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Vogue - Is the future of fashion gender free?

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Vogue - Is the future of fashion gender free?

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An article by Liam Freeman of Vogue titled Is the future of fashion gender free? outlines the longevity of gender classification in the fashion industry and the deterioration of it as we advance into a more fluid way of dress with gender-neutral collections and socio-cultural values. Throughout this article there are many instances where gender is referred as nothing more than an idea, an interpretation by each person that can vary significantly. Its place in fashion currently is debatable as “Gender has become less polarised in the hands of designers such as Allesandro Michele of Gucci, Nicolas Ghesquiere of Louis Vuitton and Vivienne Westwood.” (Freeman, 2018) This article is constantly highlighting that gender is not a necessary factor in the creative aspect of the fashion industry, if anything it creates boundaries. In the eyes of Freeman, the binary view of gender, when it comes to clothes, is dissolving. This generation encourages creative diversity in fashion and the strict gender classifications of what is ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ disables this from flourishing, we do not perceive gender or the values of gender the same as we previously have. A further point made by Freeman about the importance of the value of ‘gender-neutral’ in fashion is that womenswear and menswear have not been fitting into such a distinct and precise box. Some menswear designers market their collections in womenswear as this is where they perform best. This suggests that women enjoy more diversity in style and approach fashion with a more open mind, this could have stemmed from the feminist movement. An ambition for women to prove they can be everything that men are or simply because gender should not define what we should or should not be interested in. In conclusion, this article focuses on the success of gender-fluid dress. It highlights the cultural importance of freedom in fashion, freedom in identity and freedom in self by disassociating yourself with a stereotype that has been thrust upon you as a social construct that demands to define who you are.

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As Masayuki Ino's 'gender neutral' label Doublet wins one of fashion's most coveted awards - the LVMH Prize - Vogue speaks to the designer and other creatives who are bringing an increasing fluidity to the way we dress, tapping into a sustainable new business model in the process.

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https://www-wgsn-com.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/content/board_viewer/#/69688/page/1

Vogue Italia stated that “it is difficult to define gender by body language, by hairstyle, or by attitude. A romantic, rose-patterned shirt is just as likely to belong to a man as to his partner. Long hair, cropped hair? Who can tell? Who cares?” (Vogue Italia, 2016). This is the attitude that Generation-Z projects towards traditional societal conventions surrounding the idea of Gender. The article titled ‘Genderless Beauty’ portrays the idea that younger generations celebrate ‘individuality’ which may be onset by the rise in social media use. Male-makeup artists, such as James Charles, rose to fame on platforms such as YouTube which allow like-minded people to connect and also break the barriers and social stereotypes. The article particularly focuses on the male makeup movement, where everything from products, packaging and promotion are becoming more gender neutral. Acclaimed make-up brand, MAC Cosmetics, has changed their mantra to “All Ages, All Races, All Sexes”. They are putting this into action by collaborating with male artists to create gender fluid lines of makeup. However, due to Generation-Z’s ability to see through inauthentic modes of promotion, each step taken must be tactical and be genuine in its intentions to better the beauty industry and sculpt a more modern idea of gender neutrality.

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WGSN - “Gender-Neutral Retail - Does it Have a Future?” (Nat)

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WGSN - “Gender-Neutral Retail - Does it Have a Future?” (Nat)

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For 8 weeks in March of 2015, department-store Selfridges devoted 3 floors in it’s London flagship to gender-neutral products. The website featured both male and female models wearing the products. Linda Hewson, creative director of Selfridges, said that this initiative was “not about harnessing a ‘trend’, but rather tapping into a mindset and acknowledging and responding to a cultural shift that is happening now”. The article concluded that for a well-known store like Selfridges, this concept of genderless retail will most likely work in their favour as they still have women’s and men’s floors, however for smaller, more mainstream or independent retailers, it is less likely to be as successful, as it is does not appeal to everyone yet.

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Vogue - There's more at stake with fashion's gender-fluid movement than you realise. (Kristen)

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Vogue - There's more at stake with fashion's gender-fluid movement than you realise. (Kristen)

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This article discusses the difference between gender-neutral fashion and gender-fluid and how sometimes gender-neutral trends can detract from gender expression. Therefore, instead of acting as though gender doesn't exist, we need to embrace the ways it does. The article also discusses how the inclusion of trans people can help to broaden their representation in society.

