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Millennials And Gender Fluidity -- What Smart Brands Are Doing And Why

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Millennials And Gender Fluidity -- What Smart Brands Are Doing And Why

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“Traditional portrayals of femininity and masculinity based on gender are becoming blurred, as androgyny and gender fluidity become the norm, rather than the exception. When it comes to gender, we are in the midst of a cultural shift—and it’s being driven by millennials” As a growing percentage of the COS customer base, Millennials are more engaged with gender fluidity than previous generations. Fashion brands are also beginning to blur the genders in their catwalk presentations. As millennials continue to reject labels and stereotypes, traditional lines and definitions of gender identity are likely to become even more blurred. A new definition will take shape, with brands looking to align with this cultural movement.

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Traditional portrayals of femininity and masculinity based on gender are becoming blurred, as androgyny and gender fluidity become the norm, rather than the exception. When it comes to gender, we are in the midst of a cultural shift-and it's being driven by millennials.

Savvy brands looking to connect with this unconventional demographic are rethinking strategies, throwing away plans based on stereotypes, and tackling gender norms in how they advertise and in the products they offer. Here are some thoughts on millennials and gender fluidity, and what smart brands are doing and why.
Tearing Down Gender Stereotypes and Embracing Gender Fluidity
Millennials have been defying labels and rejecting judgment in all things since we coined the term millennial. It's nothing new. Embracing a blurred gender to reflect a more fluid world just makes sense. In fact, at a time when gender identity and gender roles are dominating the conversation, the move shouldn't seem so controversial. For most millennials, traditional gender classifications simply don't work anymore.

A recent Fusion poll found that 50 percent of millennials believe gender is actually a spectrum, and that "some people fall outside of conventional categories." Another survey by GLAAD found that more than one in ten (12%) of Millennials actually identify as transgender or gender non-conforming, meaning they don't identify with the sex they were assigned at birth.

In this new social landscape, gender stereotypes are outdated, and in many cases, just plain insulting. We're choosing unisex names for our daughters, using gender neutral pronouns to refer to our friends, dressing our newborns in pink and blue, and buying Barbie dolls for our sons as a reflection of " self-expression, fashion, imagination and storytelling."

We're also embracing new gender roles at home, shedding outdated philosophies about who should do what and when. We're sharing responsibilities in a way that showcases our belief that men and women no longer have traditional roles and behaviors. From 1989 to 2012, stay-at-home dads increased from 1.1 million to 2 million according to the U.S. Census Bureau-and the numbers keep growing.

In the workplace, the gender pay gap is starting to unravel as forward thinking companies set the stage for gender equality by empowering women and prioritizing family needs. Millennials Are Talking-Are Brands Listening?

Millennials may be driving the conversation on gender evolution in society, and male-female stereotypes are losing favor culturally, but are brands listening? Smart brands are, and they're running toward the gender fluid space. Banana Republic's baby clothing line is a perfect example. The line is more popular than ever. But walk the aisle and it's tough to find pink or blue on the shelves. Instead, the company opted to replace its traditional offering with a unisex collection suitable for both boys and girls.

Fashion isn't the only industry listening to the millennial voice, cosmetics and fragrance brands are working overtime to create products that appeal to every consumer, male or female. Sephora's 2017 holiday ads are all-inclusive and feature both male and female Beauty Advisors. And last year, Calvin Klein launched fragrance CK2, a sequel to the 1994 unisex classic CK One. CK One was the world's first unisex fragrance, but Calvin Klein deemed this recent fragrance as "gender free" in an effort to celebrate fluidity while "embracing how millennials explore their relationships, friendships, and sexualities."

Millennials aren't the only ones talking about gender. Gen Z, or those born after 1998, have a strong voice, too. With annual purchasing power of $44 billion, this demographic is only expected to grow in strength, making up a staggering 40 percent of the consumer base by 2020.
The Key for Brands is to Resonate with a Lifestyle, Not a Gender
The challenge for brands looking to connect with millennials by tapping into gender fluidity is twofold. It's not enough to recognize how your products and services are being used; you also need to reflect that reality. In other words, brands need to craft an effective strategy that resonates with a lifestyle, not a gender.

Millennials have made it clear: consumer behavior is now a function of personality. Whether it's ambition, athleticism, or honesty, attributes drive purchases, not gender. Smart brands will focus on universal character traits and passions. (Iconoculture, May 2016)
Adding it All Up
As millennials continue to reject labels and stereotypes, traditional lines and definitions of gender identity are likely to become even more blurred. A new definition will take shape, with brands looking to align with this cultural movement by targeting millennials with campaigns and advertising that show they truly understand how a lack of labels is good not just for society, but business.

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Millennials And Gender Fluidity -- What Smart Brands Are Doing And Why

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Traditional portrayals of femininity and masculinity based on gender are becoming blurred, as androgyny and gender fluidity become the norm, rather than the exception. When it comes to gender, we are in the midst of a cultural shift-and it's being driven by millennials.

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MIAMI BEACH, United States - On December 1, just as Art Basel Miami kicks off in the city's Design District, work by Alex Katz, one of America's most celebrated figurative artists, will be ready for sale. The twist? The work won't be shown at a gallery or exhibition space. Instead, Katz's serene colour-saturated portraits will appear on men's and women's clothing and accessories, as well as home goods, sold exclusively at fast fashion behemoth H&M's Miami retail locations and e-commerce site.

If the retailer has its way, the 19-piece Alex Katz X H&M offering might well become as collectible as the painter's original works, which have sold for more than $400,000 at auction. Of course, it is also significantly more affordable, with prices ranging from $19.99 for a serving tray to $79.99 for an organic-cotton maxi dress, topping out at $129.99 for a leather tote.

H&M's partnership with Katz is just the latest in a string of recent collaborations between fine artists and mass-market fashion retailers. In 2014, the Swedish fast fashion giant kicked off the trend, commissioning American artist Jeff Koons to design a ladylike leather handbag screen printed in metallic with one of his famous balloon dogs. The sell-out piece, which sold for $49.95, was created to coincide with his retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which H&M sponsored. (Another edition was issued in Paris later that year when the exhibition moved to the Centre Pompidou.)

More recently, H&M-owned created a capsule collection to complement the Guggenheim's Agnes Martin retrospective, which the high street retailer - known for its intellectual and sculptural wares inspired by mid-century design - sponsored.

Then there is Uniqlo's ongoing partnership with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, which, among other products, has given birth to a series of t-shirts inspired, in part, by works from the museum's permanent collection, as well as new designs created in collaboration with living artists. Since the start of the partnership, which began in 2013 with Uniqlo's sponsorship of the museum's "Free Friday Nights" admission programme, work by the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Jackson Pollock and Ryan McGinness has been featured on Uniqlo garments.

While luxury brands have long collaborated with blue-chip artists, the strategy is relatively new for high street labels. Part of the reason is growth in public interest in art. In a 2016 study of nearly 500 art institutions, trade publication The Art Newspaper found that museums that expanded their physical footprints saw attendance increase on average by 14 percent between 2007 and 2014. Museums that did not expand still saw their numbers increase by an average of 10 percent.

Some major institutions have seen their numbers rise more dramatically. While MoMA and the Guggenheim last celebrated record attendance back in 2009, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, set yet another attendance record this year, attracting 6.7 million visitors during the fiscal year that ended on June 30, up from 6.3 million the year before and the highest number since the museum began tracking admissions over 40 years ago.

The rise of blockbuster art shows pitched to the mass public with popular themes and large corporate sponsors - combined with the rise of social media platforms like Instagram - has been key to democratising the art world, turning it into a growing pillar of popular culture and more fertile territory for retailers. "I think social media is playing quite a big role," says Bernadette Kissane, an analyst at Euromonitor International.

For artists and art institutions, the benefits of collaborating with mass fashion brands are clear. For one, there is the exposure offered by a mass retailer, not only in-store but also via its marketing channels. There are also undeniable financial motivations. In many circumstances, retailers fund major exhibitions outright, or compensate relevant artists or institutions in the same way they would a top designer, with deals often worth several millions of dollars, especially if the partnership extends beyond a single exhibition.

Art and fast fashion collaborations are still relatively niche. It's going to be much more difficult to educate the consumer on the value of the product.

"MoMA is focused on helping a wide audience understand and enjoy the art of our time, and this partnership [with Uniqlo] supports that mission - from our retail collaboration, which enables new audiences to engage with well-known and lesser-known artists in our collection... to the Uniqlo 'Free Friday Night' programme, which provides free admission for everyone," explains Thomas Randon, MoMA's general manager of retail. "In all cases, these activities extend MoMA's brand and educational mission, enable us to reach new communities and help financially support the museum's exhibitions."

Retailers see it as a chance to enrich the consumer experience both at the store and in the museum. "By changing the way we present these artworks... we are able to bring design to the forefront and customers are able to experience art in a new and modern way," suggests Masahiro Endo, Uniqlo USA's director of marketing.

For artists, the best scenarios offer both a creative and financial gain. "The artist is often attracted by the opportunity to work in a new material, to access the expertise of a fashion design team, or to be afforded a budget for a video," says Cary Leitzes, founder of creative agency Leitzes & Co, which connects artists with big companies. "Or maybe they just want the money."

Leitzes cites Takashi Murakami's 13-year partnership with Louis Vuitton - which began in 2003 - as the definitive shift in the art world's attitude toward large-scale commercial collaborations. While Louis Vuitton is not positioned as a mass-market brand, it certainly has mass reach. "It became much more acceptable," she says. "It just became a different medium for the artists."

But while mass retailers are likely to benefit from the halo effect that comes from aligning with a cultural institution or prominent artist, creating a physical product that resonates with consumers - many of whom may have not yet heard of the artist being represented - can prove more challenging. "There is no cookie-cutter formula," Leitzes says. "What artists do that really gives value is surprise. They capture the imagination, they make you feel something. If the brand is confident to go enough on that ride, the results can be extraordinary."

"It creates an image of craftsmanship and curation," Kissane suggests. "Adding more credibility to its craft goes a long way in helping a brand establish itself."

For a brand like COS, which is catering to a sliver of a mass audience that favours a certain aesthetic, specificity is key. "The king is Donald Judd, and the queen is Agnes Martin," says Atul Pathak, a COS spokesperson. "From day one, both of those artists have been very influential to our design team."

It's no surprise, then, that the Agnes Martin capsule collection, which is available to purchase in COS stores and online, but also in the Guggenheim's gift shop, is in line with the minimalist pieces typically offered by the retailer. Items include an origami-like navy wrap skirt tied at the waist ($125), but also a linen work jacket printed with a hand-drawn grid inspired by the artist. "From a distance, [Martin's] works often look quite straightforward in a way, but up close there is an intricacy," Pathak says. "That's very much how the design team approaches things."

H&M, which reaches a wider range of customers with its gentler price point and wider product offering, has approached its artist collaborations with a broader brush. "Someone like Alex Katz really works for H&M because his work is colourful, vibrant, very iconic," says Marybeth Schmitt, an H&M spokesperson. "Some of our customers will already be fans, some might just be inspired by the work."

To be sure, just as more traditional designer collaborations - like H&M's recent Kenzo partnership - rarely make much of an impact on sales revenues, retailers are surely not expecting a financial windfall from these art-world partnerships. Rather, these collaborations are generally measured in terms of buzz, media impressions and resulting footfall. In some cases, the lack of direct financial goals has allowed for more fluidity in release schedules. (Designer collaborations, on the other hand, are delivered on a fairly regular basis: H&M's drops each autumn, while Target's are delivered in the spring.) "We're going to continue working with artists, but it's not going to be ever year," Schmitt says. "Instead, it'll be when we find the right partner."

But as art's connection to pop continues to swell, retailers may well begin to rely more and more on the aesthetic and cultural power of these partnerships to drive sales. Breakout designer collaborations - including Target's partnership with Missoni in 2011 and H&M's Isabel Marant collection in 2013 - have proven that a collaboration can indeed drive significant sales. (Both collections were highlighted as financial successes in quarterly reports from these public companies.)

For now, fast fashion's art collaborations are more experimental in nature. "Art and fast fashion collaborations are still relatively niche," Kissane says. "It's going to be much more difficult to educate the consumer on the value of the product."
Related Articles: Elegantly Connecting Fashion and Art
Fashion's Art Fair Love Affair

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MIAMI BEACH, United States - On December 1, just as Art Basel Miami kicks off in the city's Design District, work by Alex Katz, one of America's most celebrated figurative artists, will be ready for sale. The twist? The work won't be shown at a gallery or exhibition space.

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How Scandi high-street hero COS has changed the way we dress

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How Scandi high-street hero COS has changed the way we dress

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The latest lifestyle, fashion and travel trends

The latest lifestyle, fashion and travel trends

At Cos HQ, just a stone's throw from the haute high-street brand's Regent Street flagship, everyone, it seems, is very much on message. A stream of willowy girls stalk the corridors in coolly subdued looks of inky blues, off-whites and charcoal. The brand's creative director, Karin Gustafsson, is no different: dressed in a navy knitted top and matching languid, wide-legged navy trousers, the softly spoken, platinum-blonde Swede is a pretty perfect poster girl for Cos's signature Scandi cool.

At 43, Gustafsson presides over one of the British high street's most significant success stories. Cos opened its first store on Regent Street exactly 10 years ago and since then it has expanded at a dizzying pace; there are now 201 stores in 33 countries around the world as well as a rapidly growing online store. Especially impressive, given the brand has never advertised.

Gustafsson has been here from the start, plucked straight from her MA at the Royal College of Art to join the launch team as assistant designer. 'They couldn't really tell me much,' she recalls of that initial meeting. 'I was quite unsure about it. I was a bit "that's high street - I'm not going to be able to be creative there".'

How wrong she was. As Gustafsson climbed the ranks (she was made creative director last year) Cos has trail-blazed a path for interesting, affordable and beautifully made high-street fashion that focuses on architectural or draped silhouettes, a modish mid-century palette (sludgy mustards, perky greens, soft pinks and a lot of neutrals) and a very pointed lack of catwalk-led seasonal trends. Cos may have been the brainchild of Swedish behemoth H&M, but it's nothing like the celebrity-fuelled, fast-fashion that dominates much of the high street.

The cult of Cos: we discuss what men really want with the man behind

From the get-go, Cos was a unique endeavour. 'We wanted to create clothes that are comfortable, effortless, that last and that you can adapt in many different ways so you can wear it for work, and put a heel on and a clutch and go out,' says Gustafsson. 'I think that idea suits the modern woman.

'We have always been into every little detail,' she adds. They were, and still are, fanatical about fit (many pieces go through five fittings before reaching the shop floor), materials ('We are all fabric nerds!') and almost imperceptible details such as how a pocket feels or adding a split into a waistband to make alterations easy. The kind of dressmakery touches that you don't find in regular high-street stores. It's that sense of ease and going the extra mile - beautiful clothes that nod to fashion but also create a brilliant wardrobe of basics - that has won Cos a diverse fan base from businesswomen such as Samantha Cameron (she wore many Cos pieces while at No 10) to stars including Emma Stone.

Yet while elsewhere on the high street prices have dramatically shot up over the past few years (it's not uncommon now to find coats priced well over £1,000 and footwear skywards of £500), Cos resolutely stands by its original ethos. 'We always wanted to be democratic. We really believe that it should be possible to create good quality for an affordable price; doing something for a higher price point is not something we have considered.' And anyway, following other high-street stores is not something that is ever on the Cos agenda. 'I think there are some great brands and obviously we do look at what everyone does but we tend to look towards ourselves - what did we do this season? What can we do better? And always looking back to our DNA. We consider ourselves as our biggest competitor.'

