Men in skirts and blouses. Women in suites and ties. These are what we think of when we hear the term “androgynous fashion,” but what exactly is androgynous fashion and what did it look like in the ’80s?
The Oxford Dictionary defines androgynous as “partly male and partly female in appearance” or “of indeterminate sex.” This definition has caused a lot of debate among fashion scholars about what qualifies as androgynous fashion and what the overall goal of androgynous fashion is.
To many scholars, androgyny in fashion is an attempt to eliminate gender from clothes by incorporating characteristics from both men’s and women’s fashions. However, other scholars believe androgynous fashion simply cannot exist due to the body that wears the clothes.
Kevin McCluskey, a fashion history professor at the University of Mary Washington, argues against the existence of androgynous fashion in the excerpt from an interview below followed by an accompanying transcription of the excerpt.
“The issue with androgyny relative to fashion is it’s about semantics. You have to define what androgyny means. So we always have this discussion with students, “I want to write on androgyny in fashion.” It’s very hard to do androgynous in fashion because you’re dressing a gendered body. You’re dressing a body that has a certain shape to it which establishes a biological gender, right? And we understand gender is a larger concept. So we talk about this thing called androgyny but I don’t think there’s ever been androgynous fashion because to truly be androgynous you would have to remove any sense of gender underneath it. And so usually androgynous fashion is a woman in a suit and maybe she’s wearing a translucent shirt, well we see her breasts so we’ve gendered it already. Now, someone like Grace Jones, if you really look at Grace Jones though there was nothing androgynous about it. She was very clearly a woman, right? It was very very clear, right? So it all depends on how you define androgyny and androgyny means removing gender from clothing then t-shirt and jeans is about as androgynous as you can get.”—Kevin McCluskey, Fashion History Professor at UMW
McCluskey believes androgynous fashion boils down to the definition of it. By his definition androgynous fashion means fashion without gender, which he believes does not exist because the gendered biological form of the body automatically shapes the clothing into a gender category.
However, for our research on androgynous fashion in the ’80s, we decided to define “androgynous fashion” as clothing that attempts to avoid gender stereotypes by incorporating features from both male and female clothing.
We began looking at androgynous fashion trends at the national level by observing trends worn by popular singers and models in the 1980s. Then, to see if any of the trends observed were worn at the local level, we looked through the Mary Washington College yearbooks from 1980 to 1989. No androgynous fashion trends were found in the yearbooks so there is no local page for androgynous fashion. This does not necessarily mean that androgynous fashions were not worn on the MWC campus in the 1980s. It may just be that the few people who did wear androgynous clothing were not photographed.
Listen to the full interview with Kevin McCluskey below.