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Ever since Jaden Smith wore that Louis Vuitton skirt, I've read more articles about fashion's so-called "gender-fluid movement" than I can count. I've read listicles that proclaim gender-bending style as fashion's future, interviews in which designers proudly describe their binary-busting bona fides, op-eds pointing to gender fluidity as an antidote to toxic masculinity, as well as plenty of reviews playfully hailing the disruptive potential of men wearing this and women wearing that. Having read enough of these pieces, it would seem we are living in an unprecedented period of gender upheaval, a time when traditional expectations of what constitutes men's and women's dress are being blended, blurred, even reimagined altogether. Of course, this isn't entirely the case.
Read more: Laverne Cox Is British Vogue's First Trans Cover Star
What we now call gender-bending fashion has existed as long as there have been gender norms to bend - which is to say long, long before Jaden's 2016 moment. Yet, even if not necessarily new, something about today's fixation with fluidity feels different - at once more substantial and politically engaged. More than ever, the gender-bending we've grown accustomed to seeing on the runway is accompanied by a growing awareness of and sensitivity to the experiences of trans and gender non-conforming (trans&gnc) individuals - people for whom the bending of gender is not merely a style, but an identity.

In fact, I identify as such a person; more specifically, as non-binary and transfeminine, terms I've chosen to describe myself as someone who generally presents more femme, though prefers not to locate their selfhood in terms of the traditional male/female divide. Because fashion has always been one of the most useful tools for carving a space for myself to experiment with my identity, I've been thrilled to see more brands thinking critically, publicly, and creatively about their relationship to gender. But, as with any instance in which queerness is rendered to serve commercial purposes, I've wondered: What's at stake? And what might be gained for my community through mainstream fashion's involvement in the larger cultural "gender-fluid movement"?

To answer this question, I spoke to some of the most influential queer and trans&gnc folks in fashion, including Pierre Davis of No Sesso, Eden Loweth of Art School, Charles Jeffrey of Loverboy, model and activist Munroe Bergdorf, actor Ezra Miller, and model and actress Ava Grey. Through these conversations, the first thing that became clear was the need to distinguish gender-fluid fashion from what is often called gender-neutral, androgynous, or unisex fashion. Where the latter aims to disrupt established norms through dull, often billowing garments meant to transcend suits and skirts, the former strives toward the same goal by disentangling the normative association between skirts and women, suits and men.

As for the extent to which gender-fluid versus gender-neutral fashion benefits the trans&gnc community, there's really no competition. Gender-neutral fashion, even if well-intentioned, almost immediately wilts as a means of furthering a progressive gender politics. To collapse gender expression into a wash of baggy black jumpers inevitably overlooks trans people who wear skirts and suits to affirm their identities. As Ezra Miller tells me: "Gender itself is not our enemy and it will never really be over because it's a vital aspect of existence... but if you want it, we can see a world in which we are liberated from the bonds of it and nourished by the joys and beauty of it." The point, then, is not to act as if gender doesn't exist, but rather to reorient ourselves toward embracing the myriad and beautiful ways in which it does.

According to model and trans activist, Ava Grey, one way the gender-fluid movement in fashion could help our culture engage this necessary reorientation is through emboldening more trans&gnc representation. "When queer-identifying youth see queer representation on the runway and in media, we become symbols of hope for them," says Grey. "We show them lives that have been able to move past the constant bullying and negative statistics."

Echoing the appeal to the benefits of increased representation is Charles Jeffrey, designer of the fearlessly avant-garde label, Charles Jeffrey Loverboy. Jeffrey, who doesn't identify as trans himself, nevertheless brings to his work one of the most ruthless attitudes toward binary definitions of gender in current design. "I think the positives of a bigger global conversation about gender outweigh any negatives," he told me via email, adding: "From what I've seen in culture, in and outside of fashion, there's indisputably more diversity, inclusivity and also information about trans and gender-non-confirming people. It's real - real people, being able to give themselves their own platform to communicate their journeys."

But as Munroe Bergdorf points out, trans-inclusive casting is just the beginning. "What we need to be doing is making sure that fashion is as inclusive behind the scenes as it is in front of the camera or on the runway." According to Bergdorf (who recently founded GODDESS, an online platform geared toward community building among women, trans and non-binary folks, and people who are intersex) ensuring that the recent mainstream interest in gender fluidity outlives its trendy status requires an appreciation that "trans people are more than just trans and can be part of a team, can be part of a project without their transness being the focal point, or even an issue for other people".

Even while creating opportunities for greater representation, large companies' involvement in today's gender-fluid movement risks overshadowing the work of more authentic, more community-oriented labels. Art School's Eden Loweth goes so far as to contend that there are two gender-fluid movements: one constituted by the bandwagon-hopping large and small houses, and another composed of labels like their own, or Davis's No Sesso, brands that emerged from the trans&gnc community and involve them from the studio, to the runway, to the store.

