Paris Fashion Week, which ended on Sunday, was on paper dedicated to menswear, but de facto ‘gender neutral’ for practical and commercial reasons.
“The shows are even more mixed than last year, and that is primarily for economic reasons,” said Gert Jonkers, editor-in-chief of Fantastic Man magazine, to the AFP news agency. “It costs a lot of money to create a fashion show, so you might as well put two collections in it,” adds the expert, who has worked in men’s fashion for 24 years.
Louis Vuitton, Yohji Yamamoto and Kenzo put the cards on the table: women walked among men or, if you will, men among women. Such is the case with AMI Paris, the hip French brand that started with men’s clothing about ten years ago and then moved on to women. Her designer Alexandre Mattiussi dressed the actress Laetitia Casta in a proud brown cavalier coat that the actor Vincent Cassel, his other muse, could also wear.
Matthieu Bobard Delière, fashion journalist for the French women’s magazine Elle, who closely monitors trends in men’s wardrobe, believes that the gender distinction in the collections “perhaps not the last year, but certainly one of the last years,” as he puts it. And vice versa. “There is no longer even a discussion,” he told AFP. “There is no longer a moment where you question what gender this piece is for.”
Men and women share their wardrobe – with restrictions
The fluid approach to fashion primarily leads to suits that can be worn by both women and men, such as Meta Campania’s version of a three-piece suit over the chest and wide trousers. For winter there were also gabardine and pea coats, which are undeniably unisex, and accessories, from handbags to large weekenders, which are easily passed from man to woman. Despite this removal of taboos, luxury men’s fashion designers are still less willing to accept dresses or skirts for men that are tailored to their different morphologies. And the resistance was even more noticeable this Paris season at some big houses like Dior, despite the ballet aesthetic, or at “Daddy Dries”, the 65-year-old Dries Van Noten from Antwerp.
‘Himbo’
On the red carpets, the icons of the new masculinity, including heterosexual and cisgender men, are also opening up to the flowing material in their gala outfits, which is more extravagant, sexy, glittering and studded with rhinestones – similar to the tops in the Balmain show .
To accelerate this phenomenon, Ken, the anti-hero from the movie “Barbie”, and the so-called “Himbo” man, who doesn’t care about the looks of others, have prevailed. Gert Jonkers, men’s fashion specialist and founder of the men’s magazine Butt, is pleased that fashion is ending the “strict separation”.
However, he warns against lumping everything together during the weeks of collection presentations. “You have to be careful that menswear doesn’t become a strange, artistically and commercially weak mix in which you end up putting everything and anything together,” warned the editor.
Nicolas Delarue, one of the heads of the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, which runs Paris Fashion Week, told AFP: “The man is a woman like any other.” (AFP)