In many ways Cos was ahead of its time. The idea of clothes that are entirely democratic, that are ageless and/or gender fluid, is a theme that has gripped high fashion in the past year or two. It's something Cos has nurtured stealthily. Women have always shopped across both genders but men are also buying in to womenswear, especially, says Gustafsson, the coats, knitwear, sweatshirts and chinos.

A case in point is a special 10th-anniversary capsule collection. The 10 pieces, almost genderless in their design and colourways, include a stunning kimono-sleeved jacket and crisp, boxy white cotton shirts and were created with sustainability in mind. Similarly, the Cos collection uses geometric cutting to leave hardly any leftover fabric. 'It's something we have always done in different ways,' she says of the cutting-edge pieces, 'but these are the challenges that make the collection move on.'

British Vogue fashion director, Lucinda Chambers, is a great fan of the brand. 'Cos has always had a very different image from the rest of the typical high-street brands,' she says. 'I think they very deliberately set themselves apart. The cuts are often quietly bold and interesting, the colours unusual and more challenging so they attract quite a confident woman, more intellectual and not enthralled by fashion. I think there are many people out there, men and women, who love the pared-down simplicity of Cos so they can put their own stamp of individuality on the clothes.' Chambers snaps up the brand's simple basics, knits and 'risky' pieces in satin, neoprene and nylon. 'I also love their underwear - it's plain and elegant.'

By launching in London the company tapped in to the rich arts and design scene and could draw from the incredible talent emerging from local design schools, too. 'It's a great city to live in when you are creative,' adds Gustafsson. 'There's an amazing dynamic of different personalities and backgrounds.'

Cos has worked with Frieze (supporting young artists showcased in Frame) and the Serpentine's wildly popular Park Nights series that uses the pavilion over the summer months for a series of talks and events.

In many ways it's clear that despite its Swedish heritage, Cos could only have been conceived in London. 'I am really happy it was,' Gustafsson says. 'This is an amazing creative city with the art scene and music scene and we are a very international team.' She won't be drawn on Brexit but clearly it must be a concern to a fashion brand where so many of the creative team come from outside the UK, with most new designers plucked from very international alumni of London's world-class fashion schools.

It's a stressful time to head up a high-street store but as a working mother (she lives with her seven-year-old son in Walthamstow) there's not too much opportunity for really switching off. 'In a job like mine you are working all the time, but I am lucky that I work for a company who are very supportive of family life. I drop my son at school and I try to be home to eat dinner with him. On weekends we do play dates and the park - all the usual things.' Gustafsson follows a very Scandinavian ethos. 'I really believe in a work-life balance, so I run and swim and that's very important to me. I really need that if I am going to do my job well.' And we can all relate to that.
Cos Capsule Collection launches on 24 March

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How Scandi high-street hero Cos has changed the way we dress

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At Cos HQ, just a stone's throw from the haute high-street brand's Regent Street flagship, everyone, it seems, is very much on message. A stream of willowy girls stalk the corridors in coolly subdued looks of inky blues, off-whites and charcoal.

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Finding Clothes, and Identity, Outside Men’s and Women’s Wear

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Finding Clothes, and Identity, Outside Men’s and Women’s Wear

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in her words

More clothing companies are trying to meet the demands of a changing clientele, offering gender-bending, gender-fluid and gender-neutral items.

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Credit Agnès Ricart

Welcome to In Her Words, where women rule the headlines. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox. Let me know what you think at dearmaya@nytimes.com.
"I would like to see anybody wearing my clothes, and I do mean anybody." - Claire Fleury, a fashion designer who creates clothing for all genders
When a friend of mine was shopping for her wedding look several years back, she wanted a sharp, tailored suit. She went to a famous men's clothier in New York's Financial District, whose staff ultimately laughed her out of the store, a humiliation she still carries with her.

Today, her options would be plentiful by comparison as more mainstream clothing companies swiftly rise to meet the demands of a changing clientele - offering gender-bending, gender-fluid and gender-neutral garments. As Ken Downing, the fashion director of Neiman Marcus, once told The Times: "What we're seeing now is a seismic shift in fashion, a widening acceptance of a style with no boundaries - one that reflects the way young people dress."

Market research supports that shift, showing changes in points of view on gender among Gen Z consumers. Some 38 percent of this group, born in 1995 and after, said they "strongly agree" that "gender doesn't define a person as much as it used to," as my colleague Ruth La Ferla reported last week.
[READ MORE: Beyond 'Queer' Fashion]
Also, the Council of Fashion Designers of America, a trade group of about 500 leading American designers, last year added the first unisex and nonbinary category to the New York Fashion Week calendar.

Of course, unisex (and androgynous, for that matter) are not new terms when it comes to fashion. Women, particularly those with taller and slimmer builds, have long been able to shop for men's clothes. But for curvaceous women (like my friend), men who want to escape rigid masculine aesthetics and transgender people who may be adapting to a changing body, choices have been all but nonexistent.

Not to mention how winding through the men's and women's sections in traditional stores can be an exercise in anxiety and awkwardness for L.G.B.T.Q. people. Even Uniqlo and Muji, known to offer more gender-free looks, and H&M and Zara, which have presented gender-neutral items, continue to divide garments into men's, women's, boys' and girls'.

The Phluid Project, an outpost of gender-neutral fashion in Lower Manhattan, and shops like it have no gender-based sections. "The style is all about identity and unfettered self-expression," said Rob Smith, its founder.

The movement has also grown to offer parents more options to dress their children - standing in contrast to the recent phenomenon of "gender reveal parties." In November, for example, the singer Celine Dion, who has three kids, unveiled a line of gender-neutral children's clothing. "The message I'm trying to get across is, you raise your children the way you want to raise your children," Dion said.

But those kids' clothes don't come cheap (hoodies can cost $80 or more) and neither do their adult counterparts. A gender-neutral item from Phluid Project, Chromat, Wildfang, Official Rebrand, Hirsuit Swim and Radimo, among others, can easily cost $80 or more.

One reason: These brands are often bootstrapped endeavors, MI Leggett, the owner of Official Rebrand, told Mashable last year. "As L.G.B.T.Q. designers, we need to learn how to value ourselves," Leggett said. "We don't have big companies helping us; we just have to advocate for ourselves."
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Ida B. Wells in 1920. Credit Chicago History Museum/Getty Images

Last week in Chicago, city leaders, dignitaries, activists and residents gathered to celebrate the renaming of Congress Parkway as Ida B. Wells Drive, making it the city's first major street to bear the name of a black woman.

"She spoke truth to power and changed the landscape of Chicago and the world," Alderman Sophia King told The Chicago Tribune of Wells, one of the nation's most influential investigative reporters. "It's bittersweet that it's has taken so long. But we are here."

Credit Mamadi Doumbouya for The New York Times

"I felt like I was behind a window looking at my life." Meg Ryan, above, talks about on romantic comedies, celebrity and leaving it all behind. [ Read the story]

"He represents the soul of fashion." Karl Lagerfeld, the most prolific designer of the 20th and 21st centuries and a man whose career formed the prototype of the modern luxury fashion industry, has died at age 85. [ Read the story]

"For those women to be called the most beautiful in Asia feels like discrimination to the rest of us." A Chinese model's freckles in an image for Zara provoked a heated debate. [ Read the story]

"It is not a closet. It is a cage." The crisis over sexuality in the Catholic Church goes to the heart of the priesthood and into a closet that is trapping thousands of men. [ Read the story]

"It didn't occur to me that I could argue with the doctor's results." Why are we still dismissing girls' pain?[ Read the story]

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Credit Jack Manning/The New York Times

"Pantsuits may be today's fashion fad, but tomorrow they will be a permanent part of a woman's wardrobe" was the opening sentence in a 1966 Times article titled " The Pants Suit People State Their Case Ubiquitously," and the prediction certainly holds up.

I'm not just talking about Hillary Clinton, either. Last week at the Grammys, Miley Cyrus rocked a black pantsuit, one of many stars to don the look recently. But back in 1966, women commandeering traditionally masculine apparel pushed plenty of boundaries.

"I wear them shopping, on planes, in restaurants, in bars - everywhere," one woman said. "I'd even wear them to church if I could."

"Eventually women will wear them as they do suits; it will become classic," said another.

The irony: In the article, these women were identified only by their husband's names, Mrs. Malcolm Warner and Mrs. Edward Kaufman, an artist and the woman in the photo above.
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Finding Clothes, and Identity, Outside Men's and Women's Wear

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in her words More clothing companies are trying to meet the demands of a changing clientele, offering gender-bending, gender-fluid and gender-neutral items. Welcome to In Her Words, where women rule the headlines. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox. Let me know what you think at dearmaya@nytimes.com.

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At the Phluid Project, a new gender-neutral store in NoHo, community is free with or without purchase.

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Inside the Phluid Project, a new gender-neutral store in NoHo. Credit Credit Stefania Curto for The New York Times

It took anarchy and ayahuasca for a person with retail expertise to see that "the world's first gender-free store" was a worthy idea.

Rob Smith, the founder of the Phluid Project, went to Burning Man and then a two-week psychedelic-consuming retreat in the Amazon last year and came back committed to leaving his 30-year corporate retail career. Mr. Smith pursued his new dream and opened the Phluid Project in the NoHo section of Manhattan.

Though the concept of gender-free may feel familiar in fashion, to invest in actual space for it still requires a revelation in the desert. Then one in the jungle.

Retail is an incredibly gender-delineated space. For proof, look no further than this column: It's traditionally written by a cisgender man and a cisgender woman so that the two distinct categories in the industry can be reviewed.

Though New York Fashion Week now has a nonbinary category, and many brands advertise that they embrace any customer (and why wouldn't they?), brick-and-mortar stores are still mostly organized by gender. To be a gender-nonconforming or nonbinary individual in a retail space can be tense.

"I've been learning the art of tension diffusion since I was a child," the comedian Hannah Gadsby said of presenting as "gender not normal" in her Netflix special, "Nanette." "Back then, I didn't have to invent the tension. I was the tension. And I'm tired of tension. Tension is making me sick."

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The main floor at the Phluid Project. Credit Stefania Curto for The New York Times

Inside the Phluid Project, tension melted away when I smelled Glisten, a candle with fig, white tea and ginger root. The store's candles ($40) will be my go-to housewarming gift as long as there are friends in new apartments to sort-of willingly receive them. All of the proceeds from the candle line go to organizations that support L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ communities and youth, like the Trans Women of Color Collective and the Hetrick-Martin Institute.

Past the candles is a coffee shop, and a gathering space with bleachers padded with artificial turf and an installation with flowers blooming across a rainbow word cloud. "Fluid," "balance," "equality," "masc," "freedom," "femme," "openness," "nonbinary," "fearless" and more create positive word association.

The Phluid Project is a new kind of queer space. At first I wrote, "It's not just a store, it's a community center," but I realized the truth that honors my understanding of queer history is: It's not just a community center, it's a store. "The world's first gender-free store" is trademarked.

Sales of Phluid candles benefit L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ organizations. Credit Stefania Curto for The New York Times

There are rainbow-embroidered shorts ($69.50) and jackets ($98) from Levi's pride collection, and Superga sneakers with rainbow soles ($85). But there are also capitalist quips on tees, like "Gender-Phluid" in the style of the Chick-fil-A logo, and "Optimist" in the style of the Supreme logo.

Events at the store include a talk about life hacks (for cutting crop tops and starting a business) with Rio Uribe, the founder of Gypsy Sport, whose long-sleeve tie-dye tees ($128) and velvet skirts ($198) are for sale; Queer Comedy Night; and a Design Challenge, with the prize of having your line manufactured and sold in the store. I love seeing pieces from labels like Gypsy Sport and Chromat, but I think there could be much more.

Prices at the Phluid Project go up to $300 so that more people can afford what they see in the store. But shopping is not only for buying. It's for learning, inspiration and discovery, especially for those who want to be designers or who are finding their personal style.

Having a place for everyone to touch and try on well-made clothes without a double take (real or imagined in fear) would be a gift. A credit card can get you helped at most any store. A safe space will let you be.

Phluid tees and more. Credit Stefania Curto for The New York Times

An in-house tailor would be an asset here, too. The Phluid Project has a section dedicated to boxy Champion sweatshirts, basketball shorts ($58) and WeSC bomber jackets. These pieces are extremely cool and do not have gendered labels, which is great. But as I was leaving the store, my impression was that gender-free clothing is shapeless clothing.

Still, I know there are to be new designer pop-ups regularly (a "nonbinary beachwear concept collection" by Official Rebrand this week), and the store is evolving. Fluid.

There was plenty more to love. I bought a pair of side-snap white culottes ($65) that I wore to the beach the next day, and I tried a pair of Meat latex shorts ($165) that smelled like a balloon and were perfect for my sex dungeon basketball league. When I stepped out of the dressing room wearing them, two sales clerks complimented me warmly.

As I paid, I noticed a child sitting on a stool peacefully reading "Sideways Stories From Wayside School," guardian shopping nearby. I wished this store had been here when I was this kid's age, even when I was three times as old.

Supreme also began as a hangout space with a lot of T-shirts. I would love to see an empire emerge with the Phluid manifesto at its heart and lines out the door, with teenagers who are hyped to, as the manifesto on the wall says, "express themselves openly, without judgment or fear - only freedom."

The Phluid Project, 684 Broadway, 212-655-0551; thephluidproject.com.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D4 of the New York edition with the headline: Men's Here, Women's There? A Space Challenges That. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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At the Phluid Project, a new gender-neutral store in NoHo, community is free with or without purchase. It took anarchy and ayahuasca for a person with retail expertise to see that "the world's first gender-free store" was a worthy idea.

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Why is mass-market fashion brand COS engaging the design world?

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Why is mass-market fashion brand COS engaging the design world?

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Just be-COS

What does it say about London-based clothing brand COS that it is targeting architects and designers? Its price points ($99 to $225 for a men's dress shirt) are relatively accessible when compared to many other boutique or more explicitly luxury-oriented brands. At the same time, within the mass-market fast-fashion sector, COS has a different approach than other stores like Uniqlo or H&M (where dress shirts are more in the $30 range), which can tell us something about the brand and its ethos. Working in this sector, where does COS find its niche?

For COS, engagement has come through the design sphere; its target is the attendees of selective, high-end gatherings. In contrast, Uniqlo has partnered with MoMA, an institution that is trying harder everyday to cast as wide a net as possible, with celebrity-driven events like its controversial 2015 Bjork exhibition, or its apparent decision to get rid of permanent, discipline-specific galleries like architecture and design, in favor of cross-disciplinary shows with wider appeal. The Uniqlo-MoMA relationship includes the Japanese fashion brand's sponsorship of free Fridays at the museum, as well as a line of collaborative T-shirts that are sold at the Fifth Avenue Uniqlo flagship store just a few doors down from MoMA in New York City.

COS's involvement ranges from sponsoring Park Nights at London's Serpentine, a series of programs in the annual pavilion, to site-specific installations at global design events such as Design Miami/ and Milan Design Week. A recent string of projects has moved the brand away from earlier collaborations that were simpler and fairly vague-such as a 2014 project at Salone del Mobile with Japanese design studio Nendo -toward more interactive, experiential installations that activate space and merge into the architectural.

In November 2017, COS and New York-based Snarkitecture presented Loop, where visitors to Seoul's Gana Art Center gallery could place a white glass marble on a light- blue metal track, where it would descend to the gallery floor below. Similarly, London designers Studio Swine brought their Salone del Mobile installation New Spring to Miami for Design Miami/. There, visitors could play with special bubbles that fell from an arched sculpture and were filled with one of five scented mists. Next up is a collaboration with the Palm Springs-based artist Phillip K. Smith III in Milan, for which details are still pending.

While these installations might seem random, they make sense as an outreach and audience-building strategy for COS. Material and geometry are an important part of the COS brand, and in this sense, it shares DNA with modernism in architecture and design.