For Loweth, gender-fluid fashion is anything but a trend. It's their work. It's also their life. It is about honoring and supporting their community, not, as they tell me, "monetizing something that is almost day-to-day hate for people like me on the streets. When I moved to London, trans women were a major force in my life that really protected me as quite a naïve young person living in a really big city," they add. "Having those women involved in the actual process of us doing fittings is so informative, because they all have their own requirements. Their bodies are changing almost daily if they're on hormone treatment, and that's the basis of where we started working out what we wanted to do."
Read more: "She Was Our Seer, Our Oracle, Our Liberator": Writer Kuchenga Pays Tribute To Toni Morrison
The effect of this authentic approach is clearest in the clothes, according to Munroe Bergdorf, who's walked for Art School and has joined the designers in advocating for a non-binary option on official British documentation. "It's more about the wearer and making sure that the clothing fits the body, not the body fits the clothes," she says of the label. "Usually a dress would be made on a body to fit a mannequin essentially. And that's why a lot of models look the same," Bergdorf explains. "But they've taken into consideration the differences of trans bodies."

It is this level of concern - not only for how the clothes look, but also for what they mean to a wearer - that often seems lost on brands from Zara to Thom Browne, companies whose forays into questions of gender expression and identity pierce no deeper than a collection of wearable picnic blankets, or runway shows that present gender fluidity as the stuff of the avant-garde rather than the everyday. "Are these brands donating to these communities that inspire their runways?" No Sesso's Pierre Davis asks, underscoring the opportunistic relationship between labels that benefit from the illusion of progressive politics without more robustly supporting the communities that influence their designs. "A lot of these big brands say that they're designing gender-friendly clothing, but the margin that's able to buy these pieces is just rich people," she continues.

And that's assuming these brands intend to sell their more gender fluid pieces at all. Of course, the runway has always been a place for experimentation, yet there's certainly something disingenuous when brands show collections that refute the binary before selling their clothes within the same divisive categories of men's and womenswear that they've used for years. "For brands that want to almost use gender as a way of being provocative or exciting and contemporary, they're not actually talking about the issues that matter," says Bergdorf. "They're taking the top line, which is trend, and not speaking about the realities, which is not fabulous all the time. It's not fashion all the time. It's survival."
Read more: Christy Turlington Burns On How To Become A (Quiet, But Devastatingly Effective) Activist
Bergdorf is right. According to Stonewall, more than four in five trans youth have endured verbal abuse; three in five have endured threatening behavior; and nearly 40 per cent have experienced physical assault. In many ways, to be trans in the world today is to live in danger and, understandably, in fear - a truth that strikes a sour note when told against the backdrop of a fashion industry that encourages pushing gendered boundaries without more robustly speaking out regarding the pervasive dangers associated with doing so. Indeed, one of the more concerning aspects of the fashion industry's involvement in the gender-fluid movement is its propensity for conflating expression and identity, erasing trans&gnc people who don't, or can't, express their authentic selves safely.

Mainstream fashion's involvement in today's gender-fluid movement has no doubt helped expand countless people's perception of how men and women can dress. It has even exposed the public to a fuller picture of the whole constellation of genders with which one might identify. But if it is to earn a fraction of the political potency it has already seemed to claim for itself, the industry must not only continue to employ and celebrate its trans&gnc members, but also make a more substantial investment in the lives - and not simply the looks - of the broader trans&gnc community. "This is not just fashion," says Pierre Davis. "This is a lifestyle and it needs to be taken seriously."
More from British Vogue:

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There's More At Stake With Fashion's Gender-Fluid Movement Than You Realise

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"The industry must make a more substantial investment in the lives - and not simply the looks - of the broader trans&gnc community," says Wren Sanders

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https://www-wgsn-com.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/content/board_viewer/#/69688/page/1
As with most adopted trends, the progressions in deconstructing gender stereotypes in fashion and beauty are mainly lead by celebrity influence. Its a combination of more diverse representation in fashion advertising and media, and everyday people seeing popular influencers and celebrities branch out in gender expression. The article lists rappers such as Young Thug and Jaden Smith as examples who, by not limiting themselves to traditionally masculine clothing, are demonstrating to a wide audience that ‘masculinity’ can look like anything and that different styles of clothing shouldn’t be strictly reserved for only certain people. Following celebrities who people idolise is one of the ways to open up the world of fashion and beauty to more than just a traditional female audience.

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https://www.wgsn.com/content/board_viewer/#/64880/page/1

The article focuses on the movement towards a bigger emphasis on ‘unisex clothing’ and ‘gender subversion’ within fashion during the past decade. Specifically focused on denim, the article discussed the ways in which brands have diverged from the traditional convention of categorising clothes within gender.

