Shabiha Nur Khatoon
Designers who defied stereotypes and pop stars who immortalised androgynous fashion were stalwarts who influenced a generation of fashion-forward folk to think beyond the obvious and make a resounding style statement…
In the early years of the 21st century, a new trend that emerged on the style horizon was the androgynous look. Thanks to the global fashion industry and pop culture that propelled the trend with several leading pop stars emerging as creative trendsetters.
While chronicling the evolution of androgynous fashion the first name which comes to mind is Coco Chanel who gifted women pants. In 1913, when Chanel started her own label during the Suffrage Movement, she redefined women’s fashion by introducing offbeat options such as pants and masculine silhouettes.
Chanel, who refused to call herself a feminist as TIME magazine reported, believed a person should express themselves based on how they feel, and not how their gender supposedly tells them to feel.
In an interview with Business Insider, Chanel said: “I gave women a sense of freedom. I gave them back their bodies: Bodies that were drenched in sweat, due to fashion’s finery, lace, corsets, underclothes, padding.”
By the early 1900s, the world of fashion went upside with pants emerging after World War I introduced by fashion pioneers such as Paul Poiret and Chanel.
Chanel who loved wearing trousers stepped in and introduced the beach pajama and designed horseback riding trousers for women. During the 1930s, glamorous actresses such as Marlene Dietrich fascinated and shocked many with her strong desire to wear trousers and adopt the androgynous style. She is not only a style icon but is also remembered as one of the first actresses to wear trousers in a premiere.
Elvis Presley is considered the one who introduced the androgynous style in rock ‘n’ roll and made it the standard template for rock ‘n’ roll frontmen since the 1950s. His pretty face and use of eye make-up often made people think he was an “effeminate guy”, but Elvis was considered the prototype of the rock ‘n’ roll look.
However, the upsurge of androgynous dressing for men really began during the 1960s and 1970s. When the Rolling Stones played in London’s Hyde Park in 1969, Mick Jagger wore a white ‘man’s dress’ designed by British designer Mr Fish. Mr Fish, also known as Michael Fish, was the most fashionable shirt-maker in London, the inventor of ‘the Kipper tie’, and a principal taste-maker of ‘the Peacock revolution’ in men’s fashion. His creation for Jagger was considered the epitome of the swinging 60s. From then on, the androgynous style was adopted by many celebrities.
The androgynous fashion entered the mainstream in the 1970s and had tremendous influence in pop culture when Jimi Hendrix wore high heels and blouses quite often and David Bowie presented his alter- ego Ziggy Stardust, a character that was a symbol of sexual ambiguity when he launched the album ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and Spiders from Mars’.
That’s not all. Another major influence was John Travolta, one of the androgynous male heroes of the post-counter-culture disco era in the 1970s, who starred in ‘Grease and Saturday Night Fever’.
During the 1980s, power dressing for women became even more prominent which was something done by men in order to look structured and powerful. However, things began to take a turn as women pitched for equal rights.
Androgynous fashion made its most powerful statement in the 1980s through the works of Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo, who brought in a distinct Japanese style that adopted distinctively gender ambiguous themes.
