WELCOME TO SERIES 5 - WARDROBE CRISIS SHARE THE PODCAST MIC. OUR GUEST HOST THIS WEEK IS ADITI MAYER, AND SHE’S IN CONVERSATION WITH ALOK VAID-MENON.

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ABOUT YOUR HOST: Aditi Mayer is a Californian writer, photo-journalist and blogger with a focus on sustainable fashion. Her work looks at fashion and culture through a lens of intersectionality and decolonization. Find her website here.

Here’s Aditi on IG.

EPISODE 131 FEATURES ALOK VAID-MENON

Why does so much fashion still cling to strict men's and womenswear codes? Is the industry finally ready to shake off these tired old binaries and embrace the trans and gender-nonconforming community? Or is Harry Styles' Vogue cover about as far as it goes?

For this week's #sharethepodcastmic episode, sustainable fashion journalist Aditi Mayer is in charge.

She's interviewing Alok Vaid-Menon about their new book, Beyond the Gender Binary. Alok is a gender-nonconforming poet, author, performance artist and designer.

Up for discussion: everything from gender neutral fashion, to the limitations of  representation to what it means to truly redefine beauty. Also, fashion has been largely silent on the rising wave of transphobia, says Alok, yet continues to draw inspiration from gender-nonconforming people.

This episode is a powerful call to designers "take it as an ethical imperative to de-gender their lines" and to "everyone, regardless of your gender, to make this an issue."

It's time for all of us to start asking difficult questions, say Alok. "Asking our favourite brands, our favourite designers: why do you continue to gender your product? What is the purpose of this? The next piece is, how are we subverting gender tropes in our own lives? Are we dressing to fit an idea of what women or men should be, or are we dressing for ourselves?" 

Here’s Alok’s website. Here they are on Instagram.

“ALL OF US SHOULD BE ABLE TO WEAR WHAT WE FEEL LIKE WITHOUT FEAR OF BEING GENDERED OR PUT INTO A BOX BECAUSE OF IT.”- ALOK

NOTES

GENDER NEUTRAL FASHION How far has the fashion industry come? writes Obi Anyanwu in “Decoding Genderless Fashion” for WWD. “‘Unisex,’ the industry’s buzzword and symbol for inclusion and diversity, is now more mainstream thanks to brands casting male and female models for their look books and designers casting a broader spectrum of genders for their fashion shows. But with the advent of unisex collections comes a myriad of questions. For one, what makes a collection unisex? Also, where does it fit in a store or web site? Few retailers, brands and designers are ready for this movement…

“Consumers are ready, especially Gen Z consumers…56 percent of Generation Z consumers shop ‘outside their assigned gendered area.’ But are retailers ready? Selfridges introduced a genderless concept called Agender in 2015, and Finnish retailer Stockmann added a genderless shopping floor called One Way in 2018. There’s Studio183 in Berlin that started as a pop-up in 2015, offering seasonless and genderless design, fashion and art, and operates as a permanent store today. Also, non-binary and gender-fluid shop L’Insane opened in Paris at the start of 2019 and the Phluid Project, which recently closed its store, developed a formula that shows retailers can be dedicated to gender-fluid fashion.

New and existing industry players are making strides to be more inclusive, but how much of the progress is actually steps forward? For one, established retailers and brands still separate their stores and web sites according to gender, and it’s for only two genders: men and women. Secondly, the words “unisex” and “gender-neutral” are being used interchangeably to refer to genderless collections, but the collections usually lean toward one gender.” Read the rest on here.

Alok tells Aditi how slow fashion has been to embrace these ideas in a practical sense, and yet suddenly - or it feels like suddenly - there’s a bit more movement…

Here’s JONATHAN VAN NESS in Self Magazine. Read the interview here.

Here’s what Alok wrote in response on Instagram: “There is an ongoing project to disappear gender non-conforming people. for centuries we have been repressed and maligned to naturalize the cultural fiction of the gender binary. if you don’t see us then you can pretend that dividing billions of people into one of two categories is ‘natural’ not a political choice.”

So what did Alok feel about Harry Styles on the cover of US Vogue? “Holding space for joy, while also insisting on a more expansive form of freedom.”

GUCCI FEST Instead of a show for Spring ‘21, Gucci presented “Guccifest” digitally, 7 days of short films, directed by Gus Van Sant. The first one features Silvia Calderoni, a non-binary artist and performer. Watch it below:

Watch CLOTHES HAVE NO GENDER, Alok’s talk at Business of Fashion Voices:

HISTORY OF THE SUIT as formalised menswear? According to The Atlantic, “This symbol of the American establishment in fact comes to us courtesy of our colonial oppressors! In fact, the suit's prehistory begins in the evolution of court dress in Britain. Until the mid-17th century, sumptuary laws prevented commoners from wearing certain colors, like the royal purple, fine furs, and elaborate trimmings, including velvet and satin. These were reserved for courtiers of various ranks, and sometimes for the royal family alone. After a nasty outbreak of plague in 1665, the lacy and elaborate court outfits suddenly seemed like a political liability to Charles II, who ordered his nobles to begin dressing -- for a while -- in modest tunics and breeches in your usual office-drab colors (navys, grays, shudder-inducing taupes). This subdued, neutral-looking dress, which made displays of individuality difficult, was a sort of proto-suit…” Read the rest here.

Here’s a whip-through of more recent fashion history of “men’s” suit silhouettes by Gentleman’s Gazette.

The DRESS REFORM MOVEMENT called for emancipation from the "dictates of fashion", expressed a desire to “cover the limbs as well as the torso adequately,” and promoted "rational dress". Here’s an interesting article about how bloomers were significant in the 19th Century feminist fight against restrictive Victorian women’s dress.

P.S. Here’s Zendaya in a suit. That’s all.

MUSIC is by Montaigne, who sang this special acoustic version of “Because I love You” from her album Glorious Heights, just for us.

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Clare & the Wardrobe Crisis team x