Vivienne Westwood has done it again: the veritable Queen of Punk has bamboozled the fashion world by rocking up to Men’s Fashion Week in London – doing so for the first time ever, we might add – and unveiling an entirely gender fluid collection, complete with both male and female models.
While the British designer is already well known for mixing it up on the runway where gender is concerned, this non-binary collection has come at a time when the whole Fashion Week schedule is being turned on its head by the boundary-crossing of brands wanting to show men’s and womenswear on the same runway (and royally messing up the hitherto separate male/female structure of the programming).
People have been asking what mixed runways might do to the industry, and how it will feed back into the wider world. Louis Vuitton threw caution to the wind when they hired Jaden Smith for their SS16 womenswear campaign, and Burberry played fast and loose with the rules this past September by presenting their men’s and womenswear collections side-by-side. And it looks like this is the next logical conclusion: unisex fashion.
Okay, it might still take some convincing for certain men to wear the more traditional dresses from Westwood’s AW17 collection, but we’re having no trouble picturing ourselves in the jacquard power suits – or even the flaming red cowboy boots.
As one of the first show-stopping collections of the FW17 schedule, we’ve got our eyes wide open for how this might play into what’s trending by the end of the year.
