Gender Fluid Fashion Has Always Made More Sense Than the Alternative

The strict division of clothing into menswear and womenswear feels like it has always been there, but it hasn't. The rigid binary most people in the West grew up with hardened in the 19th century, driven by Victorian norms that divided domestic and public life along strict lines and built dress codes to match. Before that, the lines were considerably less fixed: men in Renaissance fashion wore elaborate, ornamented clothing that would read as feminine today, and what counted as appropriately gendered dress shifted substantially across eras and cultures. What the 19th century introduced, and what mass-produced fashion then industrialised, was a much stricter system— and in many Western countries, actual laws against crossing it.

The asymmetry in how that crossing was treated is worth mentioning. Women adopting masculine silhouettes was gradually absorbed as a form of empowerment; the trouser, the suit, the borrowed cut becoming markers of progress and liberation across the 20th century. Interestingly, men wearing feminine clothing carried a very different set of consequences: social stigma, legal risk in many places well into the latter half of the 20th century, and a cultural taboo that persisted long after the laws themselves were repealed. Getting dressed, for a significant number of people, was a negotiation the industry had never been built to accommodate.

The conversation about changing this started earlier than most people remember. Rad Hourani was building non-gendered collections in 2007, when the category barely existed as a concept. The Canadian designer developed a sizing system that worked regardless of gender and launched what is widely recognised as the first explicitly gender-neutral collection, on the simple premise that clothes should work for any body. As premises go, it is not complicated. The fashion industry took decades to catch up.

Telfar, founded in New York in 2005 by Telfar Clemens, a queer Black designer, built something different again. The brand's motto is "not for you, for everyone," and it carries through into every practical decision: unisex sizing, cuts that work across body types, and pricing that doesn't treat luxury as something reserved for a specific kind of person. Clemens built a brand on the premise that fashion doesn't have to sort its customers by gender or wealth to be desirable, then proved it by building one of the most culturally significant bags of the last decade. The Telfar Shopping Bag became shorthand for a different kind of luxury, one that wasn't asking anyone to qualify first.

In 2015, Acne Studios made a very public point with its AW15 campaign. The face of the collection was Frasse Johansson, the 11-year-old son of the brand's founder, photographed in women's clothing, heels, and a handbag, with images that ran on billboards in New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong. It was covered by WWD, Dazed, Hypebeast, The Hollywood Reporter, and Out, among others. Frasse's own take on the whole thing was straightforward: "It doesn't matter to me if it is 'girl' clothes or 'boy' clothes, I don't really feel that there is a difference." The campaign made its argument through an 11-year-old being completely unbothered by a distinction adults had spent decades treating as fundamental.

What Harris Reed Did With Gender Fluid Fashion

Harris Reed launched in 2020 and took the argument somewhere considerably louder. The brand's own description of itself— "Romanticism Gone Nonbinary," "utterly unapologetic"— is not marketing language that outruns the product. The clothes are theatrical, maximalist, and genuinely singular: British wallpaper prints, architectural silhouettes, pieces that pull from romance, drama, and heritage and refuse to be assigned a gender while doing it. Reed showed his first collection at the first ever gender-neutral London Fashion Week. The same year, he dressed Harry Styles for the December 2020 cover of US Vogue— the first time a man had appeared solo on the cover in the magazine's history. The image went everywhere.

The personal story earns its place here. Reed is queer, grew up feeling like he didn't belong, and found himself partly through fashion; specifically through seeing a man in a wedding dress on a London street and being struck by the idea that being different was not a problem to manage but something worth celebrating. "The clothes we wear signal who we are to the world," he has said, and the brand exists to expand what those signals can say. In 2021 he collaborated with MAC on their first gender-fluid makeup line. In 2023 he became Creative Director of Nina Ricci, debuting with a show that featured models of all gender identities in micro-pleated tulle and Chantilly lace, which Vogue described as the most gloriously queer Paris had seen.

None of what these designers did was inevitable. Rad Hourani saw in 2007 that the binary system was a choice the industry had made, not a law it had to follow. Telfar Clemens built a business on the same observation. An 11-year-old on a billboard in Times Square made the argument without even trying. Harris Reed turned it into a global conversation. The lines were always arbitrary; and a growing number of designers are finally starting to ignore them.

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