Harry Styles’ Gucci dress
(Picture: Jamie Stoker)Geranium pink silk satin, tiny flowers embroidered in lace and dusty blue, leopard-print frock coats. Oh, to be a man in the 17th century!
But let’s hand-brake turn into 2022 for a minute, when the stakes of masculinity seem as high as ever. In September last year, China’s television controller banned effeminate men on TV, the anti-LGBTQ+ legislation dubbed the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill was passed in Florida this month, and vitriol remains daily for those subverting macho masculinity in their dress. At the same time, we’re bearing witness to a stronghold of male celebrities rising up, as sartorially fluid as ever, while expression on menswear catwalks hits an all-time high.
Four years ago, curators Claire Wilcox and Rosalind McKever from the V&A Museum had a hunch that the buttoned-up boredom, still lingering from a post-industrialisation suit-staple wardrobe, was thawing out. They set to work piecing 100 garments and 100 artworks together to make sense of menswear’s direction today.
The resulting exhibition, Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear, tackles the twists, turns and pleats from the 1500s to the spring/summer 2021 men’s collections, to a simple end: boys’ clothes don’t need to be so drab. ‘What we really hope to do here is inspire confidence and reflect what’s happening,’ says Wilcox, the V&A’s senior curator of fashion. ‘And actually say this was happening in the past as well.’ The result hops back and forth through jockstraps and dismembered action-man figures, Rodin sculptures, transitioning bodies and David’s fig leaf before reaching body armour and Forties zoot suits.
Gucci and its creative director, Alessandro Michele, whose fresh men’s uniform of softness and subversion, complete with flicks of the Romantic and Pre-Raphaelites, became a fitting partner for the exhibition. Inside the show, the delicate florals and electric blue velvet suits stand shoulder-to-shoulder with competitively vivid 1620s doublets, or slick, sapphire court suits from the 1760s. ‘So much of men’s fashion has precedence in history,’ Wilcox says. ‘In some ways, nothing is new — but everything is new.’
For Michele, the time has come to break this down. ‘In this particular moment, I do not think it is important to unpick masculinity just for the sake of doing so,’ he says. ‘Today masculinity needs more oxygen: being a man, as a gender, being a woman or any other gender, is being questioned. There is a kind of porousness between genders as never witnessed before.’
In part, that is thanks to him. The moment all eyes opened wide to the rise of non-binary dressing came when Harry Styles was photographed in that frothy blue lace Gucci frock and tux jacket, as he became US Vogue’s first solo male cover star in December 2020. The dress plays one part of a holy trinity at the exhibition’s climax, towering in androgynous glory alongside Billy Porter’s defining 2019 Academy Awards black velvet Christian Siriano gown, and Bimini Bon Boulash’s Ru Paul’s Drag Race UK season two finale look: a white bridal corset and train by Ella Lynch.
‘Man, the male gender, must be unstitched. Unmade in order to be reassembled and given greater freedom,’ Michele says. ‘I believe there is a great need in men to have other forms of existence. My work is about giving new forms of existence to things. And in this case to genders.’
Following him, a group of designers has risen to fill gaps left as stiff masculine codes dissolve and a new generation looks to dress differently. Ludovic de Saint Sernin, the French brand specialising in sensual lace-up thongs and dripping chain-mail tops, provides splashes of sexy to its predominately queer male audience. ‘When I first started there wasn’t a brand that I could identify with,’ de Saint Sernin says. His organza suit, transparent as if dunked in water, is placed at the exhibition’s opening, looking at the male body in stages of undress. ‘People’s minds are evolving. When I was a teenager looking at celebrities I admired, I was always fantasising about wearing their clothes, but there wasn’t a translation of those for guys. I’m bringing to life all of these fantasies.’
The 2020s shift, though, comes in the ripples felt among straight men, too. London designer Martine Rose, who has contributed a clashing print shirt and pair of jeans, plays on the hip-hop and Nineties rave scene to make looks leaning into laddish. ‘I’ve always enjoyed pushing codes as far as they can go,’ she says. ‘It’s why I’ve really enjoyed working in menswear, because it is far more rigid.’
The colour pink itself holds its own corner. ‘You respected someone who wore pink and pearls in the 17th century,’ says Harris Reed, the 25-year-old designer who has fast become the person moving gender-fluid fashion into the mainstream and who features in the section. ‘It was very masculine but now it would be deemed as something feminine, almost negative.’
When Reed shared a magazine cover on which he dons a half-trouser, half tulle skirt design of his own, he was met with an influx of sick emojis online. ‘People still have a lot to learn about self-expression,’ he says. ‘I still walk down the street in my platforms and flares and have people comment.’ This is what makes elevating garments like these in cultural institutions critical. I remember heading to the V&A at 17 for a Cristóbal Balenciaga retrospective and leaving enamoured with design. The feeling is yet to wear off.
There is no chance of missing the point of Masculinites. ‘A dominant, winning, oppressive masculinity model is imposed on babies at birth,’ reads the opening text. They are Michele’s words taken from Gucci’s AW20 collection show notes. ‘There is nothing natural in this drift… It’s time to celebrate a man who is free to practise self-determination without social constraints, without authoritarian sanctions, without suffocating stereotypes.’ Walking out, I was all but peeling my black polo neck off to grab the most flamboyant frills, filled with optimism for the future.
Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear opens 19 Mar. Tickets £20 (vam.ac.uk)
