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Patty Huntington

Is a man in a skirt fashion’s last taboo?
When Los Angeles Lakers basketball star Russell Westbrook attended Thom Browne’s spring/summer 2022 show at New York Fashion Week in Browne’s white pleated men’s skirt, it prompted some apoplectic reactions on Instagram from the American sporting fraternity.
“Not no n****r I ever grew up and messed around with is gonna be walking around the goddamn streets with a dress on and some motherf***er boots and keep my respect and say he heterosexual!” shouted former NBA player Kwame Brown in an expletive-filled video rant.
Former American football star Larry Johnson posted: “There is an Effeminate Agenda going on amongst the NBA & NFL elite, peddled by high ranking Masons/handlers to indoctrinate the heterosexual sports world without them knowing, for the buying power of LGBTQ community.”
The reactions echoed the furore seen in April after rapper Kid Cudi wore a floral dress designed by Louis Vuitton men’s creative director Virgil Abloh for an appearance on Saturday Night Live.
It was intended as a tribute to rock band Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, who wore floral dresses on stage in the early 1990s. Outrage followed on YouTube, with actor TK Kirkland telling VladTV the stunt defied “the rules of being an African American brother”.

There was frenzied speculation elsewhere it was part of a supposed New World Order conspiracy, an Illuminati “dress humiliation ritual” and/or Hollywood’s alleged ongoing campaign to emasculate black men.
When British pop star Harry Styles appeared on the December 2020 cover of US Vogue in a Gucci dress, American conservative commentators Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro similarly exploded on Twitter, slamming Vogue’s “feminisation” of masculinity as left-wing propaganda.
It’s a curious reaction when you consider that, up until the rise of tailoring in the 14th century, European men had worn unbifurcated garments throughout history – and that in many other cultures today, skirt-like garments such as the Scottish kilt, the Southeast Asian sarong, the Japanese kimono, the Indian dhoti and the North African djellaba remain the norm for men.
From baggy suit to Thom Browne, LeBron shows athletes’ fashion evolution
Westbrook was by no means the only man in a skirt or dress at New York Fashion Week, with another NBA player, Jordan Clarkson, wearing a kilt to Browne’s show and a clearly unrepentant Kid Cudi donning full-length skirts to Studio 189’s New York Fashion Week show and the Met Gala the week after, where he was joined by SNL comedian Pete Davidson, also dressed in a skirt.
Floated by designers such as Jacques Esterel and Rudi Gernreich in the 1960s and Jean Paul Gaultier in the 1980s, the man-skirt has been percolating on fashion-show catwalks for at least six years.
While bad news for the conservatives, the look is gathering serious momentum, with men’s kilts, skirts and dresses all over the autumn/winter 2021 fashion runways – prompting Mr Porter, the menswear portal of luxury e-commerce giant Net-a-Porter, to post an entry on its blog in March asking “Skirts: Are you man enough to wear one?”.

In July, global fashion search platform Lyst revealed that Browne’s menswear skirt had ranked in the 10 most searched items in its hottest items of 2021’s second quarter report – the first time that a skirt has broken Lyst’s top 10 for menswear.
Mr Porter has two men’s kilts on offer this for autumn, from Burberry and Celine Homme, while Matches Fashion is selling one from Molly Goddard and a search for “skirt” in the menswear section of Canadian retailer SSense brings up eight results.
The same search over at luxury retail aggregator website Farfetch yields over 30 listings, from early man-skirt adopters such as Browne, Rick Owens, Comme des Garçons Homme Plus and Yohji Yamamoto, to Homme Plissé Issey Miyake, Molly Goddard, Marine Serre, Marni, White Mountaineering and A Better Mistake.
When 100 men in dresses and skirts marched in protest down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, New York, on February 7, 2004 to assert their right to wear women’s clothing, The New York Times dubbed it “the birth of the Male Unbifurcated Garment Movement”.


The protesters were en route to catch The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Bravehearts: Men in Skirts” exhibition, an expanded version of the earlier “Men in Skirts” show that had been staged by London’s Victoria & Albert Museum in 2002.
One of the brands included in both The Met and V&A shows was Seattle, Washington-based Utilikilts, founded by Steven “Krash” Villegas in 2000. Utilikilts’ “MUGs” [male unbifurcated garments] – a utilitarian interpretation of the Scottish kilt, in heavy duty cotton, with cargo pockets – gained a grass-roots following after selling through stalls at US festivals and fairs.
Although the product eventually garnered a tonne of international publicity, and celebrity clients from Russell Crowe to Robin Williams, it initially raised eyebrows – even in liberal California, ironically.

