In recent years, the fashion world has been giving us more and more unisex clothing. In the past, “unisex” meant boxy, shapeless, and colorless. With the rise of gender-fluid fashion and high-profile nonbinary celebrities, that is changing.
Alok Vaid-Menon, the author, artist and activist behind the #DeGenderFashion movement, says a truly gender-fluid approach to dressing could allow room for a much more expressive, flexible and even flamboyant wardrobe.
Vaid-Menon, who uses they/them pronouns said, “Gender-free is not actually about … the death of fashion. It’s about the renaissance of it. When we remove this stringent idea of ‘Am I making clothes for men or women?’ we begin to actually dwell on the fabrics, the colors, the sense, the feeling, the affect that often gets lost when we’re just regurgitating gender stereotypes.”
New designers are embracing this, like Mic Carter who is a genderqueer Toronto fashion designer who creates collections for his company L’uomo Strano. He said his main objective is to use clothing to empower non-binary folks, including male-identified but femme-presenting people like himself, to “feel like their truest sense of self.”
