“The Menswear Phenomenon” Touted in a 1984 Vogue Essay Continues to Flourish More Than 40 Years Later
The music and musicians of the day, who figured so importantly in capturing the dreams and desires of a generation, captured the new way of dressing, too. The Rolling Stones cavorted, in concert and on album covers, in floral shirts and tight hip-huggers; the Beatles and their maharishi blazed a trail to the meditation and the caftans of Eastern cultures. Today, unisex dressing is referred to as androgynous, and still stems from a continuing breakdown of barriers and the status quo. Again, it appears at its most striking, if not outrageous, in the world of music. The tank tops and slidey sweatshirts—along with the “dancing”—of Jennifer Beals in the movie and music videos from Flashdance are interchangeable with those of Kevin Bacon in Footloose. Culture Club’s flowing-locked and heavily made-up Boy George has embraced a post-peasant form of ethnic dress—that of a Hassidic Jew or a geisha girl (the latter, so convincingly he was refused entrance through French customs when officials could not believe he was a man). The T-shirt—slashed, rolled, cropped—and black leather turned up on everyone. Even the “plaid suit” catalogued by the Batterberrys in a list of ’sixties unisex outfits appeared in its bold black-and-white glory on crewcut Annie Lennox, lead singer of Eurythmics, on their latest U.S. tour. The oversized shapes of the Japanese-inspired designers are sometimes favored by Duran Duran (the group many prophesy will be the next Beatles), who carry cross-dressing further with quite definite, yet quite attractive, makeup.
On the streets, from New York’s East Village to London’s Kensington High Street, boys and girls, men and women sift through the same clothing racks in the cities’ hottest boutiques. Chances are they’re all in tweedy, single-breasted overcoats, with black berets, Ray-Ban sunglasses, neon anklets, and the gargantuan tasseled scarves of the Middle East (in the black-and-white pattern of the P.L.O.; the red-and-white of the Bedouins).
In a more classic vein, more and more women are looking to the men’s departments for their own Shetland sweaters and polo shirts, or opting for the oversupply of designed-for-women equivalents. The result, again androgynous, is a look of all-American, well-bred quality. The classic appeal of menswear is, in fact, based on a real difference in quality.
Men’s clothing is acclaimed for its expert tailoring, attention to detail, and durability of design and fabrication, generally at a lower cost. It is made to last, in part, because few men are inclined to change their wardrobes each season. In the 1970s, many manufacturers of men’s clothing—Stanley Blacker, Arthur Richards—started women’s lines, as one has explained, to provide women with “good tailored clothes” and “better quality fabrics.” Since then, more men’s manufacturers and designers have started women’s lines as more women demand more in return for their fashion dollar. This demand resulted in what used to be called “investment dressing,” and continues to make sense as women bank on clothes that stand up to time and trends.
Concern about money these days offers another reason for the rise in popularity of menswear. Throughout history, in difficult economic periods—which, although indicators are improving, we find ourselves in now—clothing has become more somber, more greyed and muted, as men’s clothing traditionally has been. The Depression of the 1930s and the WW II years of the 1940s popularized a subdued, no-fuss, simple-lined greyed suit, for women as well as men, that resurfaces in the recession-prone 1980s.