“They wouldn’t let us in to any show on the west coast in the beginning,” says Villegas, who eventually received an invitation to show at a fair in the conservative stronghold of Texas.
“We were not sure if we were being invited there to have people buy our wares or if there was going to be a lynching, but when we got there it was a full embrace,” he adds. “And people were like, ‘God you’re the best thing ever and boy you’re pissing off a lot of those traditionalists’”.
In 2021 MUG fervour is being fuelled by social media and a younger generation.
I just think the hegemony of the suit has really had such a profound impact on the way we perceive clothing … that anything that moves against that notion is going to have pushback
Michelle Finamore, who curated The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s 2019 exhibition Gender Bending Fashion
According to a 2021 report from American advertising insights agency Bigeye, half of Gen Z and 56 per cent of millennials believe traditional gender roles and labels are outdated, while 56 per cent of Gen Z are already shopping outside their gender, according to J Walter Thompson data.
The 21,058 posts under the #meninskirts hashtag on Instagram are dwarfed by the 53.9 million views the same hashtag has attracted on the Gen Z-preferred TikTok platform, where the #ClothesHaveNoGender and its original Spanish version #laropanotienegenero have clocked almost 70 million views between them.
The latter was coined in November 2020 by Spanish maths teacher Jose Pinas, when he posted an image of himself at work in a skirt in support of Spanish schoolboy Mikel Gomez.












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A week earlier, the latter had gone viral on TikTok after revealing he had been expelled and sent to a psychologist after wearing a skirt to school. The incident, which prompted a still ongoing series of skirt protests across Spain, was originally inspired by earlier protests in several Canadian schools, where boys started wearing skirts to protest at the sexualisation of women and toxic masculinity.
In June, a father in China went viral on Chinese social media platforms Zhihu and WeChat after sharing his young son’s experience wearing a skirt to school, which attracted negative commentary from teachers.
“I just think the hegemony of the suit has really had such a profound impact on the way we perceive clothing – I think it is so deeply entrenched culturally, that anything that moves against that notion is going to have pushback,” says Michelle Finamore, a fashion historian based in Salem, Massachusetts who curated The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s 2019 exhibition “Gender Bending Fashion”.

One of the reasons she first pitched the show to the museum, says Finamore, was because she had noticed a significant shift in thinking amongst designers about what constitutes appropriate “masculine” attire – a phenomenon that has, in the interim, only continued to gather pace.
“When I was putting all this in [the show] it was still perceived as somewhat radical, especially in a city like Boston,” she says. “And now I just see, the last few years, it’s just exploded and I feel a lot of the stigma attached to men in skirts is breaking down.”


Maggie Hewitt’s style picks: the founder of Maggie Marilyn loves her Cartier Tank, The Ordinary skincare and Westman Atelier make-up, and Jane Birkin and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy

Meet Matteo Milleri, who was married to Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriend Vittoria Ceretti: the DJ known as Anyma creates NFTs and is dating one of Elon Musk’s baby mamas … but which one?

Cartier blends high jewellery, ancient Chinese artworks and AI in its ‘Power of Magic’ exhibition at Shanghai Museum East – with actresses Mélanie Laurent and Gong Li in attendance

Style Edit: Why Louis Vuitton’s Nicolas Ghesquière, artistic director of women’s collections, chose Antoni Gaudí’s Park Güell in Barcelona for the maison’s cruise 2025 show

Fashion

Men’s skirts are having a moment – look at Harry Styles, Pete Davidson, Russell Westbrook and Kid Cudi. Is it time to end fashion’s last taboo?

Rapper Kid Cudi wears a floral dress designed by Louis Vuitton men’s creative director Virgil Abloh during an appearance on Saturday Night Live. Photo: Getty Images

Comedian Pete Davison (left) wore a skirt to at the Met Gala in September 2021, while
NBA star Russell Westbrook attended the 2021 New York Fashion Week in a Thom Browne white pleated men’s skirt. Photos: Getty Images and GC Images

A Burberry kilt available on Mr Porter. 