"Ornament and Crime," by Austrian architect Adolf Loos, is one of the most important treatises on the role of decoration after the industrial revolution. Personally, Loos preferred to wear very simple English wools suits. "When the English set it upon themselves to rule the world, they freed themselves from the imitation of silly costumes that they had been condemned to by other nations, and imposed the primeval dress around the globe," he once said, albeit extremely problematically by today's standards. But as a material analysis of post-national modernism, it can be applied to understanding his work.

In his architecture, such as the iconic Villa Müller and its rich marble and wood surfaces that layer over one another through adjacent spaces in a raumplan, Loos preferred simple geometries with rich materials that let the texture become the ornament-one of the major tenets of Miesian modernism and the International Style. Similarly, for COS Creative Director Karin Gustafsson, "We are interested in research such as materials or finishes. We also talk a lot about tactility."

But simplicity wasn't just a stylistic choice for Loos. He also famously said in 1908 that "when I look back over past centuries and ask myself in which age I would prefer to have lived, my answer is, 'in the present age.'" He believed that fashion and the reuse of older styles were an unnecessary infatuation with the past. Not surprisingly, he also was one of the pioneers of the modernist aesthetic, which abandoned ornament that he felt harkened back to a premodern sentimentality. To be thoroughly modern, one had to move beyond the past. For COS, modernity also comes from the timeless. "We are a fashion brand the focuses on well-made design and design that is made to last. It is timeless, it is about modernity," Gustafsson said.

But Loos's criticisms of older styles were also part of his commitment to the International project and his disdain for ornament, which he thought represented antiquated nationalism. As for COS, "We are a global brand," COS CEO Marie Honda said. "We want to always represent this through our projects and activations."

Recently, the brand released Creating Shapes, a book about fashion designer Usha Doshi, one of Gustafsson's teachers at the Royal College of Art in London. "She is one of the links between the designers and pattern cutters," Gustafsson told The Architect's Newspaper. Here, we see another connection between the COS brand and the design world, where making and materials are in a constant feedback loop, and often designers become the connection between the world of material innovation and the world of form-making. Designers and architects alike are always in search of the newest things to form into a chair or the latest glass technique that might lead to a beautiful window.

Executive Editor, Architect's Newspaper

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Why is mass-market fashion brand COS engaging the design world?

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Just be-COS What does it say about London-based clothing brand COS that it is targeting architects and designers? Its price points ($99 to $225 for a men's dress shirt) are relatively accessible when compared to many other boutique or more explicitly luxury-oriented brands.

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The latest lifestyle, fashion and travel trends

The latest lifestyle, fashion and travel trends

Being a customer at COS is a lot like being a member of a club: its regular visitors certainly treat the Swedish-owned London-based chain with the same loyalty they would an old friend.

As a group of slightly smug shoppers, we feel pity for those who haven't fallen privy to COS's charms and are enraged on its behalf when anyone fails to "get" the brand's aesthetic.

But is our smugness wrongly placed? And are the clothes available at COS - or at Collection of Style, to use its full, slightly awkward name - really that far removed from those available elsewhere on the high-street?

Karin Gustafsson, the chain's head of womenswear, certainly thinks so: "I don't buy from anyone else," she says. Neither, it would seem, does a considerable proportion of London's working population, who consider the store's minimally cut dresses and classic shirts the foundation of their nine-to-five wardrobes. And they're on to something. COS, you see, isn't a high-street store but a fashion democracy.

"We are for every woman," says Gustafsson, "we don't think of age when designing. The COS woman isn't one specific person. She is part of a group. She has a mindset. Someone who is big can wear our clothes and so can someone who is petite. We fit many personalities."

While this might sound like PR speak, there is truth in Gustafsson's words. I've seen the proof, not only in my own wardrobe but in my mum's, my colleague's and in that of an impossibly chic 80-year-old woman.

Since its inception in 2007, COS's allure has always been its ability to cater for everyone. It was launched to bridge a gap between throwaway fashion and the luxury market and it does so without fanfare. Its clothes aren't designed to intimidate or alienate but rather to serve as a blank canvas onto which a whole range of customers are invited to stamp their own personality.

So what is the secret? A disregard for catwalk trends is undoubtedly key. "We never push our team to look at what's happening on the catwalk," explains Gustafsson, who works closely with the head of menswear, Martin Andersson, to create collections around 18 months before they land in store. "We look at architecture and at art and music. We create our own stories."

This highbrow approach to high-street fashion has seen the label collaborate with a number of cultural institutions, including the Serpentine Gallery, where COS is sponsoring Park Nights, a series of artistic events this summer. In terms of Gustafsson's own aesthetic, this approach translates into clean lines and a unique approach to silhouette.

A graduate of the Royal College of Art, the 38-year-old Gustafsson always felt an infinity with slow-moving fashion rather than the promiscuous sort that is so commonplace on our high-street. "We are not fast fashion, we create clothes to last more than one season," she says. "Instead of changing the aesthetic we will focus on finding a new finish or silhouette. The essence remains."

Is this slow, considered approach a particularly Swedish thing, I wonder? Gustafsson, who was brought up in Linköping in southern Sweden, has surely noticed COS's popularity boom alongside the UK's demand for Scandi-inspired design? "We're very much an international brand," she says, reluctant to be pigeonholed, "I think that's really important."

While the chain is part of Swedish clothing conglomerate H&M, which also owns denim brand Cheap Monkey, Monki and newly launched & Other Stories, its roots lie in London not Stockholm. The COS HQ is a stone's throw from Oxford Circus and Gustafsson, a Londoner, lives with her partner in Walthamstow.

Whether it's London, Stockholm or Istanbul - where COS is about to open a store - the notion of metropolis is integral to Gustafsson's process. Not just because her designs rely on the cosmopolitan mindset of her customers - "she has a big-city mindset even if she doesn't live in a big city" - but because workwear has provided so many of her collections with their high point. Be it a beautifully cut structured dress, a great statement skirt or a pair of printed trousers, COS is rarely left wanting where delivering clothes for everyday office life is concerned.

"We have something for all workplaces. For me, work clothes should look natural. They should never look forced but should reflect your personality." For that, Gustafsson believes you'll need great shirt. A whole host of them in fact. "The shirt is our key garment," she says, waxing lyrical on the design process behind the brand's latest shirt offering - a limited-edition capsule collection inspired by the Serpentine Pavilion.

"Everyone needs a shirt in their wardrobe. It really is as simple as that."

For details of the Serpentine's Park Nights visit serpentinegallery.org/park_nights

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The latest lifestyle, fashion and travel trends The latest lifestyle, fashion and travel trends Being a customer at COS is a lot like being a member of a club: its regular visitors certainly treat the Swedish-owned London-based chain with the same loyalty they would an old friend.

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Art's Most Popular: here are 2018's most visited shows and museums

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Art's Most Popular: here are 2018's most visited shows and museums

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Nearly two decades have passed since the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York last topped The Art Newspaper's annual museum exhibition attendance survey with its 2001 show on Vermeer and the Delft School. The US institution made a spectacular re-entry into our leaderboard this year with not just the one, but the two most popular exhibitions of 2018. Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, a Costume Institute show that boldly mixed religious works of art-including 42 ecclesiastical pieces from the Sistine Chapel sacristy-with haute couture, was seen by nearly 1.7 million people (10,919 visitors a day), breaking the Met's previous record set in 1978 with Treasures of King Tutankhamun (nearly 1.4 million).

The largest exhibition ever mounted by the museum, Heavenly Bodies was seen by around 1.43 million people at the Met's main Fifth Avenue location and a further 230,000 trekked uptown to Washington Heights to see its continuation at the comparatively sleepy Met Cloisters. According to the museum, the show helped set a new attendance record for the Cloisters (349,513 in total). (The Met has not previously provided us with separate figures for the Cloisters and its Fifth Avenue locations.) The Met's other major blockbuster of 2018 was Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer (7,893 visitors a day), which presented sculpture, a painting and more than 100 drawings by the Renaissance master as well as an Instagram-friendly digital replica of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and which ranked second in our survey.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, helped the US secure a hat-trick with its free presentation of colourful installations by the Korean artist Do Ho Suh. A favourite with Instagrammers, 7,853 visitors a day immersed themselves in his large-scale fabric sculptures.

Top 20 most popular exhibitions

The Shanghai Museum, which boasts vast exhibition halls, hosted five of the ten most popular exhibitions in 2018, including presentations comprised solely of collections from foreign museums. Its show of masterpieces from London's Tate Britain attracted 7,126 visitors a day (around 618,000 in total), which not only makes it the fourth most popular exhibition in our survey but has the added cachet of being the UK institution's most visited show to date (though you had to travel 9,000km from London to see it). The Chinese museum also collaborated with the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow to bring paintings by a group of 19th-century Russian realists to Shanghai for a special exhibit. The Wanderers show drew 6,666 visitors a day to the Chinese museum. None of the exhibitions mounted by UK museums featured in our top 20.

The Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris and the Melbourne's NGV International both benefited from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York's decision to send works from its collection abroad during its building works. Their MoMA shows drew 5,171 and 3,312 daily visitors to the French and Australian museums respectively. Meanwhile, MoMA's desire to give over its entire sixth floor exhibition space to Adrian Piper proved popular as the US artist's work, which addresses issues such as racism and sexism, was a surprise hit (3,993 visitors a day).

Dressing for success

The overwhelming success of the Met's Heavenly Bodies exhibition shows how the public's appetite for exhibitions devoted to fashion is on the rise. The Met's Costume Institute shows have traditionally ranked high in our survey, notably its 2011 presentation of cutting-edge couture by Alexander McQueen (8,025 daily), and institutions such as the Musée des Décoratifs in Paris and London's Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) have staged fashion-focused shows for years. In fact, the latter's most popular show of 2018 let the public peruse the wardrobe of Frida Kahlo and engage with the Mexican artist on a more personal level, with displays of intimate photographs and possessions (1,823). And the V&A had to extend the run of its current Dior exhibition by seven weeks after tickets sold out within three weeks of its opening. (It will feature in our 2019 survey).

As further evidence of the fixation with fashion, MoMA's Items: Is Fashion Modern?, an exhibition that explored the impact of fashion staples such as Levi's jeans and the Little Black Dress was the New York institution's first fashion show since 1944 and its most popular exhibition of 2018 (4,987). The Sorolla and Fashion show (1,418) at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, which paired portraits by the Spanish artist with period-appropriate clothing, was the institution's third most popular exhibition. The Spanish museum is putting this winning formula to the test again with its forthcoming exhibition Balenciaga and Spanish Painting, which is due to open in June. The Wallace Collection in London is also preparing to capitalise on the public's interest in fashion with an exhibition, due to open in June, on the shoe designer Manolo Blahnik.

Top ten most popular art museums

Apeshit at the Louvre

It was a record year for the Musée du Louvre in Paris, both in terms of its overall attendance and its staging of the most popular exhibition in its history. With a whopping 10.2 million visitors in 2018, the 226-year-old French institution comfortably retains its title as the most popular art museum in our survey. Its major show on the quintessential 19th-century French Romantic Eugène Delacroix was seen by record 540,000 people (5,431 a day) during its four-month run. The Louvre credits the 26% increase in total attendance on the previous year to three factors: the allure of Delacroix; the popularity of Beyoncé and Jay-Z's music video "Apeshit", which was shot in the former palace and shows the hip-hop power couple lounging in front of star attractions, including the Mona Lisa; and an upswing in foreign visitors to the city after a substantial dip in the wake of the deadly terrorist attacks in 2015. Paris's Centre Pompidou and the Musée d'Orsay had an uptick in visitors, by around 180,000 and 108,000 respectively.

The Louvre's previous record of 9.7 million visitors was set back in 2012, when it staged Leonardo and Raphael blockbusters. Its forthcoming show on Leonardo, which is due to open this October to mark the quincentenary of the Italian master's death, is bound to give Delacroix a run for his money. Meanwhile, officials at the Louvre's outpost in Abu Dhabi, which opened in November 2017, report that one million people visited the museum in 2018.

The National Museum of China in Beijing, which made its first appearance in our 2017 survey, retains second position in overall attendance with 8.6 million annual visitors-an increase of 550,000 on the previous year-and the Met once again takes third with nearly seven million visitors to its Fifth Avenue and Cloisters premises (7.4 million if you include the Met Breuer). The Vatican Museums holds on to the fourth slot, with an increase in attendance of around 330,000 on 2017.

British Museum loses out

The friendly rivalry between the UK's three most visited museums-the British Museum (BM), Tate Modern and the National Gallery -continues. Our survey has shown the BM to be the most visited museum in the UK nine times over the past decade, but in 2018 it was nudged out of the top spot by Tate Modern, which drew around 49,000 more visitors (nearly 5.9 million). The BM drops to sixth in overall worldwide museum attendance while Tate Modern occupies its former fifth position, boosted no doubt by its critically acclaimed exhibition Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy, which focused on a single, prolific year in the artist's life. However, having reported a worrying downward trend in visitors to UK's main national museums last year, the overall figures stabilised in 2018 but were still 5% down from their highpoint in 2014.

Notwithstanding, the V&A smashed the record it set in 2017 for overall attendance by around 178,000 people, bringing its new record to nearly four million. After Frida Kahlo, the V&A's second most popular exhibition in terms of daily figures may come as a surprise considering that it also had a show devoted to the Spanish fashion house Balenciaga. Around 160 more people flocked each day to see what the V&A billed as a "multi-sensory and playful" exhibition on the children's book character Winnie the Pooh (1,181 a day) than creations by the late designer (1,021).

But the award for the breakout UK museum of 2018 has to go to the Royal Academy of Arts (RA), which made a splash of its 250th anniversary with the opening of a David Chipperfield-designed expansion that significantly increased the institution's footprint-and also provided permanent free collection spaces for the first time. The inauguration coincided with the RA's popular annual Summer Exhibition, guest curated by the artist Grayson Perry, which was seen by a record 4,296 daily visitors (296,442). Other RA shows of note were a presentation that reunited art-loving Charles I's Old Master collection (3,250) and one that celebrated 500 years of Oceanic art (1,857). A record 1.6 million people visited the RA in 2018 compared with just over a million in 2017.

In the US, the unveiling of portraits of the former president Barack Obama and his wife Michelle, by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald respectively, at Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in Washington, DC helped boost the museum's attendance by more than one million, to 2.3 million. Locals and tourists alike turned out to marvel at, take selfies with, and even genuflect in front of the thoroughly modern portraits of the former First Couple. It remains to be seen if the NPG can repeat last year's success this year in the wake of the 35-day US government shutdown, which forced government-funded museums to close. The Cleveland Museum of Art also topped its personal best of 719,620 annual visitors (set in 1987) by attracting 769,435 people-a 31% increase on 2017. The jump can partly be attributed to its showing of the travelling exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors (1,653).

Meanwhile, in Japan, Van Gogh (4,793), the Bauhaus (2,803) and single-artist shows on 20th-century Japanese painters Higashiyama Kaii (4,311), Yokoyama Taikan (3,228) and Foujita Tsuguharu (2,530) meant that attendance at the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto more than trebled, from around 300,000 in 2017 to more than 1.1 million last year. But the most popular exhibition in Japan continues to be the Nara National Museum's yearly display of objects from the Shoso-in treasury. The 70th annual presentation drew 16,707 visitors/pilgrims a day during its two-week run, but the religious nature of the artefacts puts the show in a category of its own, so it is not included in our rankings.
** All of the data used were supplied by the institutions concerned. * Some institutions offer a number of exhibitions for a single ticket: these are shown as one entry. * Exhibitions that were free to visit-ie, neither the museum nor the show had an entry fee- are indicated with an asterisk (*). The daily figures are calculated automatically by our database, which computes the number of days for which an exhibition was open using the following formula: total number of days between start date and end date, divided by seven, multiplied by the number of days a week the institution is open, minus exceptional closures.

