I gave them back their bodies: Bodies that were drenched in sweat, due to fashion’s finery, lace, corsets, underclothes, padding.”Īccording to Bridget DeChagas at NPR, "She was inspired by men's wear: shirts with clean collars, simple sweaters and loose belted jackets. Whether out of defiance or not, she "mixed up the vocabulary of male and female clothes," TIME added.Īs Business Insider reported, Chanel herself said, "I gave women a sense of freedom. If that meant trading in heavy gowns in favor of men's fabrics and styles, then so be it. While Chanel refused to call herself a feminist, as TIME reported, she did defend the idea that a person should express themselves based on how they feel, and not how their gender supposedly tells them to feel.
Chanel personified the independent roles women were about to enter by providing them with the option of pants and masculine-like silhouettes. When Chanel started creating clothes in 1913 (right around the era of the Suffrage movement), women were just getting used to the idea of leaving the stuffy roles of Victorian femininity behind, including lace necklines and petticoats. When you think Coco Chanel, you might think of little black dresses with slim cigarette pants, or chic Parisian women dabbing rose-colored lipsticks onto napkins. 1910s: Coco Chanel Gave Women The Gift Of Pants So let's take a look at the androgynous trends throughout the 20th century, and how they questioned the extent to which we should follow gender roles. There are other political threads to androgyny as well, whereby issues of feminism and the gay rights movement have intersected with expressing a non-binary aesthetic through clothing. Aesthetic androgyny arguably stems from the desire not to want to be constrained by gender, and to have the freedom of deciding what we should or shouldn't wear. There was an evolution of androgynous fashion throughout the 20th century, and it's never been as simple as a means to pissing off our parents (though every eyeliner-wearing, bangs-in-my-eye-tossing bone in my body loves that idea). But this isn't the first time we've experienced androgyny in fashion. Or better yet, what it's evolving towards.ĭriving the shift is arguably contemporary open-mindedness that encourages gender fluidity. Androgynous fashion is coming to the forefront in a big way, and it may come with underlining commentary about where our society is heading.
In the last couple of years, genderless designs in the clothes hitting our display windows have grown more common - the classic men versus women dichotomy blurring. Personally, I think we're on the verge of those scenes becoming more of the norm. It's not a side-eye of bewilderment, but of appreciation. Imagine riding the bus in the morning and side-eyeing a sheer pussy-bow blouse on the cute guy with the scruff reading his paper next to you, as well as the engineer boots and buzzed crew-cut of the woman standing by the door. There's been a new trend of sorts on our radar, and its name is androgynous fashion.