Focusing on the millennial audience, the article explores 6 key points:

Couple Looks – matching fits for males / females (**does this perpetuate gender?**)

Unisex Worker – simple workwear designs

Neutral Norm – standard of neutral fits and colours

Sexless Streetwear – broadening the streetwear market from masculinity oriented to less rigid implementations of gender in streetwear garments

Ambiguous Design – divergence from traditionally gender-targeted clothing

Body (Un)conscious – focus on oversized, ambiguous silhouettes w/ neutral palettes

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https://www-wgsn-com.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/content/board_viewer/#/69688/page/1
It starts off by explaining how the younger generations (millennials and gen z), are more about the celebration of individuality and gender fluid traits/patterns. There is greatly less pressure for masculine and feminine gender conformity and brands of the modern era have started embracing this following the younger generations. It explained how social media has played a huge part and been a catalyst (James Charles and Marc Jacobs’s). Gender stereotypes such as long hair on women have started to change as more people are willing to take risks. A growth of trans community has also lead to acceptance of blurred genders. Make up now being aimed at men as well as women, androgynes scents of colones and perfumes, as well as skin care products now being marketed unisex. Overall it discussed how acceptance of gender neutral traits has become more common and will continue to over time.

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- brands recreating skin care and beauty products to be plain and simple colours, simple packaging so it appears gender neutral and doesn't affect who will be more inclined to purchase it
- moisturizer can only do the job it was designed to do. It doesn't know if it's on men's skin or women's skin
- influencers are using their fame to push forward the idea of dressing however you want, challenging the 'alpha male' idea of how men are believed to behave
- Jaden Smith and Young Thug are not portraying themselves in traditional masculine clothing, trying to achieve the gender-neutral style, and show that any gender can wear the clothing they like

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DAZED - Eight words that changed the way we see ourselves in the 2010s (Gwyn)

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DAZED - Eight words that changed the way we see ourselves in the 2010s (Gwyn)

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- Elaborates that even today, there are only a handful of nonbinary celebrities (with the likes of Ruby Rose, Sam Smith, etc)
- Notes that we’ve come a long way since 2010 when the word was something most wouldn’t know about.
- Discusses that many countries - even those that have legalised and have a lot of movement surrounding LGBTQ+ rights and gender equality - don’t recognize this term in the legislations. Ultimately though, the increasing number of people vocalising that they identify as nonbinary is eliminating the general view of there being only 2 genders.

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Deep fakes, influencers, viral fashion - we live in a world unrecognisable from the one we stood in ten years ago. As a chaotic decade comes to a close, we're speaking to the people who helped shape the last ten years and analysing the cultural shifts that have defined them. Explore the decade on our interactive timeline here, or head here to check out all our features.
It's hard to cast your mind back to ten years ago, and think about the ways that language was different. But there are a whole bunch of words that we say often now and didn't really use back then, like "nonbinary" or "woke", for example. In fact, thinking about which words shaped the decade, it seems a lot of them are to do with who we are, or the way that we view ourselves, which makes sense given that the 2010s felt like the decade of identity politics.

Why was that the case? Well, a global swing towards populism and the rise of some terrifying right-wing leaders left a lot of us feeling disillusioned with traditional party politics. Perhaps growing inequality and wealth divides coupled with a sense of injustice or oppression along race, class and gender lines made us reexamine our political affiliations - and look to one another.

Or maybe, in the decade when we used more social media than ever before, we just got really, really self-obsessed.

Either way, despite what the right might say about the left ("political correctness gone mad!") or what boomers might say about millennials and Gen Z (that we're just a bunch of pathetic snowflakes), a lot of good actually came out of the shift towards identity politics in the 2010s. It made us more conscious about relative privilege and intersectionality, and it contributed to the energy of important social movements like SlutWalk, Black Lives Matter, trans and nonbinary visibility, and #MeToo and #TimesUp. And in return, these movements gave us new words that helped us to see the world differently, more clearly.

Below, we take look back at the decade through the lens of eight of these new(- ish) words.

WOKE

Ok so "woke" is not a new word. It comes from "stay woke", used in African American communities to mean "keep yourself aware to political injustice, mostly racism". However, its use by Black Lives Matter after the movement was officially founded in 2014 propelled it into much wider circles, and the word was soon co-opted by white people, as well as brands and marketeers. Its meaning also morphed slightly; "woke" kind of just became a byword for "politically correct".

That a word which literally means "stay aware about racial inequality" was culturally appropriated seems beyond irony, but also sadly quintessentially 2010s. This was the era of " blackfishing ", tokenised diversity, and everyone everywhere saying "yaas" and "fierce" like they were in a Harlem ballroom. That so many people say "woke" without thinking about where the word actually comes from makes it another casualty of a hyperspeed internet culture where people constantly take and borrow without crediting or researching the facts.

