Would you wear this? Would you wear that? How do you feel when you wear such? These and more are the common reactions to androgynous clothing worldwide most especially in Nigeria, Africa. The boldness of androgynous style can make a person stop, stare, talk, ridicule and laugh at the person possessing such style. However we can’t deny the fact that androgynous style is chic, dramatic and yassss way.
2019 challenges the androgyny style in terms of languages and sees it as an outgrowth of men and women’s wear, further describing it as “cross dressing”, sometimes people think when a woman dresses like a man it gives her power, courage, stamina and projects her as an epitome of feminism in the society but when a man wears a crop top, split pants and other female related wears , he is described as disgusting, repealing, stupid and drastically a “homosexual”.
In a fashion industry that has steadily been reorganising itself in recent seasons, with some designers merging their men and women’s shows and others silently ignoring the gender labels of clothes when it comes to celebrity dressing, this season felt like a restoration of sorts -which means the industry is now taking a gradual leap in eradicating gender specific dressing by merchandising men and women’s wear together so people don’t know what they are actually looking at in a creative synchronisation with main stream acceptance and normalisation of gender identities that once seemed foreign, weird, absurd, gay, unusual, disgusting and gender abusing to some.
So when we talk fashion, we like to tell ourselves that everything has been done before. This moment in time, however is decidedly ground-breaking, evenly dramatic, schmick and free from gender abuses. Therefore if it means that men can now wear splits without societal oppression, by all means – can the evolution begin?
