The Line Between Menswear and Womenswear Keeps Fading

The fashion calendar used to be neatly gendered: menswear shows here, womenswear there, two separate machines running on separate schedules. A growing number of houses have stopped pretending the line is so clean, and now show their collections together, as one. What began as a gesture — a way of signalling openness — has hardened into a working method that is quietly rewriting how clothes are conceived.

The change reads, on the surface, as a statement about gender, and it is one, reflecting a generation that treats the boundary as porous and the rules as optional. A blazer is a blazer; who wears it is increasingly beside the point. Designers who came up in that sensibility find the old division artificial, and say so.

When a garment is no longer designed for an assumed body, the whole logic of the cut has to be rebuilt.

An old line, drawn recently

It is worth remembering that the strict division of dress by gender is neither ancient nor universal. For long stretches of history, the wardrobes of men and women shared far more than they differed — ornament, colour, silhouette, luxury of fabric were markers of rank and wealth long before they were markers of sex. Heels, lace, bright colour, elaborate decoration: all have belonged, at one time or another, to the masculine wardrobe without embarrassment. The rigid coding of certain forms as feminine and others as masculine is a relatively recent settlement, not a law of nature.

Seen in that light, the current blurring looks less like a radical departure than a return — a loosening of a knot that was tied more recently than we tend to assume. The generation now designing and buying grew up sceptical of inherited categories of every kind, and the gendering of cloth was never going to survive that scepticism intact. What reads as transgression is often just the quiet abandonment of a rule that had less history behind it than its defenders imagined.

Commerce and craft, not only philosophy

But the combined show is not only a philosophical statement; it is also, quietly, a matter of commerce and craft. A single show is cheaper and simpler than two, and it lets a house present one coherent vision rather than two halves of a divided one. In a calendar groaning with events and a market impatient with excess, the economy of the merger is its own argument, and not a trivial one.

More interestingly, the merger changes the work itself. When a garment is not designed for a predetermined body, the designer thinks differently from the first sketch — about cut, about proportion, about how cloth sits on a range of forms rather than an assumed one. The old method began with a body in mind and cut toward it; the new one begins with the garment and asks which bodies it might suit. That is a genuine shift in the craft, not merely in its presentation. It forces a reconsideration of construction at the most basic level — where volume falls, how a shoulder is built, what a proportion means when it is not anchored to a single silhouette.

The garment that suits a range

The design consequences are subtle and real. A jacket conceived to sit well on a variety of frames is cut with different intentions than one tailored to a single idealised form — its ease is distributed differently, its structure is more forgiving, its proportions negotiate rather than dictate. This is harder work, not easier. The assumed body was a convenience; it let the designer solve a narrower problem. Remove it, and the problem widens, demanding a more supple understanding of how cloth behaves on bodies that differ.

For the wearer, the effect is a wardrobe that offers itself more freely. A garment designed without a fixed gender in mind tends also to be a garment designed without a fixed occasion or a fixed customer, which makes it more adaptable, more shareable, more useful across a life that does not sort neatly into categories. The best of this work has a generosity to it — an openness to being worn in ways the designer did not prescribe. That generosity is the quiet reward of abandoning the assumed body: clothes that meet the wearer where they are rather than insisting the wearer conform to them.

Dressing across the line

For the wearer, the merging of the collections has a practical dividend that the philosophical framing tends to obscure: it makes for a more generous, more shareable wardrobe. When garments are designed without a fixed body in mind, they tend to accommodate a wider range of them, and the old barriers to borrowing across the line — of fit, of cut, of assumed proportion — begin to soften. A coat conceived for no particular frame becomes a coat that many frames can wear, and the wardrobe stops being two segregated closets and becomes a single shared resource.

The styling of this shared wardrobe rewards an attention to proportion over category. The interesting question is no longer whether a garment was intended for a man or a woman but how it sits, where it falls, what it does to the line of the body wearing it. An oversized shape reads differently on different frames, and the pleasure of the merged wardrobe lies in discovering those differences rather than legislating against them. The wearer who dresses this way thinks like a designer working without an assumed body — beginning with the garment and asking what it might do, rather than beginning with a category and cutting to fit it.

There is an economy to this beyond the aesthetic. A wardrobe organised around proportion rather than gender is a wardrobe that can be shared, handed between people, drawn from freely across a household or a friendship. Pieces circulate that once stayed put, and the garment gains a longer, more useful life for being loosed from a single assigned wearer. This is the quiet practical face of a shift usually discussed in loftier terms — not a statement about identity so much as a wardrobe that simply works harder, offering itself to more bodies and more occasions than the old divided closet ever could. The philosophy may be what makes headlines, but the generosity is what makes the clothes worth living in.

The limits, and the direction

The shift is not universal, and it would be naive to pretend it is. Plenty of houses still draw the line firmly, and there are practical reasons — fit, tradition, customer expectation — that keep it in place. Tailoring in particular resists easy merger; the disciplines of fitting a garment closely to a body remain, for now, substantially different depending on the body, and the craft has not yet dissolved those differences even where the philosophy would like to.

Yet the direction is set, and it is downstream of a culture that got there first. Fashion, as it often does, is catching up to how people already live — dressing across the old lines, borrowing freely, treating the wardrobe as a shared resource rather than a segregated one. The calendar’s neat division was always a convenience of the industry more than a reflection of the street. As the shows merge, they are not imposing a new way of dressing so much as admitting, belatedly, that the old categories were never as fixed as the schedule pretended — and that the cloth itself never much cared who was wearing it.