Pride Voices: Menswear is queerer than ever, but who’s it really for?

 

Jockstrap whale tails at Thom Browne, barely-there tank tops at Rick Owens, itsy-bitsy leather shorts at Prada and Egonlab – looking at the SS23 menswear shows in Paris and Milan, it doesn’t take the sharpest eye to clock that menswear these days is louder and prouder than ever; it’s here, it’s queer, and you’d better get used to it. Those that aren’t quite ready to add a Gucci butt plug pendant to their everyday accessories needn’t worry – there’s still plenty out there to appeal to more chaste tastes. But the uptick in clothing that’s historically been coded as queer bears noting. 

 

Granted, fashion’s sexual awakening isn’t taking place in isolation. After all, it exists in a constant complex dialogue with pop culture. This visible embrace of more risque dress styles owes a lot to the flourishing of figures like Lil Nas X and Troye Sivan – both of whom shamelessly place the expression of queer desire at the heart of their public images and identities – or to Gen Z tendencies to think – and dress – less in line with inherited heteronormative structures. Worthy of celebration as this boom in queer visibility is, it’s not without its own issues. While it’s certainly a progressive step, the values that underpin how queer menswear is presented are, on closer inspection, anything but. It prompts the question: what is queer menswear at its core – and who, exactly, is it for? 

My response? Not for me. Without giving away the crux of what’s to come, the blunt reality is that the scope of most of the menswear that’s labelled as ‘queer’ isn’t quite as inclusive as the term suggests. While the garments themselves may challenge a normalised masculine aesthetic, the bodies we see wearing them on runways rarely do. For those with physiques that don’t quite align with the honed, toned standard that most ‘queer menswear’ is designed for – mine, for example, is short, somewhere between slim and average, and of a shapelier build that I’ve been told is ‘feminine’ – wearing these supposedly agenda-advancing clothes often triggers more dysmorphia than it does pride.

 

In my case, however, the process of aspiring toward – and eventually rejecting – the standards projected by most ‘queer’ menswear has been crucial in guiding me towards the person that I actually am. Finding a way of dressing that felt instinctual rather than imposed was what made me realise that I don’t identify as a queer man (and I try not to make too fine a point of what I do identify as, though have settled with non-binary for now). And while I should note that, yes, I do still wear a fair bit of ‘menswear’, it’s pieces like an A-line Chopova Lowena dress with a harness neckline or a vintage Junya Watanabe pencil skirt that make me feel the most, well, me. 

Of course, the fact that fashion plays a key role in the discovery and articulation of queer identity is nothing new. Without embarking on a socio-semiotic treatise on the role of dress in queer culture – check out Hal Fischer’s Gay Semiotics (1977) if that sounds up your street – leather daddies, rubberists, scallies, jocks, femmes and so many more have had to develop complex sartorial codes to express the nuances of their identities and desires, and often in contexts where openly doing so was punishable by law. For decades, too, fashion designers have extensively riffed on these codes – think: Gianni Versace’s AW92 S&M-inspired womenswear collection; the rubber doll makeup for ‘The Horn of Plenty’ Alexander McQueen AW09 collection, a homage to Leigh Bowery; Balenciaga’s recent gimp parade at The New York Stock Exchange. 

 

While there are subtle differences between transposing queer-coded signifiers into fashion contexts and dressing queer, there are key similarities when it comes to what governs the looks that read as queer. Take the runway renaissance of jockstraps as a case in point. While originally designed for cyclists to offer support while traversing bumpy roads, the immediate association on seeing one for anyone that sits higher than a 1 on The Kinsey Scale is a very different kind of ride. And yet, despite their implicitly explicit connotations, we’ve seen the underwear appear far and wide from Rick Owens to ERL and JW Anderson to Thom Browne, whose recent Paris show saw a parade of tricolour-banded tweed jocks peeking above the waistbands of miniskirts and trousers, almost like reverse whale tails.

As powerful a testament as it is to see openly queer fashion designers propose visual ciphers for gay sex without fear of reprisal, it isn’t necessarily in check with the fashion’s ostensible push for greater inclusivity. ‘But how the hell can sending a jockstrap down the runway be anything less than a cheeky expression of queer pride’, you’re probably wondering. And, yes, on one level, it is just that. The point being made here, though, has little to do with the garment – and more about the culturally enshrined fantasies it fuels. For proof, I’d encourage you to quickly Google ‘person in jockstrap’ – though perhaps not if your boss is peering over your shoulder. The ubiquitous images you’ll see are of slim to athletic, cis-passing men – a body type and gender expression conventionally placed high on the pyramid of socially-sanctioned attractiveness. Essentially, many of the clothes that we’ve collectively christened as ‘queer’ implicitly reinforce conventional ideas around which bodies are ‘worth’ desiring. 

 

As the late bell hooks wrote, queerness is about more than mere sexual preference; it is ‘about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live’. It is rooted in otherness; in difference; in having to create new ecosystems at the margins of spaces from which people have been excluded. Read in this light, the vast majority of the queer menswear we’re seeing proliferate on runways today is, arguably, anything but – it is, instead, fashion at its most insidious: a repackaging of stale values, labelled with a glittery new name.