But if jogging pants are not just about making statements, they are also about comfort: Do fashion and comfort have to be mutually exclusive? After all, Coco Chanel also valued comfort, namely freedom of movement, which is why she borrowed her women’s designs from functional men’s suits.
Absolutely. Fashion is characterized by the fact that, in principle, it makes the public accessible. Good fashion is always comfortable. Today I’m thinking of Comme Des Garçons, Yamamoto or Balenciaga: Their fashion is incredibly comfortable. Dior may have been a countertrend in the past. You had to have a certain attitude.
What seems to be off the table now are high heels. You don’t see them anymore. Also a consequence of the pandemic?
The linear development of fashion is, above all visually, so that one lives in the city as in the jungle. One only sees the gaze of others in public space as an obstacle. It’s about getting around practically. This is also a form of narcissism, being completely self-contained. And of course it also has to do with mobile phone culture. People look at their phones more than they do at each other. This is a loss.
Your new book is also about the oscillation between gender identities. Women who wear men’s clothes have been around for a long time. Vice versa is not accepted. Until the Enlightenment, men’s fashion was dominated by men’s legs in pantyhose that emphasized the bottom and penis.
Men were originally the fair sex. The one that showcased its assets in a sexier way. The French Revolution was a rupture. Since then, men have constituted themselves as the more natural, unfashionable modern sex and have imposed the stigma of fashion on women.
This does not seem to have caught on in Italy. There are more men’s tailors than women’s tailors.
Italy is an exception. But the Global North’s performance norm is one of male renunciation.
Playing with gender is very present at the moment, but actually not new if you think of Virginia Woolf’s fictional character Orlando.
There have always been forms of crossdressing. For the last hundred years, the female fashion type has been the “garçonne”, the female Bubi. In terms of fashion history, the development from male to female was formally completed with Yves Saint Laurent in the mid-1970s. Now that has turned around. Today, motifs from women’s fashion are transferred to men’s fashion. Ruffles, sexiness, make-up, extreme body contouring. Everything that was actually attributed to the female. Whether as a burden or a privilege. The taboo used to be “man-woman-monster”. This is now answered by breaking the taboo “gay-feminine-sugarboy”. In this respect, one can say that fashion always breaks gender corsets.