Genderless fashion is no passing fad, but a reality: Tatler speaks to Asian designers, retailers and organisations to understand how it has evolved, where it is in 2023, and what it needs for the future
“I remember when Abercrombie & Fitch first opened its flagship in Hong Kong [in July 2012]: at the time, it seemed like 99 per cent of men were into streetwear and masculine looks. If you were looking for something gender-neutral, or with a softer aesthetic, which we were into, there wasn’t anything,” says Mite Chan, co-founder of Hong Kong-based fashion brand Demo. “The market was pretty dominated by that [overtly masculine looks], and we wanted to start a brand to fill the gap.” Chan and his business partner Derek Chan were inspired to launch their gender-fluid label in 2013.
The past decade has been one of rapid change in this respect: just think of Jaden Smith sporting a skirt for Louis Vuitton’s womenswear campaign in 2016, or MM6 Maison Margiela and Balenciaga sending male models down the spring-summer 2023 runways in ballet flats. “Over the last few years, we’ve seen pearls, skirts, bustiers, platforms and lacey shirts all become top sellers in the men’s world, where traditionally the customer was a bit less adventurous. ... Brands [are] championing the blurring lines around dress codes,” says Ida Petersson, womenswear and menswear buying director at London-based e-commerce site Browns Fashion.
Read more: Beyond ‘his’ and ‘hers’: the rise of genderless jewellery
Alessandro Michele, former creative director at Gucci, famously made the house’s menswear more “feminine”; beyond him, Petersson says, “Harris Reed, Feng Chen Wang and Bianca Saunders are all examples of brands opening up their collections in an incredible way.” There is certainly an appetite for this. For example, in the first half of 2021, there was a 33 per cent increase in searches for terms like “genderless” and “gender-neutral” on fashion app Lyst; in South Korea, the number of posts related to genderless fashion on the search engine Naver more than doubled in 2020, and this momentum is being reflected in sales.
Gender-fluid, or non-binary, fashion is not new, but it does perhaps need to be defined. It is an evolving movement that is breaking down the notion of separate “womenswear” and “menswear” at every step of fashion’s life cycle: from design intention, marketing and merchandising practices to consumers’ shopping mindsets.
Gender-fluid—which is distinct from its friends “unisex”, “gender-neutral” and “androgynous”— garments are not designed nor marketed for a specific gender; items, colours, prints, patterns, fabrics and so on are not seen as limited to traditional gender categorisation. There have been parallel increases in the accessibility to gender-fluid design, and the popularity of gender-fluid dressing and shopping, as customers of all genders are offered a wider variety of clothing, in an environment where they feel free and safe to escape stereotypes and shop for whatever they feel comfortable and proud to wear.