Comedian Pete Davidson wears a skirt to the 2021 Met Gala in New York. Photo: Getty Images

Russell Westbrook attends the 2021 New York Fashion Week in a Thom Browne white pleated men’s skirt. Photo: GC Images

A man models a men’s kilt from Utilikilts.

Harry Styles appeared on the December 2020 cover of US Vogue in a Gucci dress. 

Indigenous fashion in Australia makes giant strides forward, from the country’s fashion week to its oldest department store

Models walk the runway in designs by Grace Lillian Lee at Afterpay Australian Fashion Week 2021. Photo: Getty Images

A First Nations Fashion and Design presentation at this year’s Barunga Festival in Katherine, Northern Territory. The First Nations Fashion and Design show was also an event at this year’s Afterpay Australian Fashion Week.

A model in a Maara Collective design during the Indigenous Fashion Projects show during Afterpay Australian Fashion Week 2021. Photo: Getty Images

A look from Australian indigenous brand Native Swimwear Australia, available at department store David Jones.

A model poses at the First Nations Fashion and Design show during Afterpay Australian Fashion Week 2021. Photo: Getty Images

A model in a design by Indii Swimwear during the Indigenous Fashion Projects show at the Afterpay Australian Fashion Week 2021. Photo: Getty Images

A model in a design by Ngali during the Indigenous Fashion Projects show. Photo: Getty Images

An indigenous model at Afterpay Australia Fashion Week’s first traditional Indigenous Welcome to Country ceremony.

Looks from Australian indigenous brand Ngali, available at department store David Jones.

Want a Halloween look like Billie Eilish, Ted Lasso or Kim Kardashian? How to turn your sweatpants and leggings into a costume

ASAP Rocky attends the 2021 Met Gala. Photo: Getty Images

Style up your leggings like the Skims queen herself and be Kim Kardashian at Halloween. Photo: @skims/Instagram

American actor Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa in Rocky (1976). Photo: Getty Images

American model Hailey Baldwin at LAX airport in Los Angeles, California. Photo: GC Images

Jane Fonda was part of the 1980s aerobic workout craze. Photo: Getty Images

Reality star and model Kardashian. Photo: @skims/Instagram

A black PVC catsuit. Photo: Shutterstock

Billie Eilish attends the 2020 Grammy Awards at the Staples Centre in Los Angeles. Getty Images

VSCO girl, Olivia Cara. Photo: YouTube

Basketball player Kawhi Leonard of NBA team the Los Angeles Clippers. Photo: AFP

Lady Diana in her signature biker shorts. Photo: Instagram 

Jason Sudeikis (left) as Ted Lasso, with Brendan Hunt. Photo: Apple TV+

Saweetie (left) and Paris Hilton in Juicy Couture tracksuits. Photo: Instagram

ASAP Rocky attends the 2021 Met Gala in New York. Photo: Getty Images

Sexy fashion is back, from crop tops to miniskirts – just look at Dua Lipa in Versace and Kim Kardashian’s Balenciaga get-up. It’s time go out and party

Dua Lipa at  the Versace spring/summer 2022 show.

Chinese designer Rui Zhou with a model in one of her designs. The designer is one of many catering to women’s desire to dress sexy post-pandemic in a way that is inclusive and subtle.

Looks from the Versace spring/summer 2022 show.

Dua Lipa in a look by Versace at its spring/summer 2022 show.

A spring/summer 2022 look by Eckhaus Latta.

Designer Nensi Dojaka (right) with a model in one of her designs.

Rui Zhou says the core values of her brand are “inclusivity, and the duality of beauty and imperfection”.

A look from the Dion Lee autumn/winter 2021 collection.

A Maison Alaia outfit, available on Net-a-Porter.

Looks from Prada’s spring/summer 2022 show.

A dress from Lanvin, available on Net-a-Porter.

Figure-hugging looks from Saint Laurent’s spring/summer 2022 show.

Lifestyle

Fashion & Beauty

Harry Styles appeared on the December 2020 cover of US Vogue in a Gucci dress, while comedian Pete Davidson wore a skirt to the 2021 Met Gala in New York
The look is gathering serious momentum – bad news for conservatives – with men’s kilts, skirts and dresses all over the autumn/winter fashion catwalks


With male celebrities such as Harry Styles and Pete Davidson confidently wearing skirts, is the stigma attached to men in dresses finally coming to an end?


Menswear

Women and gender

Harry Styles