Woke's rise in popularity in the 2010s also points to enduring racial inequalities in America, highlighted by some horrific moments including multiple police shootings of black Americans, Dylan Roof's mass shooting in a Charleston church in 2015, and the Unite The Right Charlottesville rallies in 2017, along with the ensuing car terrorist attack on counter-protesters.

In 2019, the word came full circle when Barack Obama, America's first black president, criticised "woke culture". It had basically become call-out culture, he said, with people cancelling others online to virtue signal how woke they are. "This idea of purity and you're never compromised and you're politically woke, and all that stuff," he said, "you should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws."

SLUT

Over the course of the 2010s, feminists worked hard to take the word "slut" and reclaim it from an insult into a symbol of sex positivity, so the idea that women should be able to do whatever they want with their bodies, without worrying about the kind of societal double standards that tell us men can sleep around and women can't, for instance.

On January 24, 2011, a moronic and misogynistic Toronto police constable called Michael Sanguinetti ushered in a new, not-so-progressive decade by giving a talk on campus rape at a Canada university. "I've been told I'm not supposed to say this - however, women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised," he told students, in a giant step back for mankind. But we quickly realised this view was common when just a month later, a Canadian judge in Winnipeg called Justice Robert Dewar made comments during a rape trial implying that the woman who was raped was partly responsible.

In protest of these incidents, Canadian activists Sonya Barnett and Heather Jarvis organised a rally: "We want Police Services to truly get behind the idea that victim-blaming, slut-shaming, and sexual profiling are never acceptable," Barnett said. Taking place on April 3 in Toronto, over 3,000 people showed up to the march, some wearing fishnets and underwear to make the point that women should be able to wear whatever the fuck they want in public.

"If SlutWalk has a legacy, it's the work it did to erode society's deepseated Madonna-Whore complex"

The demo was called SlutWalk, and the concept quickly spread: by the end of 2011, sister events had popped up in Melbourne, London, and cities across the US, as well as Iceland, Korea, India, Brazil and other countries. In 2015, ex-stripper, ex-girlfriend of Kanye West and feminist campaigner Amber Rose started her own SlutWalk in LA (she called it Amber Rose's SlutWalk - a classic Amber Rose move).

The punk spirit of SlutWalk - slogans on a bare chest, balaclavas, unruly female anger - aped groups like FEMEN, the Ukranian radical feminists who protested topless at the end of the 2000s, as well as Pussy Riot. Its message reflected other anti-slut shaming campaigns or voices that sprung up in the 2010s too, like The UnSlut project, a campaign to counter sexually aggressive bullying in schools after the suicides of three young American girls, or the work of writer and journalist Karley Sciortino, aka Slutever.

#Slutwalk was a key moment in ushering in fourth-wave feminism, and its global reach paved the way for the #TimesUpRally and the Women's March. If SlutWalk has a legacy, it's the work it did to erode society's deep-seated Madonna-Whore complex, but in the criticism that it garnered, partly from sex-negative feminists who thought that "slut" wasn't a word worth reclaiming, it reminded us that the work sex-positive feminists have to do is a long way from over.

Happy #InternationalWomansDay ❤️
Today wouldn't be complete w/o shouting out @DaRealAmberRose who has been fighting for social change & equality for years with her SlutWalk movement 🌹 See you ALL in attendance at this year's #arsw18
(date TBD!) pic.twitter.com/Y0kaSTD6kZ
- Amber Rose SlutWalk (@slutwalk_la) March 8, 2018

TROLL

Imagine a time when we thought "troll" meant "a dwarf or giant in Scandinavian folklore inhabiting caves or hills". Well, that's what life was like in simpler times, before 2014, which is when the dictionary revised the word's meaning to include: "a person who intentionally antagonizes others online by posting inflammatory, irrelevant, or offensive comments or other disruptive content".

Today, we think of "trolling" as simply winding someone up - not just online but also offline. However, for a while, it felt more sinister. In 2014, trolling seemed to converge with harassment as #gamergate, an anti-feminist attack on female developers in the video game industry unfolded. #gamergate was basically a bunch of anonymous creeps and angry alt-right bros sending women rape threats and doxing them. Not quite trolling, no - online harassment is illegal, trolling is not - but it did make us stop and consider what these kinds of keyboard warriors were motivated by. (Clue: misogyny).