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Art's Most Popular: here are 2018's most visited shows and museums

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Nearly two decades have passed since the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York last topped The Art Newspaper's annual museum exhibition attendance survey with its 2001 show on Vermeer and the Delft School. The US institution made a spectacular re-entry into our leaderboard this year with not just the one, but the two most popular exhibitions of 2018.

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H&M GROUP: ANIMAL WELFARE &MATERIAL ETHICS POLICY

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H&M GROUP: ANIMAL WELFARE &MATERIAL ETHICS POLICY

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The largest exhibition of his drawings for 50 years

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The largest exhibition of his drawings for 50 years

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The largest exhibition of his drawings for 50 years

This one-way route guides you from the Manton entrance and through the exhibition. There will be access to toilets, a shop and an opportunity to buy food and drink during your visit.

Aubrey Beardsley shocked and delighted late-Victorian London with his sinuous black and white drawings. He explored the erotic and the elegant, the humorous and grotesque, winning admirers around the world with his distinctive style.

Spanning seven years, this exhibition will cover Beardsley's intense and prolific career as a draughtsman and illustrator, cut short by his untimely death from tuberculosis at the age of 25. Beardsley's charismatic persona played a part in the phenomenon that he and his art generated, so much so that the 1890s were dubbed the 'Beardsley Period'.

This will be the first exhibition dedicated to Beardsley at Tate since 1923, and the largest display of his original drawings in Europe since the seminal 1966 exhibition at the V&A, which triggered a Beardsley revival.

The over 200 works include his celebrated illustrations for Le Morte d'Arthur, Lysistrata and Oscar Wilde's Salomé. It will also show artworks that were key inspirations for Beardsley, including a Japanese scroll and watercolours by Edward Burne-Jones and Gustave Moreau.
Watch the curator's tour and explore the exhibition room by room

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Aubrey Beardsley - Exhibition at Tate Britain | Tate

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The largest exhibition of his drawings for 50 years This one-way route guides you from the Manton entrance and through the exhibition. There will be access to toilets, a shop and an opportunity to buy food and drink during your visit. Aubrey Beardsley shocked and delighted late-Victorian London with his sinuous black and white drawings.

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COS first opened on Regent Street, London in 2007, followed by the launch of the online store in 2011. The brand is available across Europe, Asia, North America, the Middle East and Australia, and offers reinvented classics and wardrobe essentials for women, men and children. With items made to last beyond the latest season, the collections merge lasting quality with timeless design. Committed to supporting the world of art and design through collaboration, COS partners with established and emerging artists, studios and galleries around the world. In 2018, COS presented Soma, a seasonless capsule menswear collection, through choreography by Wayne McGregor during the Pitti Uomo event in Florence. COS' expansion continued in 2018, with its first stores in Russia and, via franchise, in Thailand, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. COS also opened online in China, where the brand was very well received on the e-commerce platform Tmall.

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COS first opened on Regent Street, London in 2007, followed by the launch of the online store in 2011. The brand is available across Europe, Asia, North America, the Middle East and Australia, and offers reinvented classics and wardrobe essentials for women, men and children.

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Cos x Pitti Uomo | Source: Courtesy

By Christopher Morency April 24, 2018 05:25

FLORENCE, Italy - London-based minimalist fashion label Cos is the latest special guest to show its collection at the 94th edition of Pitti Uomo in June. Joining the likes of Craig Green and Roberto Cavalli, Cos will present its capsule menswear collection - titled "Soma" - during the biannual menswear trade show in Florence, marking the first time Pitti Uomo has named a fast-fashion brand as a special guest.

"We feel that Pitti has become a real fashion moment in menswear," says Karin Gustafsson, creative director at Cos, which hired Hermès and Maison Margiela veteran Christophe Copin as head of menswear in July 2017. "We felt that with Christophe on board it's a good moment to reinforce [our menswear] and once again share what's important to us with our customers."

Cos will present its collections via a collaboration with British choreographer Wayne McGregor, whose dancers - dressed in Cos garments - have created a performative piece inspired by the collection's themes around movement and sound.

"Throughout the years we have explored how we communicate menswear, from in-store activations to online collaborations," says Marie Honda, managing director at Cos. "This year we think it's an amazing opportunity to explore this further [through dance]."

Founded by the H&M group in 2007, Cos quickly gained a following for its wardrobe staples that take inspiration from art, architecture and design, all at mid-market prices.

Cos has over 230 stores worldwide, up from 125 three years ago. Last year alone, the brand opened up 37 new doors, and it expanded into new markets including Malaysia, Israel, Slovenia and Qatar.

The brand hit 9 billion SEK (about $1.06 billion) in revenue, representing around 4 percent of H&M's total turnover.

Presenting its performance during Pitti Uomo marks the next chapter for Cos' approach to its menswear category, which currently makes up roughly 30 percent of overall sales.

"We're still very new in the markets that we're in so we're still getting to know our customer, so getting that response is really important," says Honda. "We haven't got a set-in-stone strategy for [future] runway shows and presentations, but we would say that we have potential in all areas to expand further."
Related Articles: Quiet High-Street Rebel Cos Accelerates Global Expansion H&M Profit Drops to 16-Year Low H&M's Answer to Streetwear Gathers Pace

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Cos x Pitti Uomo | Source: Courtesy By Christopher Morency April 24, 2018 05:25 FLORENCE, Italy - London-based minimalist fashion label Cos is the latest special guest to show its collection at the 94th edition of Pitti Uomo in June.

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Global Data: Retail Viewpoint – H&M H1 FY2018/19 for the six months ending 31 May 2019

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Global Data: Retail Viewpoint – H&M H1 FY2018/19 for the six months ending 31 May 2019

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<p class="x_MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst"> What influence does
London bring to Cos?

<p class="x_MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">London is a growing

hub of creativity where we are continually inspired by the eclectic

mix of old and new and different cultures. This is often reflected

in the way we work at Cos with the use of traditional methods using

modern fabrics. This summer, I am looking forward to visiting the

Herzog & de Meruron's extension for the Tate Modern and the

Hive at Kew gardens. Another key reason that we chose to base Cos

in London is the fantastic art and design schools we have here - we

love to add to our design team with amazing graduates.

<p class="x_MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"> What signature
elements does Cos bring to the brands it collaborates
with?

<p class="x_MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst">We see collaborations

as an opportunity to provide an insight into the people that

inspire us, to share our world and to reach a new audience.

We find it incredibly exciting to see how artists

reinterpret our core DNA and create an experience for the visitors

that they hope will be memorable and feel very much like a coming

together of the designer's vision and Cos.

<p class="x_MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"> You've had a
long partnership with the Serpentine, tell us about your
relationship with them.

<p class="x_MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">The Park Nights

series embodies Cos's values in terms of accessibility to the

public and support of young and up-and-coming artists. When we

first met with the team four years ago, there was an instant

synergy with their democratic approach and values - we're very much

aligned. Hans Ulrich Obrist and Julia Peyton Jones are in

themselves incredibly inspiring and have such a wealth of knowledge

from the art world. We love to hear about their planned exhibitions

and the pavilion, we have great admiration of their work and find

it incredibly exciting year after year!

<p class="x_MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">

[ImageLibrary##1669203/Any##Description¬The T-shirt created by Cos in aid of the Serpentine Trust]

<p class="x_MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"> The Serpentine is
famed for its summer parties, what do you think makes a great
party?

<p class="x_MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">The pavilion is such

a wonderful setting for an event, the combination of the classical

English park and the striking architecture is always wonderful to

be immersed within. I love that the event we host feels like a

great mix of Cos family and friends and no matter what the weather

everyone seems to enjoy themselves.

<p class="x_MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"> Why is supporting
the Serpentine Trust so important to you?

<p class="x_MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">The Serpentine

Galleries is at its heart a charitable institution and is open to

all members of the public free of charge. We value this democratic

approach, making the arts accessible to the public and offering

young talent the opportunity to showcase their work to a wider

audience. As a brand with our home in London, it is great to work

with a gallery that feels so much a part of the city.

<p class="x_MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">

[ImageLibrary##1669202/Any##Description¬Karin Gustafsson in 2014]

<p class="x_MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"> Is there always
something in the back of your mind when you're designing the Cos
collections?

<p class="x_MsoListParagraph">Each season we travel around

the world seeing new cities, visiting galleries and art fairs and

seeing the works of both established and emerging artists,

photographers, designers and architects. We then come together as a

team and interpret our findings and apply them throughout the

collection to create a conceptual story of functional, timeless and

modern pieces.

<p class="x_MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst"> What/who is your
artistic inspiration?

<p class="x_MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">We look towards

architecture, design and art for inspiration, season after season

we have looked towards the fresh functionalists from the Thirties -

Charlotte Perriand, Prouve and Le Corbusier - and the American and

Danish modernists from the Fifties - Eames, Wegner, Jacobsen and

Juhl. For our autumn/winter 2016 collection, we were particularly

drawn to the work of Lynette Yiadom Boakye, an English artist whose

work we first saw at an exhibition at the Serpentine. We loved the

intense colours found in the backdrop of her paintings. Another key

artist this season was Lev Khesin's and the rich and enveloping

compositions found in his work.

<p class="x_MsoListParagraph"> How important are fashion and
art to one another?

<p class="x_MsoNormal">I believe there are intrinsic links

between fashion and art. This is exemplified through the

manipulation of functional shapes and form to create surprising and

irregular compositions. At Cos we feel that art

has always been relevant to what we do, it inspires our collections

with shapes and colours. The nature of fashion and clothing in turn

means it constantly inspires everyone - it is a key part of

everyone's life!
The T-shirts are available in select Cos stores in London and at cosstores.com from July 12, costing £55/£49 for men's/women's with proceeds going to The Serpentine Trust.

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What influence doesLondon bring to Cos? London is a growing hub of creativity where we are continually inspired by the eclectic mix of old and new and different cultures. This is often reflected in the way we work at Cos with the use of traditional methods using modern fabrics.

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CACI's Acorn is a powerful consumer classification that segments the UK population. By analysing demographic data, social factors, population and consumer behaviour, it provides information and understanding of different types of people.

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The Secrets To COS's Inspired Minimalism

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The Secrets To COS's Inspired Minimalism

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H&M Group (Hennes Mauritz AB) launched its 2018 sustainability report this week with a fanfare. By 2030 it aims to use only recycled or other sustainability sourced materials and by 2040 it wants to be 100% climate positive. The world's second-largest clothing retailer (in sales), whose brands include Cos, And Other Stories, Weekday and Monki, currently sources 35% of its materials from recycled and sustainably sourced materials.

Outside the H&M store in the Sollentuna shopping centre north of Stockholm, whose plate-glass windows had been covered in red SALE posters the last few weeks, Måns Flodholm, a 15-year-old student, was less convinced. He wasn't going to the store. "I don't buy clothes from H&M - ever," he said.

Why? Was it the merchandise? "No. Don't you know they burn their clothes that they don't sell?" he asked.

Last year, a documentary on Danish t.v., Operation X, alleged that H&M had been accused of burning 12 tonnes of unsold but usable clothes. Bloomberg also reported that H&M was burning discarded clothing alongside recycled wood and trash at the Västerås combined heat and power station, as part of the latter's conversion to becoming a fossil-free facility by 2020.

According to Greenpeace, the incineration of reject clothes is a common practice worldwide. I asked H&M if it was true it burnt usable clothing. It said:

For H&M to send our products to destruction is very rare, and when we are obliged to do it, it is always as last option and only for those garments that cannot be reused - including donations - or recycled. These may be, for example, products that have failed certain chemical safety tests or that have been affected by mold during transportation, and are therefore not safe to be reused or recycled. As we said, this happens in very rare instances.

H&M has been going through a rough patch recently. Its shares stand at a low while last year, it recorded its first fall in quarterly sales for more than two decades. Over the 2017 financial year, sales growth was little over 3%. The company has admitted it got its stock orders wrong at the H&M brand, leading to the need for widespread clearance sales.

Earlier this year, H&M got into trouble over its advertisement for its Monkey hoodie, which depicted a black child wearing the eponymously named hoodie. Edward Adoo reflected the views of many in The Independent when he said that as a black person, he felt uncomfortable about the ad. " The problem here doesn't lie in the supposed racism of H&M, but instead in their misguidedness," he wrote. "Their intention was clearly not to cause offence; it just obviously didn't enter their minds to think seriously about their black customers."

In a similar fashion, the response to the clothes burning inquiries doesn't quite tally with a recent acknowledgement by chairman Stefan Persson, the son of H&Ms founder, that the company needs to be more transparent. The company told me it 'rarely' burnt clothes. But what does 'rarely' mean? If there is a problem with the chemicals in the clothes that the company is burning, what happens to the environment when they are burnt? In 2010, the company was forced to change its policy of cutting up unsold garments rather than giving them to the needy, following a report in the New York Times. The clothes burning image won't go away either. There is, as the saying goes, no smoke without fire.

Despite tough conditions, H&M believes it can grow sales this year by more than 25%. It is going to focus more on online sales and slow down store openings. This year it will open 390 new shops (rather than 479 in 2017) and shut 170 (almost twice as many as last year), the biggest number of store closures since at least 1998.

At its first capital markets day this year, H&M illustrated that apparel is the world's second-largest consumer industry after packaged food. But if it is this big, how many more clothes do we need? And critically, how do you persuade a teenager concerned about sustainability and the environment to buy a T-shirt? Retailing today is about understanding data and responding quickly, but retailing tomorrow may be much more about understanding the minds of teenagers like Måns.

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H&M Is Pushing Sustainability Hard, But Not Everyone Is Convinced

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H&M Group (Hennes Mauritz AB) launched its 2018 sustainability report this week with a fanfare. By 2030 it aims to use only recycled or other sustainability sourced materials and by 2040 it wants to be 100% climate positive.

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H&M customers can now Click-and-Collect in 7 out of 47 markets 

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H&M customers can now Click-and-Collect in 7 out of 47 markets 

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It's hardly unknown for a fashion retailer to sign up a high profile figure to produce their own collections or to front new design pushes on social media platforms. It's maybe a bit more of a left-field decision to recruit the whistleblower who kicked off the Cambridge Analytica expose last year, but that's precisely what H&M has just done.

The beleagured Swedish outfit has signed up Christopher Wylie on a consultancy contract as Research Director, with a brief to:

help H&M Group improve its capabilities within consumer, product and market insights. Besides that, he also supports our work on sustainable and ethical AI.

Actually Wylie's a pretty savvy catch when you look into his background. Prior to his time at Cambridge Analytica he worked as a fashion trends forecaster, which is basically what he's going to do for H&M. He told reporters in Sweden:

If you better understand what people like to wear, and how they like to wear it, and how they want to feel when they're wearing it, you'll naturally start to create insights as to modernizing and updating your collection.

In other words, he's going to tap into data from the 30 million worldwide members of the H&M Club loyalty program and based on his analysis, deliver the retailer sufficient insights to avoid it repeating the situation it found itself in last year when it needed to stage a massive 'fire sales' to try to get rid of unsold inventory.

That's the theory at any rate. There's a lot at stake here as well. The Swedish firm just turned in another set of poor quarterly and full year numbers that will do nothing to convince investors that the much-vaunted transformation program is having much impact.

That said, there are a few encouraging signs amid the red ink, not least a 22% year-on-year increase in digital sales, taking online revenues to SEK 30 billion or 14.5% of total sales. That digital growth is balancing out the decline of the physical stores revenue in some key markets. For example, in the UK, a 38% year-on-year online rise offset a one percent decline in store, leading to the region claiming overall growth of 8%.

