“What is masculine and what is feminine, anyway?” Jean Paul Gaultier’s guiding principal while designing his 1997 Sari Suit (a literal mash-up between an Indian sari and a man’s suit), has felt more prescient than ever in recent years as gender, and dressing gender, has become a hotly contested topic.
Take the furore that followed Harry Styles’ appearance on the cover of US Vogue in December 2019. You might assume the singer had made some sort of profane gesture or revealed something wildly controversial in the accompanying interview. Neither were in fact the case – it was the singer’s apparel that so irked people: a powder blue several-tiered Gucci gown with black lace trim, worn under a tuxedo jacket. A straight man in a dress on the cover of a fashion magazine was enough to spark cries from some corners of the Internet to “bring back manly men”. I suspect the curators of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s latest blockbuster Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear, would get a kick out of taking these malcontents on a tour of the exhibition.