"At some point, while ignoring the pond scum of the internet, we realised that we actually cared much more about what the more politically correct voices online thought of us"

Trolling as a concept sums up two difficult truths that we learned way back in the early days of social media, the 2000s: that we are willing to behave in dramatically different ways online than off, and that this behaviour is hard to moderate. Twitter was meant to be the Roman Forum, instead, we got the Colosseum - a load of people savaging each other for sport.

Over the 2010s, we came to understand that yes, some trolls were extremists, but a lot of trolls were victims of bullying themselves, or just people crying out for attention. "Don't feed the trolls," we were told, until at some point while ignoring the pond scum of the internet, we realised that we actually cared much more about what the more politically correct voices online thought of us. Suddenly, getting cancelled became a much scarier fate than getting trolled.

INFLUENCER

It wouldn't be a list of words of the decade without this defining piece of marketing jargon. We all know what "influencer" means: someone who wields the influence, particularly in the digital sphere, to encourage their army of loyal followers to buy something. If the late 2000s gave us Instagram, the 2010s gave us its stars; the Bella Hadids, Kylie Jenners and Luka Sabbats of this world, and the modern parable of Caroline Calloway.

These influencers sit at the intersection of so many other would-be words of the decade: they sell us wellness, they're usually clad in athleisure, they take a shit ton of selfies, they apparently invented sadfishing, and if they fuck up badly enough, they become scammers, whether they meant to or not. But in some ways, haven't they been scamming us all along?

A recent article on Wired remembers how, at the beginning of influencer culture, in about 2006, we were outraged and concerned that bloggers could be sent products for free or given money to try to promote something to us, unsuspecting consumers. Rules were put in place to improve transparency, but then we gradually got desensitised to scrolling through seeing murky spon con all day anyway. As we viewed more of it, influencers multiplied, and so did their paychecks (Kim K can reportedly charge $1 million for a post), and with these rewards came the problem of engagement fraud, and the pressure to buy followers.

We already knew that influencers didn't make us feel great about ourselves, but in the second half of the decade, shitstorms like Fyre Festival and Calloway made us question the authenticity of influencers as a concept, while things really entered a surrealist parody hellscape around the time we got given nonexistent CGI influencers. Then, with the invention of micro-influencers, the influencer concept was democratised into pointlessness. Finally, when the Pope called the Virgin Mary an influencer, we knew it had basically lost all meaning.

And yet, somehow, as we enter the 2020s, the influence of the influencer prevails: a recent survey of American kids found that, for 86 per cent of them, it was a dream job. If that's not depressing, what is?

NONBINARY

It's the cusp of 2020, and there are still less nonbinary celebrities than we can count on two hands; Jonathan Van Ness, Sam Smith, Asia Kate Dillon, Tommy Dorfman, Amandla Stenberg, Lachlan Watson and Ruby Rose being the main examples. It's a strong reminder that identifying as "nonbinary" was most definitely not a thing we really knew or thought about back in 2010, despite versions of the term - like two-spirit in Indigenous North American communities or X-gender in Japan - being around for a while. In fact, "they"/ and "them" pronouns were only added to the dictionary as singular, non-gender-specific in September 2019.

Nonbinary people will know well the eternal agony of trying to have their "they"/ "them" pronouns respected by people who are slow to grasp or just unwilling to learn. But on a wider scale, even some of the most so-called "progressive" countries in the world when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights and gender equality are not embracing the legislation or social changes required to actually recognise nonbinary people's existence. Countries like The Netherlands and Sweden have all fallen behind in pan-European rankings on LGBTQ+ rights, failing to show progress in terms of how gender is legally recognised.

Yet, the fact that more and more people are identifying as nonbinary - in the public eye or otherwise - is slowly eroding the conception that everyone falls into one of two gender categories. Merriam-Webster recently reported that searches for "they" increased by 313% in 2019 on 2018, meaning that more people are looking into its meaning.

In spite of a hostile climate for trans and gender-nonconforming people right now, the work nonbinary people and their allies are doing to dismantle the gender binary and the stereotypes that come with it will change the way that we think about gender in the 2020s in ways that we can't yet imagine.

For me, it's actually a non binary person in a non binary outfit 🏳️‍🌈 https://t.co/rm1rCG08d0
- Jonathan Van Ness (@jvn) August 27, 2019

ADULTING

Trending around 2016, "adulting" makes the list of words that changed the way we see ourselves because, despite the fact you may not have actually heard it, or if you did, you probably found it incredibly annoying, it sadly encapsulates the generation that came of age - or rather didn't - in the 2010s.

According to some definitions, "adulting" meant holding down a nine to five job or saving up for a mortgage. So, you know, doing traditionally adult things. But it was also used to describe the more silly cultural signifiers of adulthood, like having a supply of wrapping paper in your house. Or else just really banal life things, like cooking dinner and doing your washing. The fact that "adulting" needed to exist as a phrase at all was telling: growing up was no longer a given, but something we needed a stupid neologism for.