Hand-waving

But arithmetical hand-waving can't conceal the ongoing omni-channel problems that the retailer has and needs to address more urgently than it has demonstrated to date.

While CEO Karl-Johan Persson cites rollouts of initiatives like Click-and-Collect and one day delivery, the harsh reality is that some of these 2019 retail essentials are only an option in as few as 7 of the 47 markets in which H&M operates.

With that in mind, there is one important milestone that's just been passed which is to get German stores - H&M's biggest market - up-and-running on the firm's new global online platform. Persson clearly sees this as a major achievement:

When it comes to our tech and IT infrastructure, here we invest a lot, and this has made it possible for us to complete the transition of online globally to our new online platform. Last week we successfully transferred online in Germany, which is our largest market and this means that now all H&M's 47 online markets are now on the new platform, which will enable further improvements of the shopping experience for our customers.

It's not for want of spending that H&M remains in the omni-channel slow lane - around 60% of CapEx goes on digital projects and the 'to do' list is ticking the right boxes. Underway at present:

Upgrading of hm.com and H&M's mobile app with improved navigation and product presentation as well as more payment options to enhance the customer offering:

Image search is being rolled out and is now available in 29 markets, providing image recognition functionality to help customers move directly from inspiration to purchase.

Next day delivery is available in 11 markets including Germany, USA, UK and Sweden, while same day delivery will be launched in a further 6 or 7 markets in 2019.

A VR app called Perfect Fit is being trialed in Sweden which allows customers to try on items virtually and shop via the mobile site or via the app.

In partnership with Google, H&M Home has developed a voice app called H&M Home Gift Guide, which allows customers to make a purchase entirely through the voice app.

Find-in-Store is now in 18 markets and lets customers use their mobile device to find an item they have seen online in the right size and at the right store.

Scan & Buy is available in all 47 online markets allowing customers to scan the QR code on an item in store to find the size and colour they want online.

In-Store mode is available in Sweden, Denmark, UK and Ireland, showing customers which items are in the store they are currently in as well as online.

As noted above, Click-and-Collect is available in 7 markets, with a further 10 planned for 2019, leaving 30 more without the option.

Online returns in store is now available in 15 markets and to be rolled out to "several more markets" in 2019.

Behind the scenes, 3D technology is now used in the design process for several product groups to deliver cost and time savings as well as less material being used.

But the stores remain the elephant in the room. And an elephant that needs better integration with online to create the elusive omni-channel balance. Persson says:

We're also working hard to further improve the shopping experience for the H&M in the physical stores, as well as online...If we look at the shopping experience online, we're making improvements to the dot com sites and our mobile app where we have made improvements in terms of stability and speed. We're also improving in terms of navigation, product presentation, improved delivery times and new payment options just to mention a few examples. Then we are also working hard when it comes to further integrating the online and the physical stores. We are improving and rolling out features like returns in-store, Click & Collect, online purchases in-store, our In-Store mode, just to mention a few examples.

All of which is great - if you happen to be in one of the handful of markets that is open to such features.

As for that unwanted inventory, that's a logistics and supply chain management shortcoming that is being addressed, according to Persson:

When it comes to improving the supply chain, we continue to invest a lot in the supply chain. One example of that is our investment in new fulfilment centers. We have opened three new fulfilment centers...Together they add a total of two 230,000 square meters of logistics area. We have also automated our logistics center in Poznan in Poland. Good improvements from this will release the capacity constraints that we have had before during the year, especially during the second half of the year and also in the first quarter and also enable a range of other improvements for our customers. For example faster deliveries in a number of European markets, including Germany. Further ahead towards the end of the year, we will also open two more fulfilment centers one in Madrid and one in London.

There's also - inevitably - an AI angle, which brings Wylie's appointment back to center stage. Persson argues:

When it comes to the product flow as well, AI is becoming an increasingly important tool for us and thanks to our vertically integrated business model. We can build - we can build AI models with algorithms designed to address various parts of the product flow from trend detection to quantification, allocation, pricing to mention a few examples...the AI initiatives will help us as well when it comes to being more precise in how we buy, how we quantify and allocate the product.

My take

All the right words and spending that's focused on some critically-important areas, but H&M is so behind the curve on omni-channel that a rapid acceleration is badly needed. Persson inevitably argues that some of the "challenges" in transition and transformation that H&M faced in 2018 have provided learnings that will avoid a repetition in 2019 and beyond. That being so, he needs to be considerably more ambitious in the scaling up of roll-out. For a retailer with a primarily young and fickle demographic in 2019 to present the fact that it can now offer Click-and-Collect in 7 of its 47 operating markets as an achievement tells the story of how H&M got into its current mess.

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H&M customers can now Click-and-Collect in 7 out of 47 markets - a 'boast' that illustrates the retailer's omni-channel nightmare

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It's hardly unknown for a fashion retailer to sign up a high profile figure to produce their own collections or to front new design pushes on social media platforms. It's maybe a bit more of a left-field decision to recruit the whistleblower who kicked off the Cambridge Analytica expose last year, but that's precisely what H&M has just done.

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Illustrating Wilde: An examination of Aubrey Beardsley's interpretation of Salome

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Illustrating Wilde: An examination of Aubrey Beardsley's interpretation of Salome

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[The author wrote this essay for Professor Troy Thomas's graduate-level course, HUM 530 Narrative in Art and Literature at Pennsylvania State University. In the original text of the play the name of the speaker occurs on a line previous to the dialogue. I have placed them on the same line for easier reading on the WWW. - George P. Landow]

Respectability is a mask maintained by a conspiracy of silence [Burdette 42]

Oscar Wilde wrote his original, French version of the one-act tragedy of Salome in 1891 while living in Paris, the epicenter of the transnational yet distinctly Parisian movement of Symbolism (Balakian 9) he was so attracted to. The play was initially banned from theaters in England after rehearsals for its performance were already underway, purportedly on the basis of an old law forbidding the stage interpretation of biblical figures. It was more likely than not that the true reason behind the ban was the overt sexual passion permeating the work and Wilde's portrayal of woman in extreme opposition to the traditional notion of virtuous, pure, clean and asexual womanhood the Victorians felt comfortable living with. Wilde had struck a nerve in deviating from the prevailing belief of the era that "no truth that was unrespectable should be mentioned" (Burdett 40), offering a view of woman which society did not want to consider and an expression of the latent fear of her which men preferred to keep as repressed as they liked to keep their women.

Enter Beardsley. A young artist of only twenty-one, Aubrey Beardsley was just making a name for himself around the time of the first publication of Salome. Though acquaintances, the two artists were not friends and in spite of the impact of the play on him being so powerful as to spur him to illustrate its climactic moment entirely independently and spontaneously, Beardsley shared the opinion of many of the two men's contemporaries that the originality of Wilde's work was questionable.

From left to right: Moreau's Salome dancing before Herod, attooed Salome, and The Apparition. [Click on thumbnails for larger images.]

Wilde's many influences were so obviously evident in Salome that he was accused of nothing less than shameless plagiarism. The victims of his alleged crime included Flaubert, with his short story of Herodias, Moreau, with his paintings of Salome Dancing before Herod, Tatooed Salome and The Apparition, Huysman, with his novel A Rebours ( text), where two of Moreau's paintings are described in chapter Five, and Mallarmé, with his poem "Herodiade," depicting the beheading of John the Baptist. Though certainly and visibly inspired by all of these works, Wilde's Salome was nonetheless different than any seen before.

Its originality was underlined and compounded by the illustrations made by Beardsley for the work's English edition of 1894. In them we see an "empowered woman, coldly aware and in control of her sexuality" (Bielski 47) yet never actually giving herself to any man, thus dually enraging him as she had thus appropriated for herself the role of the one who calls the shots traditionally reserved for the 'superior' sex. This is a woman who was to be unspoken of in the century of outward respectability. Yet her menacing presence was lurking behind dark corners and threatening every man with the loss of his power and thus his manhood.

There were strong undercurrents at work in redefining Woman in the traditionally patriarchic Victorian society. The second half of the century reaped the benefits of the first efforts of organized feminism and saw reforms in divorce law, property law and the school system, giving women more dignity and equality than they had previously enjoyed. Complacent with their social progress on the surface, within the men trembled at the fear and uncertainty of the threat posed by the loss of their meek and submissive household innocents. The reemergence of the popular subject of the femme fatale in much of the art of the day was an expression of this terror which consumed them.

J'ai baisé ta bouche

[Click on thumbnail for larger image.]

Beardsley's visual interpretation of Wilde's femme fatale was published in the debut of the London journal, The Studio, in April of 1893 (see Fig. 1). Published with eight other drawings of his, the title of the Salome illustration was an echo of her final words before her death - J'ai Baisé ta Bouche, Iokanaan ("I Have Kissed Your Mouth, Iokanaan"). The illustration resonated astoundingly with Wilde. Apparently feeling he had found a kindred soul in Beardsley, he soon delivered him a copy of Salome with the inscription, "For Aubrey: for the only artist who, beside myself, knows what the dance of the seven veils is, and can see that invisible dance." Through this seeming marriage of minds a sort of 'collaboration' was born. Wilde commissioned Beardsley to illustrate all of Salome.

The public was outraged when the English edition of the work was published with its illustrations and Wilde himself was taken aback when he laid eyes upon Beardsley's completed drawings. Not only did he find their style inappropriate, but the illustrations had caused such public controversy with their fascinating, grotesque appeal that Wilde was concerned they would overshadow his work and "reduce the text to the role of 'illustrating Aubrey's illustrations'" (qtd. in Kravec 30). Further, since the publishing of the English edition many have posed the question of whether or not the illustrations even corresponded to the written text.

When considering this question one should be clear about what is meant by the term illustration. While many manuals in the nineteenth century insisted the illustrator "was not at liberty to paint or draw his own unaided imaginings; he is merely interpreting another's words into a graphic representation" (qtd. in Owens 81), in Cultivating Picturacy: Visual Art and Verbal Interventions, James Heffernan points out that, according to Martin Meisel, there is in fact a distinction between the nineteenth century comprehension of the terms illustration and realization. "While a realization faithfully recreated a verbal description or a painting on the stage . . . illustration meant "enrichment and embellishment" on the page, with the artist's imagination freely at work in the two dimensions" (qtd. in Heffernan 201). Further, it was not at all uncommon for the author of a work which was to be illustrated to be surprised by the final product he or she had commissioned as in the 1890s the writer and illustrator rarely, if ever, actually worked together. On the contrary, it was customary for the illustrator to receive the manuscript from the publisher and work independently with no interaction whatsoever with the author (Heffernan 201).

The Toilette of Salome I and II

Left: The Toilette of Salome I . Right. The Toilette of Salome I .

[Click on thumbnails for larger images.]

If one adds to that the driving principle behind symbolism - representing something rather than showing it - it would be difficult to accuse Beardsley of deviously veering from the text and creating something irrelevant for no reason other than to indulge in the aesthetic belief of 'art for art's sake.' That said, while working on the commission Beardsley himself confessed in a letter to art historian Robert Ross that he had "withdrawn three of the illustrations and supplied their places with three new ones (simply beautiful and quite irrelevant)" (qtd. in Greslé 25). Some believe these illustrations to be The Toilette of Salome I, The Toilette of Salome II, and perhaps Salome on Settle. I will not include an examination of Salome on Settle in this work, not only because it was not published until the 1907 edition of the play but also because I believe it to truly be quite irrelevant, significant only in the fact that it alludes to possible auto-eroticism in Salome's holding of the phallic symbol as she sheepishly looks back at the observer. I do believe, though, it is likely that this was one of the three drawings Beardsley had referred to in the above quote. On the other hand I do not believe The Toilette of Salome I or II could have been among these irrelevant illustrations as history tells us that The Toilette of Salome II was forbidden by the censors and thus replaced with The Toilette of Salome I, in an altered form, indicating that they were made and remade with a purpose, not exclusively for their beauty. The published version is placed beside the following text:

HEROD. No, no, Salome. It is not that thou desirest. Do not listen to thy mother's voice. She is ever giving thee counsel. Do not heed her.

SALOME. It is not my mother's voice that I heed. It is for mine own pleasure that I ask the head of Iokanaan in a silver charger. You have sworn an oath, Herod. Forget not that you have sworn an oath.

HEROD. I know it. I have sworn an oath by my gods. I know it well. But I pray thee, Salome, ask of me something else. Ask of me the half of my kingdom, and I will give it thee. But ask not of me what they lips have asked.

SALOME. I ask of you the head of Iokanaan.

HEROD. No, no, I will not give it thee.

SALOME. You have sworn an oath, Herod.

HERODIAS. Yes, you have sworn an oath. Everybody heard you. You swore before everybody.

HEROD. Peace, woman! It is not to you I speak.

The text appears to bear no direct correlation to the illustration which accompanies it. But if we regard Beardsley as illustrator, not realizer, we can see in the image the self-satisfied Salome, for the first time ever in a treatment of the story herself desiring the head of John the Baptist, smugly sitting on a phallic symbol she can almost be said to be sneering at, satisfied with herself and her approaching victory. Unlike in The Climax, dealt with below, her hair is here perfectly composed, reflecting her control of the situation at hand. If viewed in such a manner, it can be said that the illustration in fact does parallel the text, as it is expressing its mood and Salome's newfound power and awareness of it. Her satisfied expression can also be attributed to auto-erotic activity, for it can be argued that her dress is concealing just that beneath it, perhaps mirroring the satisfaction she feels in her domination in negotiations with Herod. The suggestion of auto-eroticism is far more overt in The Toilette of Salome II; in this initial drawing Salome's arms are not hidden under a gown and she is visibly naked, clothed only by a robe thrown over her back and appearing to be on the verge of slipping off her body, leaving her and her pleasure entirely exposed.

In The Toilette of Salome I we can also see two pairs of scissors, one in the pocket of the Pierrot-Harlequin and one on the third shelf from the bottom of the dressing table, representative of castration, which is at once a foreshadowing of the prophet's looming decapitation and an expression of the fear felt by Victorian men at the prospect of the loss of their manhood and thus power in the face of the growing strength and independence of women. The Harlequin hair-dresser is wearing both the mask Wilde and Beardsley strived to peel off of hypocritical Victorian society and the mask they themselves were forced to wear as homosexuals leading double-lives. Aside from the mask bringing homosexuality to mind, the Harlequin-Pierrot himself, holding a symbolic powder-puff in one hand - a slang term for homosexuals in the late nineteenth century (Owens 91) - is in his androgyny and role a representation of homosexuality, criminalized in the nineteenth century. Some regard the Harlequin as Beardsley's insertion of himself in the work, expressing his own role in both the subject matter and creation, I would say even decoration, of the work. On the bottom shelf we see books which are traditionally considered to be decadent, including Emile Zola's Nana, Paul Verlaine's Fêtes galantes, and the writings of the Marquis de Sade, among others. Owens believed that the inclusion of these titles was more than just a reference to Decadence but a "joke more subtle in that they were all banned or suppressed in the late nineteenth century. Beardsley takes the opportunity to needle Wilde with these reminders of the humiliating fate of Salome" (Owens 99).

The Climax

[Click on thumbnail for larger image.]

In stark contrast to the Toilette illustrations, Beardsley's initial Salome drawing, published in The Studio, and its modified version in the published English edition of Salome were indeed supreme 'realizations' of a specific moment in time suspended in perversity and powerfully expressed in the play. The illustration of The Climax was placed opposite the following text, painfully pouring out of Salome:

Ah! Thou wouldst not suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Iokanaan. Well! I will kiss it now . . . But wherefore dost thou not look at me, Iokanaan? Thine eyes that were so terrible, so full of rage and scorn, are shut now. Wherefore are they shut? Open thine eyes! . . . Thou wouldst not have none of me, Iokanaan. Thou rejectedst me . . . Well, I still live, but thou art dead, and thy head belongs to me . . . I have kissed thy mouth, Iokanaan, I have kissed thy mouth.

