-up, who has made sooty eyes and blue-black nails his fashion insignia. Others fall back on Johnny Depp.

“I came here with an idea,” Dyllan White said as he inspected his reflection at Mudhoney, a unisex hair salon in the East Village. Mr. White, 22, who is studying art therapy, wanted “something up and back, something ‘Cry-Baby,’ ” he said. He settled on a modified pompadour that recalled Mr. Depp in the 1990 John Waters movie of that name. “I feel fine about it, like a guy,” he said of his haircut. “It’s universal. It’s awesome.”

To Sharon Graubard, a senior executive with Stylesight, a trend forecasting firm in New York, Mr. White’s thinking points to a sea change. “In the streets I see young couples dressing almost alike, wearing slicked hair, peacoats, straight jeans or those longer T-shirts that are almost like a dress,” she said. Such a willful melding of men’s and women’s garb represents, she said, “a kind of evening of the playing field.”

Mingling men’s and women’s clothing, others argue, is like waving a flag of neutrality. “It’s a way of breaking down sexualized relationships, of getting people to relax,” said Piper Marshall, 24, who is an assistant art curator at the Swiss Institute in Manhattan. “I work with lots of male artists,” she added. “It’s important to find a common ground.”

Humberto Leon, an owner of Opening Ceremony, the vanguard boutique in Lower Manhattan, is one of a growing number of merchants catering to that mind-set. Lately Mr. Leon has been mingling men’s and women’s clothing with marked success. Even angora cat-print cardigans, part of a unisex line designed by Chloë Sevigny, “flew out of the store,” he said, snapped up by men and women alike.

So entrenched are the latest forms of gender blending that mainstream purveyors of hip, including Urban Outfitters and American Apparel, are offering clothing and jewelry meant to be worn by either sex. American Apparel has no fewer than 724 unisex items — hoodies, cardigans, blazers and bow ties, among them — on its Web site, simply because, as Marsha Brady, the company’s creative director, put it, “that’s the way people wear clothes.”

At a jazz club in downtown Manhattan last week, Bettina Chin and Michelle Wang drove home the point, wearing severely tailored evening ensembles that perfectly echoed each other. “I like a mannish look at night,” Ms. Chin explained as she flicked back her cuffs.

Some marketers have been quick to interpret that sort of ambiguity. Fall advertisements for Burberry show a succession of lanky, pallid men and women wearing what seem to be interchangeable coats. A model for Rolex is tricked out in an Earhart-inspired leather jacket, aviator cap and goggles.

Gender neutrality has gained traction on the runways as well. Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto jettisoned gender codes long ago. More recently, designers as influential as Rick Owens and Alexander Wang have made their mark with draped T-shirts and, in Mr. Owens’s case, dresses and high-heeled shoes for men. In London, Christopher Kane lent his spring 2010 collection some swagger by inviting the model Jenny Shimizu, a standard-bearer of female androgyny, to saunter down his runway wearing a man-tailored suit.

“Today the more successful designers are the ones that try to bridge the gap between the sexes rather than drive a wedge between them,” said Karlo Steel, a partner in Atelier, a progressive men’s store in downtown Manhattan that also draws a female clientele. “Right now fashion’s pendulum seems to be swinging in that direction.”

Skeptics argue nonetheless that gender blending is bound to remain a marginal trend.

“It’s something you need to be young to do well,” said Harold Koda, the curator in charge of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “To carry it off, you need the physique of an adolescent boy. As long as the young are the primary audience, it’s not going be economically sustained.”

Still, gender-neutral dressing has made sufficiently formidable inroads that some suggest it has a robust future.

“Obviously androgyny may not play in Peoria,” said Dr. Ehrensaft, the psychologist. “But norms are shifting.” In her clinical practice, working mostly with teenagers and elementary school children, Dr. Ehrensaft said she routinely witnesses “a kind of gender fashion parade.”

“Kids, even little kids, are experimenting across gender lines. Boys are wearing My Little Pony T-shirts, just because they like them. Sometimes they like to dress in the girls’ section because the shirts are cooler.”

Adults have long dictated the way young people dress, Dr. Ehrensaft said. “But now the young are giving us a different dictation.”