Post-2008 recession, we saw a continued shift back - in the West, at least - of the age at which people could afford to buy a house, get married and viably have kids. The proliferation of convenient apps for everything, like Deliveroo or Uber, infantilised us while giving us a new way to waste the small amount of money we'd never be able to do much with anyway, while the rise of dating apps like Tinder and Hinge made it feel less like there was a "One" and instead quite possibly many.

"Demographers have always placed us in generational categories. But it feels like we became increasingly obsessed with doing it for ourselves in the 2010s"

We were no longer hitting our life markers, no longer meeting a life partner at 18 and settling down at 21, as per the now bizarre seeming old standard. "Adulting" described a group of economically challenged and emotionally stilted people, simultaneously broke (at least compared to their parents) and yet spoiled for choice.

Demographers have always placed us in generational categories. But it feels like we became increasingly obsessed with doing it for ourselves in the 2010s. (See quintessentially millennial TV shows like Girls and viral phrases like " OK boomer".) "Adulting" was in some ways born out of this obsession. But it didn't take us long to feel grossed out by how twee, middle class, and according to some people, sexist the phrase was. Maybe it was just too on the nose.

Or perhaps, ironically, we just outgrew it; Gen Z, supposedly more self-aware than Gen Y, know better than to think cooking yourself dinner is anything to be particularly proud of, especially when the world is burning.

TOXIC

The phrase "toxic masculinity" has been around for a few decades, but the 2010s was the era that the media really picked it up as a kind of catch-all term that speaks to the social pressures put on men to be aggressive, dominant or competitive. It's a phrase that defined the decade because of the #metoo movement, because of men like Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein.

But you don't have to be an (alleged) rapist to be a solid example of what toxic masculinity can look like (however studies have found that sexist attitudes do lead to sexual violence). Some other examples are also quintessential 2010s buzzwords: mansplaining, gaslighting, and in the extreme, incel culture, incels being involuntary celibates: men who feel rejected by women so seek out revenge.

When Gillette made an advert about toxic masculinity in January 2019, the response and backlash it received showed divisions over the idea of dismantling toxic masculinity. Some praised the advert as groundbreaking, arguing that the pressures of toxic masculinity weighed so heavy on men that they're probably contributing to high rates of male suicide in Britain and America. Others said that the video simply reinforced the idea that men are all violent thugs or abusers, while Men's Rights Activists argued that men should be men, and act how they want.

The debate took a real dive when certain women waded in to defend men, like Meryll Streep, who claimed that "we hurt our boys by calling something toxic masculinity. Women can be pretty fucking toxic... It's toxic people." Ok, so that might have one small strain of truth, but this is also the woman who wore a T-shirt that said " I'd rather be a rebel than a slave" and told the Berlin film festival " we're all Africans really ". Two real low points of the 2010s.

SNOWFLAKE

How could a list of the words that made the 2010s be complete without "snowflake"? It was 2016 when Brett Easton Ellis famously used it to describe easily offended and overly entitled millennials, while he was defending an article written by an LA Weekly journalist about Sky Ferreira's sex appeal. "Oh, little snowflakes, when did you all become grandmothers and society matrons, clutching your pearls in horror at someone who has an opinion about something, a way of expressing themselves that's not the mirror image of yours, you snivelling little weak-ass narcissists?" he asked wryly.

The same year, "snowflake" was named a word of the year, and we got a lengthy analysis in the book I Find That Offensive! by Claire Fox, which asked, "how did we become so thin-skinned?"

As much as they'd probably love to claim it, the "snowflake" conversation was much bigger than Ellis and Fox. Remember no-platforming? It was the argument about free speech that peaked back in 2014, when a speaker making pro-Israel comments was booed off stage at Galway University, and in 2015, when students at Cardiff University tried to stop Germaine Greer appearing in a debate, due to transphobic comments she had made in the past.

"Quickly, someone came up with 'broflake': when a man gets upset by progressive attitudes that don't align with his more conservative views"

The idea, a simple one, was not to give a stage to hate speech and especially not to let it into spaces that were meant to be safe. But a lot of people considered this outright censorship, throwing cultural appropriation and trigger warnings into the same boat while they were at.

By 2017 "snowflake" contorted from a slur thrown at liberals by people on the right (and especially the alt-right) into a more general political insult, as people started to call Trump a snowflake. (Quickly, someone came up with "broflake": when a man gets upset by progressive attitudes that don't align with his more conservative views.)