Both text and corresponding illustration depict Salome in a state of perverse ecstasy coupled with suffering as she holds the lifeless head of Iokanaan in her hands. The tormented virgin's hunger for his body overcame her that same evening during the celebration of her stepfather's birthday. Her stepfather was Herod, Tetrarch of Judea. Lusting after Salome (who was, in fact, his niece, as his brother was the first to marry Herodias, Salome's mother), Herod begs her to dance for him, offering in return anything she desires, even half his kingdom if need be. Held captive in a cistern is Iokanaan, the prophet (John the Baptist). Salome has by this moment grown to desire him passionately but, his chastity unassailable, he refuses her advances. When pressed enough by the Tetrarch to dance, she concedes. In return she requests the head of the prophet, in punishment for his unrequited love.

In reading the text we feel her perverted elation as she kisses the lips of the dead prophet whose mouth she has likened to 'ripe fruit' and 'a pomegranate cut in twain with a knife of ivory,' as if his lips truly were meant to be feasted on. Beardsley brilliantly captures and shares the ardor of the moment just after Salome had acquiesced to her necrophilic appetite and in his illustration we see her literally floating in the air, lifted to a state of suspended rapture above a puddle of blood from whence a lily of the perverse grows tall and erect.

Just as her body is levitating above the confines of earthly morality in its state of twisted frenzy, her hair too is rising, an extension of her mood of supreme elation, vibrating and writhing and curling with pleasure. The medusa-like locks mirror those of Iokanaan, though his tendrils in contrast hang limply from his decapitated head. In the upper left-hand corner of the picture we are reminded of the 'clusters of black grapes' to which Salome previously compared Iokanaan's hair in the text, again speaking of his body as something to be devoured, ravaged, thus reversing the traditional roles of woman and man in regards to sexuality.

Woman's hair accounts for a significant element in Symbolist iconography and as Robert Goldwater has pointed out in his book Symbolism, "woman's hair, through representation and design, becomes the symbolic expression of the moral forces which, for good or ill, woman exercises over the will and psyche of man" (Goldwater 67). Indeed the now ghoulish Salome's snake-like coils of hair can here be seen to represent her moral depravity through which she tried to divest the prophet of his virtue and when unsuccessful divested him of his life, leaving nothing stirring in him but the blood dripping from his head and into a sea of blackness.

Another illustration that bears a vraisemblance to the text is the frontispiece (see Fig. 6). There are three generally accepted interpretations of who it is depicted in this illustration: Narraboth (the Young Syrian) and Salome, Iokanaan and Salome, and the Page of Herodias and Narraboth. I am of the belief that the two characters depicted are the Page of Herodias and Narraboth, the frontispiece in this case depicting the opening scene of the play.

The Woman in the Moon

[Click on thumbnail for larger image.]

Salome was not the only character in the tragedy who suffered from unrequited love (in Salome's case we here use the word 'love' liberally), for Narraboth himself was quite enamored with Salome, and the Page of Herodias was in turn deeply in love with him. Below is the opening text of the play.

THE YOUNG SYRIAN. How beautiful is the Princess Salome to-night!

THE PAGE OF HERODIAS. Look at the moon. How strange the moon seems! She is like a dead woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. One might fancy she was looking for dead things.

THE YOUNG SYRIAN. She has a strange look. She is like a little princess who wears a yellow veil, and whose feet are of silver. She is like a princess who has little white doves for feet. One might fancy she was dancing.

In The Woman in the Moon we see the Page cowering before the moon, 'hiding' himself with one arm from the dangers he believes it is waiting to release upon them and shielding Narraboth with the other. He appears to be standing on Narraboth's robe, fearful of losing him, in both cases foreshadowing the tragedy and death that is to come. Narraboth is gazing elsewhere, one could assume towards Salome if we take this illustration to be another 'realization' of the text. In the moon we see a face which I believe to be that of Wilde (other interpretations identify it as Salome or Herod) (Greslé 36). One could imagine the creator of the piece observing his characters while they, in this case the Page, look back apprehensively, distrustful of what the creator has planned for them, corresponding to the Page's expression of his anxieties in the text itself.

In placing those two characters in the frontispiece, where the illustrator traditionally depicted the main theme or protagonists of a work, Beardsley brings the theme of same-sex passion appearing throughout the text to the foreground and refers to Wilde's own homosexuality by here inscribing him into the moon (Greslé 36). Supporting the theory that it is Wilde's face depicted in the moon is the fact that the lines of the face and droopy eyes bear a similarity to other characterizations of Wilde made by Beardsley (Greslé 38). Further, the drawing was in fact initially entitled "The Man in the Moon." What is more, to the left of the moon there is what seems to be a single carnation, possibly indicative of the 'green carnation' worn as an emblem by nineteenth century Parisian homosexuals (Greslé 38), again sending the message that the homosexual author of the work is inextricably part of the work itself.

It should be noted that the moon is a leitmotif recurring throughout Wilde's text, at times being compared to Salome, at times almost existing as a menacing presence and character in and of itself, and as we see in The Woman in the Moon, it can at times be taken to be the very author himself. Often expressing the emotional states of the characters, it is always setting the mood of the play with its changing color (Sato 65). References to the moon include the following lines: "She is like a little piece of money, a little silver flower. She is cold and chaste. I am sure she is a virgin," (suggesting whiteness and purity) and "She has become red. She has become red as blood."

Beardsley's insertion of what is evidently Wilde in this drawing, as well as in other Salome illustrations (A Platonic Lament, Enter Herodias and most likely also in The Eyes of Herod, all three dealt with below) is indicative of the method he employed in illustrating the work. The true Symbolist he was, he looked beyond the text. His holistic approach infused in his illustrations the wider context within which the written work was given life - the homosexuality of its author, the changing role of woman in Victorian society and the fear of her felt by Victorian man, the secret desires society experienced and indulged in yet dared not speak of, and the unflattering view of Wilde held by Beardsley and others (some illustrations seeming quite flagrantly to poke fun at the author). As Wilde had evidently recognized prior to sending Beardsley a copy of the text with the afore-mentioned inscription, the young artist possessed the ability not only to see what the work presented on the surface but also to unveil what it suggested, hidden in its many layers, instinctively understanding the underlying messages Wilde was giving form to and which Beardsley was able to recognize, thus illustrating the entirety of the work of art and all that was infused in it rather than simply 'realizing' the text.

The Platonic Lament

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Carrying further the underlying theme of homosexuality brought to the surface in the frontispiece rather than the main theme of the play, the illustration of which would have had to include Salome, is the depiction of the Page mourning the death of Narraboth in the illustration entitled, interestingly enough, A Platonic Lament. The text beginning on the page facing the drawing is as follows:

THE PAGE OF HERODIAS. The Young Syrian has slain himself! The young captain has slain himself! He has slain himself who was my friend! I gave him a little box of perfumes and ear-rings wrought in silver, and now he has killed himself! Ah, did he not say that some misfortune would happen? I, too, said it, and it has come to pass. Well I knew that the moon was seeking a dead thing, but I knew not that it was he whom she sought. Ah! Why did I not hide him from the moon? If I had hidden him in a cavern she would not have seen him.

The effeminizing of the Young Syrian is clear in the selection of gifts the Page had bestowed upon him, traditionally reserved for women. And later we have another suggestion of the nature of the Page's feelings for the Young Syrian when he reminisces of their time together: "In the evening were wont to walk by the river, and among the almond-trees, and he used to tell me of the things of his country. He spake very low. The sound of his voice was like the sound of the flute, of one who playeth upon the flute. Also he had much joy to gaze at himself in the river. I used to reproach him for that." The sound of the Syrian's voice was literally music to the enamored Page's ears. In this speech we should also note the portrayal of the Young Syrian gazing at himself in the river, which can be said to correlate with the story of Narcissus, often taken as a metaphor for homosexuality in the nineteenth century (Greslé 38) in its expression of the love of the likeness of oneself.

In this drawing again we have that familiar face in the moon, here in the upper right of the illustration. As in The Woman in the Moon the Page is again nude, most likely I would say depicted as such to signify his vulnerability in the face of his impossible situation and perhaps also the innocence of his love and his willingness to give himself fully to the Young Syrian. Again we have a single carnation (if that is what the flower is taken to be) falling to the ground to wither away and die in sorrow on behalf of the Page as he gently holds the head of his beloved in his hands.

It is important to note the similarity of the facial features of the two characters that render them almost entirely indistinguishable from one another. This similarity is something we have seen in The Climax and the frontispiece as well and it is a device employed throughout Beardsley's Salome illustrations. This characteristic of mirroring images not only introduces a balance in the illustrations but, more importantly, it blurs the lines between personal identities and even more significantly it underscores the messages being relayed. Both in terms of same-sex relations and the definition of woman, it blurs the line between the sexes. Masculine and feminine cease to exist as they are undistinguishable in this androgynous realm of questionable desires and unclear relations that balance the role of man and woman in the battle of the sexes and separate love from procreation. There is no longer man or woman, there is neither, and gender identity is rendered irrelevant in this work which transgresses all accepted norms of sexual identity and behavior. The suggested androgyny of the characters leaves no room for stereotypes and sets the stage in which Salome clearly enjoys powers otherwise reserved exclusively for men in Victorian society - she is her own voice, she is the decision-maker, she is the one who objectifies the human body; she is the powerful, the predator, in command.

The Peacock Skirt

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In The Peacock Skirt we have what is generally assumed to be the Young Syrian casting his gaze upon Salome. This identity can be inferred from the text below, though again, the faces do not allow us to determine whom we are looking at. The figure to the right, assumed to be the Young Syrian, can be identified as a man by observing his legs and knees that betray the androgyny of his face. Though his expression does not convey the image of the gentle affection he feels for Salome according to the text, his eyes appear to be blinded by what he sees as her beauty, represented by the haze or veil of denial visibly clouding his vision, in opposition to Salome's clear, dead-white glare.

The illustration is placed amidst an unrelated dialogue where two soldiers are discussing the commotion heard from the banquet hall while we intermittently have the Page speaking of the menacing moon and the Young Syrian again repeating how beautiful he finds Salome. The following exchange that begins on the page opposite the illustration gives us reason to believe it is the Syrian and Salome depicted in the drawing:

THE YOUNG SYRIAN. How beautiful the Princess Salome is to-night!

THE PAGE OF HERODIAS. You are always looking at her. You look at her too much. It is dangerous to look at people in such fashion. Something terrible may happen.

The elaborate dress and décor about Salome correspond to the Young Syrian's vision of her as the embodiment of ultimate femininity and elegance. Beardsley might have been inspired to use the peacock theme and imagery in this picture due to Herod's offer later in the text to give the princess all of the peacocks in his possession if only she would take back her request for the prophet's head: "Salome, thou knowest my white peacocks, my beautiful white peacocks . . . Their beaks are gilded with gold and the grains that they eat are smeared with gold, and their feet are stained with purple . . . There are not in all the world birds so wonderful. I will give thee fifty of my peacocks . . . I will give them to thee, all." Considering this later description of the regality (gold and purple) and beauty of the peacocks and the possibility of Salome having them in her possession, this illustration could be an example of how, in a manner that some describe as anachronistic, Beardsley's drawings bring together various elements, images, feelings and hidden messages from differing moments in the work into one illustration, endowing it with numerous connotations and references and telling a broader story than one might expect or critics may find "appropriate" within the bounds of his task.

The Black Cape

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The Black Cape must be a representation of Salome. In the English publication the illustration accompanies the text which introduces Salome to the stage just before she first hears the voice of the prophet. The text reads as follows:

THE YOUNG SYRIAN. She is like a dove that has strayed . . . She is like a narcissus in the wind . . . she is like a silver flower.

[Enter Salome.]

SALOME. I will not stay. I cannot stay. Why does the tetrarch look at me all the while with his mole's eyes under his shaking eyelids? It is strange that the husband of my mother looks at me like that. I know not what it means. Of a truth I know it too well.

THE YOUNG SYRIAN. You have left the feast, Princess?

SALOME. How sweet is the air here! I can breathe here! Within there are Jews from Jerusalem who are tearing each other in pieces over their foolish ceremonies, and barbarians who drink and drink and spill their wine on the pavement, and Greeks from Smyrna with painted eyes and painted cheeks, and frizzed hair curled in columns, and Egyptians silent and subtle, with long nails of jade and russet cloaks, and Romans brutal and course, with their uncouth jargon. Ah! How I loathe the Romans! They are rough and common, and they give themselves the airs of noble lords.

Chronologically the third illustration in the play, The Black Cape is the second drawing depicting Salome, the first being The Peacock Skirt. The Young Syrian's silver flower is here seen bending and contorting like a snake, yet appears somehow quite elegant in doing so. From beneath her cape hangs limply a hand reminiscent of the Chinese woman's bound foot representative at times of the lotus/vagina and at others of the penis. She holds in her other hand what is evidently another phallic symbol, further defining her in terms of her potential to hold man firmly in her clutches. This illustration stands as the only one depicting Salome alone and due to its placement in the text it can be thought of as her official introduction to the reader. She is enshrouded in black attire, serpentine in her form and cold in her indifference as she cannot be bothered to return the glance of the observer. Beardsley portrays her with a mock dignity, putting the shameless temptress' nose in the air and clothing her in elegantly rigid attire, her true nature revealed only in the form of her grotesque fist falling out from under the cape.

Perhaps this illustration was one of the 'irrelevant' ones Beardsley referred to, as it was in fact a replacement for John and Salome, which was not to be published until 1907 due to its depiction of Salome's flowery breasts, standing proudly as she strives to overpower the faith of the prophet, coldly staring him down. As Latimer says of the John and Salome illustration, it "reinscribes psychologically the resonant polarities of love and hate, attraction and repulsion, like those written into Salome's dialogue with Iokanaan" (Latimer 27).

John and Salome

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An example of the dialogue he refers to follows:

SALOME. I am amorous of thy body, Iokanaan! Thy body is white, like the lilies of a field that the mower hath never mowed . . . There is nothing in the world so white as thy body. Suffer me to touch thy body . . . Thy body is hideous. It is like the body of a leper. It is like a plastered wall, where vipers have crawled . . . It is of thy hair that I am enamored, Iokanaan . . ."

Love and hate, intertwined and playing against each other in irrational passion and present in Salome's dialogues are reflected in the balanced, contrasting yet complementary images of John and Salome. It is also worth noting that the image is indicative of the treatment of femininity in the play, as Salome is here not only on a par with the male, but seems to be in command and with her "masculine desiring gaze effectively feminizes Iokanaan" (Latimer 27).

Moving on to the illustration of Enter Herodias, we see a drawing the title of which was taken from Wilde's stage direction itself ("Enter Herod, Herodias, and all the court"). In this very act we again see Beardsley's view of Salome as a work beyond just the story. As stated by Owens, "This title draws attention to the mechanics of a production of the play, surely a teasing reference to the fact that Wilde's planned production of Salome in 1892 . . . had been denied a license" (Owens 84). This is underlined by the insertion of Wilde in the image, this time not a character in the work, such as his presence in the moon can be interpreted, but rather as creator, director and proud artist, seen in the bottom-right hand corner motioning to the greatness he has (not) brought to the stage behind him.

Nothing short of a caricature, Beardsley adorned the image of Wilde with numerous 'props' meant to illustrate his character as seen by Beardsley and others. Among them we see a caduceus staff under his left arm, like the rod of Mercury, the "messenger god and the god of orators, merchants and thieves" (Owens 88). With this comparison we see a reference to Wilde's celebrated eloquence and also to his purported plagiarism. The staff can similarly be seen as a crutch, as he relied heavily on his earlier-mentioned 'sources' to create his Salome (Owens 88), both ideas - thief or dependant - are emphasized by the copy of a work of Salome Wilde holds in his hand.

