“I remember when Abercrombie & Fitch first opened its flagship in Hong Kong [in July 2012]: at the time, it seemed like 99 per cent of men were into streetwear and masculine looks. If you were looking for something gender-neutral, or with a softer aesthetic, which we were into, there wasn’t anything,” says Mite Chan, co-founder of Hong Kong-based fashion brand Demo. “The market was pretty dominated by that [overtly masculine looks], and we wanted to start a brand to fill the gap.” Chan and his business partner Derek Chan were inspired to launch their gender-fluid label in 2013.
The past decade has been one of rapid change in this respect: just think of Jaden Smith sporting a skirt for Louis Vuitton’s womenswear campaign in 2016, or MM6 Maison Margiela and Balenciaga sending male models down the spring-summer 2023 runways in ballet flats. “Over the last few years, we’ve seen pearls, skirts, bustiers, platforms and lacey shirts all become top sellers in the men’s world, where traditionally the customer was a bit less adventurous. … Brands [are] championing the blurring lines around dress codes,” says Ida Petersson, womenswear and menswear buying director at London-based e-commerce site Browns Fashion. Alessandro Michele, former creative director at Gucci, famously made the house’s menswear more “feminine”; beyond him, Petersson says, “Harris Reed, Feng Chen Wang and Bianca Saunders are all examples of brands opening up their collections in an incredible way.” There is certainly an appetite for this. For example, in the first half of 2021, there was a 33 per cent increase in searches for terms like “genderless” and “gender-neutral” on fashion app Lyst; in South Korea, the number of posts related to genderless fashion on the search engine Naver more than doubled in 2020, and this momentum is being reflected in sales.