Like a lot of the words of the 2010s, it lived and died quickly, as we soon found something else to argue about. But in many ways "snowflake" is a lightning rod for how the culture wars of the 2010s played out: a never-ending screaming match over who is allowed to say what and an ongoing competition over who was most offended. Here's to the 2020s!

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Eight words that changed the way we see ourselves in the 2010s

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Deep fakes, influencers, viral fashion - we live in a world unrecognisable from the one we stood in ten years ago. As a chaotic decade comes to a close, we're speaking to the people who helped shape the last ten years and analysing the cultural shifts that have defined them.

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WGSN - The Genderless Generation (Olivia)

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WGSN - The Genderless Generation (Olivia)

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Consumer trends towards the popularity of androgynous or genderless clothing and style are currently growing. As a result, many brands such as Zara, MINI and Selfridges are adapting their product line to service customers interested in the rapidly increasing market for this kind of clothing. For example, Zara, introduced an ungendered clothing range, MINI has denoted the ‘democratic silhouette’ and Selfridges launched an a-gender concept shop. As demonstrated in the article, it requires minimal effort from these kinds of companies to expand their product line as they already cater to both men and women. However, it can be noted that the rising consumer trends towards genderless clothing is heavily biased towards females transitioning to a more androgynous and relaxed silhouette rather than men perusing women’s clothing. Unpacking this idea further reveals that the ungendered clothing rarely boasts any kind of feminine silhouette and usually follows the oversized street style aspect of genderless fashion.

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WGSN - The Genderless Generation - Sarah

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WGSN - The Genderless Generation - Sarah

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https://www-wgsn-com.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/content/board_viewer/#/68734/page/5

- Young people choose clothing more as a method of self-expression rather than traditionality.
- Some young social groups spread unconventional ideas by incorporating LGBT and sex-positive ideas.
- Designer brands are slowly shifting their garments to be more neutral (Gucci, Burberry etc).
- Today's fashion icons are highly influencing youth style.

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VOGUE - Is the fashion future gender free? 

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VOGUE - Is the fashion future gender free? 

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(Georgie)
https://www.vogue.com.au/fashion/news/is-the-future-of-fashion-gender-free/news-story/20305bd24d6482c5b49def388617806f

Through this article it is clear, Vogue a very influential perfume and fashion magazine has set the standard for future collections from brands to be more inclusive and stand for those who can't conform.  Vogue highlights the forward and appreciated movements of gender neutral clothing and recognition for the high-end but especially more mainstream brands that are being inclusive of those who prefer not to conform with he/she pronouns.

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- Androgynous style is on the uprise in mens fashion
- Young celebs lead the charge - Pop culture thrives on covering androgynous style because young people like it

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And this ethos being present within brands has caused a knock-on effect in the shops. Two years ago Selfridges launched Agender, a shopping space where customers could buy clothes which transcend the notion of "his" and "hers". Accessories came in white, unmarked boxes, while customers could also get their hands on unisex Stan Smiths by Adidas, hoodies by Hood By Air. Clothing is logo-free, as to avoid any notion of gender. "We were seeing men shopping on the women's floor and vice versa," explained womenswear buying manager Heather Gramston. And the same thing is happening on the high street. Spring Summer 2016 saw Zara present Ungendered, a line of unisex separates from jeans to hoodies. And just last month ASOS unveiled Collusion, a unisex, coming-of-age brand that has been designed by Gen-Z, for Gen-Z.

But while we aren't necessarily expecting you to don a skirt-cum-sarong a la David Beckham anytime soon, all the signs are pointing towards a more gender-fluid attitude across fashion. And with it, thus far, has come a great deal positivity. For instance, Charles Jeffrey's gender-bending designs have so far seen him win not only GQ's Breakthrough Designer of the Year award, but also British Emerging Talent prize at the 2017 Fashion Awards, as well as a nod in the LVMH Prize.

With the men's Autumn/Winter 2019 shows just under two months away, it'll be interesting to see how far a shift towards womenswear designers dare to make (and how the customer - that's you - will respond). As GQ Style Senior Fashion Editor Gary Armstrong puts it, "Flamboyance and femininity has been intrinsically linked with menswear, from Louis XIV ostentatious frills and armour, to Mick Jagger 's fur and peacocking, to Michele's vision of Gucci. The look has come full circle. Don't be scared - in the words of Shania Twain, 'Man, I Feel Like a Woman!'"
Now read: Are you man enough to wear make-up? What will men wear in 2048?

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Gender fluid fashion is the future. Here's how menswear is changing

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Gender fluid clothing is rising in popularity and the menswear fashion world is becoming increasingly more and more feminine. From Gucci, to Charles Jeffrey, here's why it doesn't look to be stopping anytime soon.