Further mocking Wilde, Beardsley here depicts him wearing an owl hat. As noted by Owens, 'owl' was a slang term used to describe somebody whose "superficial wisdom masked underlying foolishness" (Owens 92), the bells adorning the hat further underlining the reference to Wilde as a jester, certainly not a representation the man known for his unrivaled wit would have expected or taken lightly.

Enter Herodias and The Eyes of Herod

Left: Enter Herodias; right: The Eyes of Herod. [Click on thumbnails for larger images.]

As for Herodias, Beardsley here went beyond the moderate androgyny with which he impregnated his Salome series and depicts the woman as nothing short of "an enormous drag-queen" (Latimer 27). Her theatrical presence, with its overbearing hair, is in line with Beardsley's other allusions (through Wilde himself) to the ill-fated play's failure to see the light of the stage. In the same mood we see a fetus-headed grotesque attendant seemingly run amuck on stage, boasting an enormous, veiled erection and peering under the skirt of Herodias with wild eyes which could be taken to be an allusion to the Young Syrian's and Herod's persistent ogling of Salome (Owens 93). Embryos and aborted fetuses are devices Aubrey often made use of in his works. Kuryluk explains their appearance in much of the age's Decadent art as representations of "the deadly secrets and dangers of sex" (qtd. in Navarette 67). This interpretation makes sense in the context of Salome, as in this work sex is closely linked with, as it eventually leads to, death. Infamous for his insertion of the male sexual organ and craftily hidden phallic symbols in his work, in this illustration we see three phallic candles, two of which are supported by the more evident phallic symbols of the candle-holders themselves. The image is placed next to the page where Herodias is singled out as the only character fully grounded in reality, as after observation upon observation of the looming danger represented by the moon by other characters she tersely states, "No; the moon is the moon, that is all."

More phallic candles are found in The Eyes of Herod. Here we see Salome, again unfeminine save her breast which falls out of her robe, literally upstaging Herod, indicative of her forthcoming victory in the power game the two are engaged in. The text opposite the picture describes the lascivious Herod's attempt at reeling in Salome so that she would quench his desires with her enticing dance. Salome is, characteristic of her in Wilde's rendition, defiant and impenetrable:

HEROD. Pour me forth wine. [Wine is brought.] Salome, come drink a little wine with me. I have here a wine that is exquisite. Caesar himself sent it me. Dip into it thy red lips, that I may drain the cup.

SALOME. I am not thirsty, Tetrarch.

HEROD. You hear how she answers me, this daughter of yours?

HERODIAS. She does right. Why are you always gazing at her?

HEROD. Bring me ripe fruits [Fruits are brought.] Salome, come and eat fruits with me. I love to see in a fruit the mark of thy little teeth. Bite but a little of this fruit, that I may eat what is left.

SALOME. I am not hungry, Tetrarch.

HEROD. [To Herodias.] You see how you have brought up this daughter of yours.

The leering eyes of Herod are transposed onto a face which, familiar to us by now, resembles that of Wilde himself, thus a correlation is drawn between the author and Herod, perhaps referring to the popular view of the artist held by much of society as an almost monstrous figure due to his notorious escapades. And again, it shows how the artist and the work can hardly be separated when one is aware of the former, and Beardsley does not even strive to separate them as, already noted, he apparently believes Wilde's presence to be an important element of the work itself.

The Stomach Dance

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The next illustration we come across in the work is The Stomach Dance. There is no need to question the pertinence of the illustration to the work as the dance itself is the key that unlocks the horrific decapitation and climax that ensue. Yet the portrayal of the dance is a far cry from what Wilde had envisioned for his princess, as he is reported to have told a friend she should appear "totally naked, but draped with heavy and ringing necklaces made of jewels of every color, warm with the fervor of her amber flesh" (qtd. in Puffet 3). In spite of this brilliant vision, there is no such description of the dance in the text and its interpretation was truly left entirely in Beardsley's hands. The entire dance is reduced to a single stage direction (Salome dances the dance of the seven veils) on the page facing the drawing and the entire extent of any description of that dance is found in Herod's brief expression of how he envisions how her delicate feet would flutter in the air when he sees her sandals have been removed: "Ah, thou art to dance with naked feet! 'Tis well! 'Tis well! Thy little feet will be like white doves. They will be like little white flowers that dance upon the trees . . ."

Her nipples, "tipped with carnations" (qtd. in Owens 95), do not match the masculine and stony expression on Salome's face and overall the only emotion evoked by her somewhat guarded bearing is one of slight tension. Evidently the illustration lacks the richness and sensuality envisioned by Wilde and expected by the reader due to the consummate anticipation produced by Herod's continual insistence on seeing her dance.

Herod's lechery is embodied in the grotesque "drooling dwarf whose priapus is barely disguised as clothing decoration" (Bielski 50). In this 'drooling dwarf' we see a supreme example of how the mischievous Beardsley ingeniously built phallic symbols and male genitalia into the ornate decoration of his illustrations, slipping "flagrant eroticism past the Victorian sensors" (qtd. in Greslé 32) - a certain victory the young, controversial artist no doubt delighted in.

The Dancer's Reward

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After performing her dance of the seven veils Salome demands the head of the Prophet. Begging her to ask for anything else, Herod is left with no choice but to surrender in the face of Salome's usurpation of male power (Bielski 50). The Dancer's Reward is placed beside the text where the power struggle comes to an end. A few pages later she is delivered the head of the prophet - in the words of Salome, "the head that is mine" - and we now have before us the bitter words of Salome which are the inspiration for both this illustration and The Climax, its sequel, which includes the following:

SALOME. Thou wouldst have none of me . . . Thou didst put upon thine eyes the covering of him who would see his God. Well, thou hast seen thy God, Iokanaan, but me, me, thou didst never see. If thou hadst seen me thou hadst loved me. I saw thee, and I loved thee. Oh, how I loved thee! I love thee yet, Iokanaan. I love only thee. I am athirst for thy body; I am hungry for thy body; and neither wine nor apples can appease my desire. What shall I do now, Iokanaan?

We know that what she did was press her lips against his, as she was elevated to a state of debased intoxication, consoling her pain and injured ego while feeding her monstrous hunger. Before doing so, she is here shown "taking possession of her reward" (Latimer 30). In part of the monologue from which the above text has been extracted she goes on to say, "Well, I still live, but thou art dead, and thy head belongs to me. I can do with it what I will." A more disturbing scene or disturbed mind is one we should not even wish to imagine and Beardsley here illustrates this moment when the demented Salome grabs a fist of the prophet's blood-soaked hair, pulling his face up towards her penetrating glare, believing in her state of delusion that he is present and aware of her ultimate victory, her violation of his body.

The blasphemous depiction of The Dancer's Reward and The Climax are paramount examples of how Beardsley, rather than misrepresenting the text of the play, as he has often been accused of doing, takes what is written a step further, as his "drawing begins at the point where the text stops" (Burdett 111). In conclusion, the Salome drawings do not take away from the text or 'miss the point' but rather enhance and give further voice to the play's numerous 'unspeakable' themes and underlying subtexts. Unhappy as he might have been with the style of the illustrations, Wilde was certainly fortunate to have found in Beardsley an artist privy to the world within which the writer created both himself and his work, as the illustrator evidently had the uncanny ability to recognize Wilde's numerous hidden messages - Victorian man's fear of woman, woman's growing independence, homosexuality as a love as pure as any other, and the overall dark side of human nature none dared to speak of at the time - and convey the feelings therein in his 'repulsive,' 'audacious' and 'extravagant' illustrations (qtd. in Sato 71).

Related Material

Bibliography

Albin, Tania. " Woman at Fin de Siècle - The Creation of the Femme Fatale." www.victorianweb.org.

Balakian, Anna. The Symbolist Movement: A Critical Appraisal. New York: Random House, 1976.

Beardsley, Aubrey. Salome. www.wormfood.com.

Bielski, Sarah. "The Femme Fatale as seen in the work of J.K. Huysmans, Felician Rops and Aubrey Beardsley." Art Criticism, 17:1 (2001): 47-54.

Burdett, Osbert. The Beardsley Period. London: Butler & Tanner Ltd., 1925.

Dowling, Linda. Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Sicle. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986.

Elam, Diane. Feminism and Deconstruction. New York: Routledge: 1994.

Goldwater, Robert. Symbolism. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.

Greslé, Yvette. "Strategies of veiling same-sex desire and its public consumption: Aubrey Beardsley's illustration of Oscar Wilde's 1894." De Arte 70 (2004): 22-39.

Heffernan, James A.W. Cultivating Picturacy: Visual Art and Verbal Interventions. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2006.

Kravec, Maureen T. "Wilde's Salome." Explicator, 42:1 (1893: Fall): 30-33.

Latimer, Tizra True. "Aubrey Beardsley's Salome: The Daughter of Too Many Mother's Sons." Rutgers Art Review 19 (2001): 25-36

Navarette, Susan J. The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin de Sicle Culture of Decadence. Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998.

Owens, Susan. "The Satirical Agenda of Aubrey Beardsley's Enter Herodias." Visual Culture in Britain, 2:3 (2002): 81-102.

Puffett, Derrick: Richard Strauss: Salome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Sato, Tomako. The Wilde Years: Oscar Wilde and the Art of his Time. London: Philip Wilson Publishers Limited, 2000.

Shepherd, Anne. " Overview of the Victorian Era." www.history.ac.uk.

Wilde, Oscar. Salome: A Tragedy in One Act. Dover Publications, 1967.

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Illustrating Wilde: An examination of Aubrey Beardsley's interpretation of Salome

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The author wrote this essay for Professor Troy Thomas's graduate-level course, HUM 530 Narrative in Art and Literature at Pennsylvania State University. In the original text of the play the name of the speaker occurs on a line previous to the dialogue. I have placed them on the same line for easier reading on the WWW.

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"People hate to see their darting vices depicted [but] vice is terrible and it should be depicted."

Summary of Aubrey Beardsley

Aubrey Beardsley's artistic career was remarkably impactful for its brevity. In the seven years he was able to draw and write before succumbing to tuberculosis, Beardsley developed a reputation as one of the most controversial artists of his time. The linear elegance of his designs coupled with the artist's bizarre sense of humor and fascination with the grotesque and taboo simultaneously intrigued and repelled his Victorian audience. His illustrations comprised characteristics of Aestheticism, Decadence, Symbolism, and, most apparently, Art Nouveau. Beardsley's block prints allowed his work to be easily reproduced and widely circulated. The diabolic beauty of his work and its overwhelming presence in English publishing houses meant that Beardsley quickly became the most influential draftsman of his time.

Key Ideas

Aubrey Beardsley's childhood, life, career, and various anecdotes

Read Aubrey Beardsley's Biography

And, the artists and movements that built upon Aubrey Beardsley's art

Read Aubrey Beardsley's Artistic Legacy

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"People hate to see their darting vices depicted [but] vice is terrible and it should be depicted." Aubrey Beardsley's artistic career was remarkably impactful for its brevity. In the seven years he was able to draw and write before succumbing to tuberculosis, Beardsley developed a reputation as one of the most controversial artists of his time.

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This limited edition collaboration was released during Art Basel Miami 2016. In house designers worked in close contact with the celebrated pop artist to recreate 10 of his most iconic paintings in a summer collection.  The paintings selected included portraits of Gavin Brown and Ada Katz, printed on silk dresses, bathing suits, and accessories, including an oversized scarf that doubled as a decorative print.

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This year a unique T-shirt collection was created by Uniqlo; featuring Japanese colour woodblock prints from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. These historical designs were crafted by ukiyo-e artists who flourished during the late Edo period in Japan. From the 1860s onwards, these prints gained popularity among European artists and art collectors, giving rise to their continued influence on Western visual culture. This range retails at £14.00 per item.

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Discover a collection of graphic T-shirts featuring Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints from the late Edo period.

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Art lovers flock to New York City to visit galleries, exhibitions, and museums, but rarely do New Yorkers take full advantage. Uniqlo wants to change that. This week, the Japanese company released a new line of T-shirts created in partnership with MoMA and the Andy Warhol Foundation.

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COS unveils collection inspired by Agnes Martin

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COS unveils collection inspired by Agnes Martin

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Within the fashion world of (millennial) pink being for girls and blue for boys, there's a huge white space. " Statistics show 38 percent of Gen Z-ers'strongly agreed' that gender no longer defines a person as much as it used to, and 27 percent of millennials felt the same way," says Christina Zervanos, the head of PR at The Phluid Project, a brand built on the concept of genderless dressing. "These generations are the future of retail, accounting for $143 billion in spending in the next four years."

As a result, a growing number of fashion brands are starting to think outside the binary box. Over the last few seasons, luxury designers like Gucci, Saint Laurent, and Haider Ackerman have held coed runway shows. Moda Operandi debuted its first unisex streetwear collection earlier this year, and Zara started releasing ungendered collections in 2016 with models of both sexes styled in the same clothes. More notably, a crop of new brands like Agender and Rebrand have popped up to cater to consumers who don't want to be told what's men's or women's fashion.

Demand for fashion not focused on gender is so high in fact, that when Asos' released its first unisex collection earlier this year, it became the fourth most popular offering (out of over 800) within a week. As a result, the UK's largest online retailer is expanding its neutral fashions. So far, it's focused on streetwear: sweatshirts, tees, and other casual staples most people grow up wearing regardless of gender.

"Designers create clothing that caters to everyone by not keeping things limited and one-dimensional."

Arguably, this is the case with the majority of unisex clothing on the market at the moment: There are fewer instances of men in skirts or dresses than there are women in pants and suits within this category. But they do exist, and as genderless fashion finds its footing in the mainstream, it's creating more places to shop for all people interested in exploring non-binary dressing, including members of the LGBTQI+ community.

Italian brand Francesco Russo now makes upscale stilettos in men's sizes, New York City brand Telfar, a recipient of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) Fashion Fund, creates luxe leather purses marketed toward men, and The Phluid Project has a sprawling brick and mortar space in downtown NYC at a time when physical stores are closing down in droves. "To be able to play and experiment through fashion and beauty in a judgment-free space is the best way to learn who you are and come into your own" Zervanos says. "Designers create clothing that caters to everyone by not keeping things limited and one-dimensional."

And it's not just brands contemplating how gender norms (or a lack thereof) will inform fashion moving forward. In February the CFDA added a unisex/non-binary option for New York Fashion Week- four brands showed in this category, with an additional 12 designers showing unisex collections in their traditional categories. The decision to offer more options than men's and women's for fashion shows came after witnessing "a growing number of designers whose collections are not delineated by gender," says Marc Karimzadeh, a spokesperson for the CFDA. "These designers reflect the cultural momentum." It's a shift many in the fashion industry are watching carefully.
The momentum of millennials and Gen Z-ers to drive change is undeniable. Here's how they're influencing the travel industry. And creating new community spaces within the wellness scene.

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Fashion's embracing a gender fluid future with unisex collections

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Within the fashion world of (millennial) pink being for girls and blue for boys, there's a huge white space. " Statistics show 38 percent of Gen Z-ers'strongly agreed' that gender no longer defines a person as much as it used to, and 27 percent of millennials felt the same way," says Christina Zervanos, the head of PR at The Phluid Project, a brand built on the concept of genderless dressing.

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Fashion retailer Zara has hinted that some of their garments might be gender-neutral.

While the popular high street brand haven't made an official announcement regarding unisex clothing, savvy shoppers have noticed that some of their clothes are being modelled by both men and women online.

