Fashion is always adapting to our wants and needs. Lately, as many people are discovering themselves and getting to know their true identities, the fashion industry is reflecting these changes due to styles changing. Many men and women are dressing and buying clothes that are nonbinary, but not because it’s something that will “make a statement.”
Genderfluid clothes are more widely known than we all think. From t-shirts to blazers and jeans, these clothes are always found in both the women’s or men’s departments. Embellishments and fits of the clothing are what distinguishes the clothing from them being more feminine or masculine. Whoever said a man couldn’t wear more jewelry and show more skin with their clothes, or a woman couldn’t wear a pantsuit every day?
Just like art, our body is a canvas – we do what we want, however, we want, and whenever we want with it. Fashion allows us to think beyond the binary standards set by society on how a man or a woman should dress. Instead, it’s about what we want to wear, how we want to represent ourselves and questioning why we should ever stay inside the box of what clothes to wear. The fashion industry allows individuals to look at gender as a spectrum, not as a social construct.
One example of showing gender as a spectrum in fashion is Rio Uribe’s latest Fall Ready-to-Wear for the brand Gypsy Sport, which was unveiled during London Fashion Week this February. For this concept, he included men and women of different races, genders and sizes to show that everybody can wear lingerie. The collection focused on sustainability like reusing everyday products and reconstructing clothes for each piece to have a new purpose.
Only one word can describe this show: beautiful. Gypsy Sport showcased beauty in all of its forms and emphasized how we can overlook these different qualities for being ugly and weird. From the editorial makeup and the sparkles on the outfits, each individual executed the beauty and diversity meant to prove Uribe’s point of any human body being able to wear lingerie.
This caused a shift of acceptance In the LGBTQ community, as there are many people who identify as being nonbinary or genderfluid, where they prefer to not identify themselves as one gender or the other. Fashion allows us to observe how we have been told our entire lives to think there are only boys and girls, she and him – but this isn’t it. It’s about they and them, and how they are catered to with the fashion industry looking at gender as a spectrum.
Fashion is a force to be reckoned with. I think it’s important to talk about how fashion can have an impact on the entire society, especially if it helps to empower voices that were once silenced.