We’re a generation that’s tired of people telling us what to do, what we should aspire to, what to eat, how to behave, and of course, what to wear. We’ve grown up in an era where literally everything is labeled and where all those labels carry a load of prejudice, moral standards, and values. We’ve proven to be a rebellious generation that fights every day to break all those barriers and walls built by our parents and society. But that doesn’t seem to be enough. It’s hard to bury all those judgments and the best way to do so is by making little statements in our daily life. For instance, stop pursuing dreams that are not yours.
Fashion has always been a tool that both sets social patterns and rebels against them. For centuries, bold people have used the way they dress to make statements against the standards of the time they lived in. In that way, we have cases of women wearing pants since the eighteenth century and men wearing dresses or skirts. Yet, why are these gender binaries so strong and deeply rooted?
Gender differentiations are now being blurred in a quest for equality. So, whether it’s a matter of this generation’s open-mindedness or a way to make ourselves noted in this fight against gender labels, androgynous clothing has made its way to millennial fashion trends.
It’s not just wearing the clothes of the “opposite” gender. It goes beyond that. The drill is wearing pieces that represent you and make you feel comfortable without caring about the gender that’s meant to wear them. For instance, if you want to wear pants with a cut designed for men, that doesn’t mean you can’t wear ballet flats or stilettos. It’s all a matter of choosing the elements that define your fashion statements and personality. After all, that’s one of fashion’s main purposes, to show who we are through our clothes.
Now, one could argue that we’re living in a time where people don’t really have a personality of their own and they only follow whatever trend fashion industries put in front of us. And that might be true. Of course, there are people who only wear what they are told is fashionable. But, if you think about it, that has happened for centuries. Yet there were people like the Teddy Girls, who didn’t care about what was chic at the moment.
My point is that we have the power to choose what trend to follow. We can follow fashion to make a statement against the strains that keep separating society and that still want to mark differentiations as well as power hierarchies. Naturally, as I mentioned before, the purpose of androgynous fashion is not just about wearing men’s clothing or the other way around, but to see clothes as genderless, to conceive them as non-binary items. So, are you ready to make fashion statements?
***Fashion has been a very powerful tool to determine a society, its moral values, its drive, and its way to see the world. However, there have always been fierce individuals rebelling against these parameters. Check how they did it with these bohemian styles.
Source:
Bustle