One £159 checked coat is advertised as being from Zara Man, despite being modelled by a woman and appearing in the women's coats section.

Another long checked duffle coat, also £159, is similarly advertised as being from the men's collection but is modelled by both genders.

Plus, it appears in both the men's and women's outerwear sections.

It wouldn't be the first time the £8.6bn brand embraced gender-neutral clothing.

In 2016, Zara released a unisex line named "Ungendered" which featured eight minimalistic wardrobe staples such as hoodies, tracksuit bottoms and T-shirts, all in neutral shades of grey, beige and navy.

However, the progressive line was met with mixed reviews.

Some shoppers praised Zara for their initiative, while others criticised the clothes for being too plain.

"When will we move past this notion that genderless clothing simply = plain t-shirts/sweatpants? why is this "bold"?," tweeted Tyler Ford, associate editor at Condé Nast's new LGBTQ platform, Them.

Ford wasn't the only disappointed customer, with one person describing the line as "literally just male coded lounge wear" and others suggesting Zara should have added some more subversive options to the gender-neutral collection, such as skirts.

However, it wasn't long until other major fashion retailers followed in Zara's forward-thinking footsteps.

In March, H&M launched a unisex denim line while John Lewis famously ditched "girls" and "boys" labels on their children's clothes in September.

Zara responded to The Independent on this saying "this isn't something that Zara would provide a comment for."

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Fashion retailer Zara has hinted that some of their garments might be gender-neutral. While the popular high street brand haven't made an official announcement regarding unisex clothing, savvy shoppers have noticed that some of their clothes are being modelled by both men and women online.

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Inside Selfridges' radical, gender-neutral department store

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Inside Selfridges' radical, gender-neutral department store

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We live in a world where Facebook and Google+ have introduced "infinite" gender options for users, trans models like Andreja Pejic and Hari Nef are burning up the runway; and designers like Hood By Air and Telfar break new ground in fashion every day. Is it any wonder that walking into a store and only heading for your gender-assigned aisle is starting to feel a little passé? Enter Selfridges latest initiative, Agender, a pop-up department that aims to create a "genderless shopping experience" within the London department store.

I went down to visit Agender on the opening day to see what a gender-neutral store actually looks like. Is it lightly watered by the tears of queer unicorns; adorned with the statues of LGBT heroes and feminist icons who sought to destroy gender stereotypes at every turn? Does a giant, kindly bust of Judith Butler look over you and your gender non-conforming boyfriend as you peruse unisex Stan Smiths and HBA sweatshirts?

"Selfridges' ambition was to create a space where men and women could essentially come and shop together irrespective of gender, and that you would choose clothes as an individual rather than based on your gender," Faye Toogood, who designed the retail space, says. "For a department store, that's very revolutionary. You still go up to the children department and everything is still segregated by pink and blue, boys and girls. This concept's really about breaking down those boundaries... As someone that wants to buy the clothes in this space, you're going to have to work hard to understand it."

You see what you mean when you enter her space. Toogood, who has designed interiors for Comme des Garçons and Alexander McQueen and runs her own unisex fashion label (also called Toogood), has housed the Agenda offering in a cage-like exterior made of chicken wire. The space extends across three floors, all cordoned off from the main shopping area. The New York Times described it as a " primeval Tardis".

All the clothes are bagged up in white cases made from stiff artists canvas, with a slit running down the middle to offer a glimpse at the garment inside: black tulle-overlaid hoodies from Nicopanda, gold embroidered Ann Demeulemeester jackets, graphic-print Yang Li sweatshirts. All accessories come in unmarked white boxes.

On one floor, the offering is overshadowed by hulking papier-mâché sculptures dipped in a washed-out candy pink, in the kind of shapes you might describe as "primal blobs" - think a deconstructed Venus of Willendorf and you're not far off. There are no brands and no logos present; as Toogood puts it, "no smacking you on the head with commercial constraints".

"There's been a big change in what men and women are wearing," she says. "More and more, the boundary is blurred. It's definitely reflected socially and politically. When I was designing [Agender], I was certainly aware that the issue goes slightly deeper than whether men and women will just shop in the same space. I think we realise now that gender is not binary, we are all individuals, and essentially gender is a fluid thing."

The Agender concept has actually been in the making for two years, when Selfridges buyers started noticing that men and women were slowly moving out of their allocated shopping aisles and exploring each other's departments. It's no surprise that streetwear makes up a big part of Agender's stock - you just need to look at K-pop star CL to know that women can look as good as men in a Nasir Mazhar jersey.

There's something intrinsically political about putting on a garment that is better associated with the opposite gender, or one that eschews gender norms completely. It's a bold declaration of self-identity; it's defining yourself against conventions so widely held as to be unassailable. And also, it almost always looks pretty fucking cool.

"Agender is trying to do something a bit subtler than 'women in suits and men in dresses'"

But Agender is trying to do something a bit subtler than "women in suits and men in dresses", the old cliche that fashion sometimes takes to mean as "androgyny". Most of our leisure and shopping spaces, like our clothes, are gendered from the day we're born till the day we die. Think of the pink blanket that swaddles a newborn girl; the Claire's Accessories where she gets her ears pierced for the first time; the bottles of funky, floral-scented body wash in the women's toiletries aisle.

So does Agender's radical experiment work? On an intellectual level, definitely. You're reminded of that old truism that gender is a construct - and nothing more so when you're struggling to unbox a piece from its stiff case. The shopfloor comes across as an elemental twist on the future offered by Gattaca: sparse, strip-lit, and crucially, unisex minus the sex. With added chicken wire. Twogood didn't intend it to be an easy shopping experience, if that makes sense. "It's a neon lit, slightly awkward space, but that's [deliberate]," she says. "I guess I'm just trying to heighten your senses while you're in the space."

If I've got anything against Agender, it's that the IRL shop lacks the playfulness in its campaign film starring Hari Nef, shot by Alex Turvey and Kathryn Ferguson. In the final shot, you see Hari take her place among a tableau of performers - from white-haired older women to curvier girls with rainbow hair and gender non-comforming individuals of every stripe, shape and colour. If we want to start thinking critically about gender, we can't lose the joy and colour in its wildly diverse expressions. Where's the fun in that?

But I can't fault Selfridges for trying to think outside the gender binary. We've got a long way to go before we reach a truly unisex future in fashion, no matter how much designers periodically pay lip service to the idea (you know, a pussybow blouse on a man here, unflattering slacks on a woman there). But if Agender is anything to go by, at least there are some people willing to try.
Agender runs until mid April at Selfridges, 400 Oxford Street London W1A 1AB. selfridges.com/agender

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Inside Selfridges' radical, gender-neutral department store

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The new Agender pop-up offers a small but significant peek into a genderless future

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ASOS Focuses on growing its genderless fashion

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ASOS Focuses on growing its genderless fashion

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ASOS website | Source: Shutterstock

By Bloomberg October 17, 2018 10:01

LONDON, United Kingdom - ASOS, the UK's largest online-only fashion retailer, plans to capture sales from a new generation that doesn't want to be categorised as male or female.

"We look through the eyes of customers," ASOS chief executive officer Nick Beighton said on a call with reporters Wednesday as the company reported stronger-than-expected profit. Members of Generation Z, who are now coming of age, "choose to be free to select their fashion the way they want."

The campaign, titled "Collusion" includes items like a digital-print leopard shirt for £20 ($26) and high-waisted skinny jeans for £15. Many of the items are worn on the site by two models.

ASOS partnered with "influencers" who have thousands of followers on Instagram to help develop and market the line. In its first week of sales in October, it was the No. 4 brand out of 850 ASOS labels, Beighton said, without citing exact figures.
By William Mathis; editors: Eric Pfanner, John Lauerman.

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ASOS Focuses on Growing Its Genderless Offering

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ASOS website | Source: Shutterstock By Bloomberg October 17, 2018 10:01 LONDON, United Kingdom - ASOS, the UK's largest online-only fashion retailer, plans to capture sales from a new generation that doesn't want to be categorised as male or female.

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What fashion needs to understand about being gender neutral

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What fashion needs to understand about being gender neutral

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Over the course of the last year, conversations surrounding gender expression have gained considerable momentum, as the line between the traditional male and female binaries grow increasingly blurred and the cultural landscape begins to shift.

These conversations haven't been lost on the fashion industry. Identifying as gender-neutral myself, I've been flooded with excitement to see more and more designers choosing to create gender neutral lines. But though the topic is now, at least, on the table, what's actually happening on a practical level is a far cry from where things need to be. I recently went shopping with a female-identifying friend. Upon entering the store (which has more of a progressive reputation than most) a row of models physically separated menswear from womenswear - when she went left, I went right. Gone was our shared shopping experience.

Given a positive slant, fashion's burgeoning acceptance of gender fluidity does show promise. But for the most part, the conversation lacks depth and nuance when it comes to tilting the binary. Over the last few years, a number of high-end and high street brands have entered into the market seeking to cater for gender neutral customers, and the 2018 nominees were credited for "treading a unisex line" according to Where the likes of Charles Jeffrey, 69US, and Eckhaus Latta show a natural propensity toward gender neutrality within their collections, others joining the movement show less consideration as to what a move like that actually means.

H&M and Zara, for example, have both presented 'gender neutral' offerings of hoodies, sweatshirts and t-shirts designed for both men and women. But while their intentions may have been positive, each collection was merchandised either within the menswear or womenswear section of both stores, meaning gender neutral customers still had to make a decision as to which to head for. For the most part, my rejection of the male-female fashion dichotomy means heading straight to the menswear section, and all the old signposts still mark my decision. Despite brands' efforts, I'm not able to make purchases without physically (or digitally) placing myself within one category or the other. As with the history of medicine, signposts, and even language, it's that which is male which is seen as 'neutral'.

Past that first hurdle, comes a second obstacle: from the selection of styles on offer, I face choices that may fit my gender presentation, but won't fit my body. I was born female, identify as gender neutral, and wear menswear. Is it really that revolutionary for me to wear trousers and muted colours? Why does the fashion industry assume I'm breaking convention rather that choosing a desired ambivalence?

And while I don't want to downplay the merits of clothing lines that advocate for girls who don't want to wear pink, on the other end of the spectrum, there is little done to acknowledge those born male who do not wish to only wear menswear. Gender neutral does not mean 'without any traditional female signifiers', as most retailers seem to believe. Girls clothes appear exclusively for girls, but boys clothes are for everyone: the silent but apparent contradiction that undermines fashion fluidity becomes obvious under minor scrutiny. Why can't dresses and skirts be gender neutral too?

"Gender neutral does not mean 'without any traditional female signifiers', as most retailers seem to believe"

For the most part, brands are not pushing current definitions of gender expression. Instead, we see traditional men's styles presented as a blanket statement which capitalise on existing social movements and the political consciousness of consumers. It's a pattern that both excludes and insults the non-binary, transgender, and non-conforming individuals that brands have the opportunity to appeal to. At the moment, the emergence of gender neutral lines that are literally just menswear feel like less of a move towards increased equality, and more an indication of ambient cultural misogyny - ideas that femininity is invalid and masculinity is standard.

Where the likes of H&M and Zara's endeavours into gender fluid or neutral offerings failed, there are some doing things right, though. Phluid Project, which opened in New York recently, is the city's first dedicated space that displays gender neutral clothing in a manner that rejects the male-female binary. Elsewhere, in 2017, British department store John Lewis made the move to stop explicitly labelling their childrenswear for boys or girls, offering hope for structural change that goes well beyond other seemingly trend-jumping efforts.

Still, as a non-binary person who strives to wear clothes without regard to gender, I still don't feel represented. I want variety, not a one-sided bargain. Jeans should not be the only immediately comfortable garment I own, and if jeans can be gender-neutral, then what is the cultural roadblock that prevents skirts from receiving the same treatment? What rules do we need to break to upend masculine and feminine ideologies? Dresses and heels can be for everyone. We need the potential beauty of gender expression to transcend currently inescapable norms and conventions.

So how would these actually gender-neutral ranges work? Accepting gender fluidity, designs must account for the variety of body types related to assigned sex; gender neutral clothing needs to fit all shapes. Size ranges should expand to accommodate body shape, comparable to waist and leg length when purchasing jeans. Gender Free World, for example, has created their own sizing method which completely eradicates the need for numbers: instead, it consists of a series of names that correspond to different body types. SK Manor Hill has drawstrings on all their trousers to accommodate its customers' varying shapes, while Seeker solves the fitting problem with elastic waistbands and two ways to fasten - a tie or a button. Elsewhere, the black and queer-owned Kris Harring blends masculine and feminine design elements in a culturally necessary manner.

"Jeans should not be the only immediately comfortable garment I own, and if jeans can be gender-neutral, then what is the cultural roadblock that prevents skirts from receiving the same treatment?"

Such diversity and customisation should not remain limited to a small, exclusive, and often expensive, range of labels, though. By attempting to sell gender neutral fashion, the industry fails to promote diversity in a way that invites productive conversation about gender expression. We need to hold fashion brands accountable for their role in the contemporary curation of gender.

According to a study by GLAAD, 12 per cent of young people now identify as something other than cisgender, meaning that increased representation is non-negotiable. To move forward from here, non-binary individuals need to be present for all steps of the design and production process, both of garments and retail spaces. If my body doesn't fit into existing style categories, then I need to be able to help make the new criteria. To refuse such choice pushes me back to where I started, and forces me to continue making a decision between two mannequins that mean nothing to me. There are no two ways about it. It's time the wider fashion industry cemented their commitment to designing for our new, real, and widening-gendered world.

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What fashion needs to understand about being gender neutral

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Over the course of the last year, conversations surrounding gender expression have gained considerable momentum, as the line between the traditional male and female binaries grow increasingly blurred and the cultural landscape begins to shift. These conversations haven't been lost on the fashion industry.

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The British Museum has lost its crown as the UK's most popular visitor attraction for the first time in a decade, overtaken by Tate Modern.

Almost 5.9 million people visited the Tate Modern art gallery last year, new figures show - just above the 5.8 million who went to the British Museum.

Elsewhere, an exhibition of Terracotta Warriors helped visitor numbers to Liverpool's World Museum jump by 111%.

That made it the most-visited English museum outside London in 2018.

According to the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (Alva), the World Museum was visited by 1.4 million people in 2018 - 610,000 of whom saw the ancient Chinese statues.

It was 23rd on the overall national list, above Tate Britain and London Zoo.

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery also saw a big rise, thanks partly to the visit by "Dippy" the Diplodocus.

The replica dinosaur skeleton was in Birmingham for five months as part of its three-year tour from the Natural History Museum. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery welcomed 832,000 people in 2018 - up 38% on the previous year.

The new branch of the V&A in Dundee received 341,265 visits between its opening in September and the end of the year.

Tate Modern, which staged blockbuster exhibitions by Picasso and Modigliani last year, is top of the overall list for the first time since it opened in 2000.

Despite the overall rise in visitor numbers, some outdoor attractions had a dip - mostly blamed on the extreme cold spell early in the year.

The country's second most popular garden, RHS Garden Wisley in Surrey saw its visitor numbers drop by more than 70,000.

The Eden Project in Cornwall; ZSL Whipsnade Zoo, Bedfordshire; Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire; and Chatsworth House, Derbyshire also all saw a drop in visits.

"I wish tourism was slightly more sophisticated, but weather has always been a determining factor on where people go," said Alva director Bernard Donoghue.

Alva also said the World Cup period had also led to a fall in visitors to some attractions.
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The British Museum has lost its crown as the UK's most popular visitor attraction for the first time in a decade, overtaken by Tate Modern. Almost 5.9 million people visited the Tate Modern art gallery last year, new figures show - just above the 5.8 million who went to the British Museum.

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INp Seasonal Range Plan Stores New No VAT