By Nina Larbi ’22
Op-Ed Editor
Released on Nov. 24, Vogue’s December 2020 issue has sparked controversy, as the cover features British singer Harry Styles wearing a Gucci dress. Conservative commentators like Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro have voiced their disapproval of Styles’ appearance, claiming that wearing a dress is an outright attack on masculinity. Various people have come to Styles’ defense, asserting that gender roles are restrictive and clothing is genderless.
As important as it is to have these conversations, I feel as though this happens every six months. Harry Styles will wear one skirt in a photoshoot or paint his nails, and media outlets and social media platforms will shoot out article after article and post after post on how he is either a traitor to masculinity or how he is the vanguard of breaking gender norms — all for one measly skirt. Whether you fall into one of those two camps — or neither — Styles has been chosen as the face of “gender-neutral fashion,” as affirmed by Priya Elan in The Guardian. Though he is a major public figure who dresses in a manner that challenges traditional Western masculinity, centering him as the sole forerunner of gender neutrality in fashion is dismissive of the various people of color that are doing the same.
To answer Shapiro and Owens’ rhetorical questions on the fate of Western masculinity, men have been wearing skirts since antiquity. The link between pants and masculinity may be due to the necessity of divided legs for riding, but the strong association of the two was cemented during the 19th century in the West. Traditional masculinity hasn’t been traditional for very long. Moreover, there has been a myriad of people who have challenged conventional masculinity since, like Prince and David Bowie.
The fashion world itself specifically owes much to LGBTQ+ artists of color. In the 1990 documentary “Paris is Burning,” director Jennie Livingston recorded the 1980s New York City ballroom culture and the involvement of Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ people in the scene. “Paris is Burning” provided insight into a community that was disparaged for its race, gender, sexuality and class, and has been recognized as culturally significant by the Library of Congress. The documentary’s depiction of ballroom culture heavily inspired the popular television show “Pose,” which has been met with critical acclaim. Ballroom culture and the window “Paris is Burning” provided for mainstream audiences has roused people. The fashion industry is no exception.
Though clothes are highly gendered modes of expression, fashion has always pushed the envelope regarding gender nonconformity. The Met Gala is certainly a place where gender norms can be challenged, as it is meant to be a spectacle put on by celebrities and designers for the fashion critique of the masses.
The 2019 Met Gala pushed a bit more with the theme “camp.” Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine, picked the theme herself, along with the curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, Andrew Bolton. Celebrities showed up in a variety of colorful and over-the-top costumes. But, as Lena Waithe put it, “Black drag queens invented camp.” She continued, “Pepper LaBeija, Benny Ninja, RuPaul, all these pioneers. … I really wanted to pay tribute to them and all that they did for the culture. … They started this whole ‘camp’ thing by being over-the-top.” Despite this long historical precedent, camp was still considered groundbreaking in 2019, as well as Styles’ dress a year later.
Styles’ Gucci dress certainly got more attention than is warranted in 2020, even if he is the first solo man on a Vogue cover. The Vogue issue praised him as “revolutionary” when he and many others have worn skirts and dresses before.
Why is it that when Styles does it, he’s radical? Various artists of color similarly challenge gender norms but are met with heavy criticism and little praise. To be clear, Styles isn’t intentionally profiting off of femininity to give his work more intrigue. In an interview with The Guardian, he answered such claims: “Am I sprinkling in nuggets of sexual ambiguity to try and be more interesting? No.” He then went on to say, “I want things to look a certain way. Not because it makes me look gay, or it makes me look straight, or it makes me look bisexual, but because I think it looks cool.”
Though he is not deliberately wearing dresses to market himself as LGBTQ+ adjacent, Styles’ brand of gender nonconformity is the most easily accepted by people because he is a white cisgender man. Many artists of color, LGBTQ+ or not, are told that they are “doing too much” when they adopt gender neutrality and subcultures like ballroom as part of their image. Prince, Jaden Smith, Janet Jackson, Janelle Monae, Young Thug and Lil Nas X have all been branded over-the-top as if they are challenging gender roles too much for their image choices. Still, Styles’ ruffled dress somehow seems to be the perfectly palatable type of nonconformity. Young Thug wore a similar pale blue ruffled dress on his “JEFFERY” mixtape cover, but it didn’t create nearly as much buzz as Styles’ Gucci number.
I am happy to see that people are growing increasingly supportive of Styles’ manner of dress, but I also want to see other artists, the ones I mentioned earlier, receive that same praise. Rather than having a narrow type of “acceptable” gender nonconformity, we should seek to expand and include artists of color and their nonconforming presentation. We need to recognize the impact that people of color have had on fashion and, rather than appropriate, give credit where credit is due.