It was 1985, a whopping 37 years ago, that I first caught sight of a man walking down a catwalk in a skirt. Snapshots from Jean-Paul Gaultier’s wonderful Et Dieu crea l’homme collection had made their way onto the news pages of a copy of i-D magazine sat on my big brother’s bedroom floor. Even then, Gaultier resisted making a big deal of his man-skirt. The Roman Empire loved a robe. So do samurais. Why not the runway of a visionary Parisian iconoclast?
Why, in fact, not the wardrobe of a highly bankable screen actor almost four decades later, during an unprecedented heatwave? When asked about his appearance in a fetchingly distressed linen skirt during the European promo schlep for his summer blockbuster, Bullet Train, Brad Pitt said he appreciated the breeze. Come now. Pitt knows, as does every unfathomably handsome screen star sporting a skirt in public, that it will still cause a certain curtain-twitching ripple, as if generations haven’t moved on since JPG dressed models in his ingenious wraparounds.
