Androgynous Fashion: To What Extent Does It Work in Daily Life?

Posted by Sarthak Yadav on February 28th, 2017

The fashion industry is supposed to be about bending looks and breaking boundaries with newer fashion statements. And recently, there’s been a new trend on the industry’s radar that has been gaining popularity rapidly, and it’s called androgynous fashion. The new fashion wave of trends inspired by core masculine and feminine fashion has turned heads all across the globe. This is one way to create bold and creative fashion statements in a society where gender specific identities are still confined and limited.

But what is Androgynous Fashion?
Androgynous fashion is a clothing style that involves dressing up to look like neither typically womanish nor manly. It basically aims to avoid gender stereotypes. In the remote past, androgynous fashion has held a stigma with its relations to the LGBTQA communities, due to its open-mindedness to gender neutrality and refusal to societal gender norms. However, in the modern fashion industry, androgyny has become more accessible and is being worn by more and more people including movie personalities, style bloggers and designers themselves.

Driving this fashion shift is inarguably the contemporary open-mindedness that is encouraging gender blurriness and fluidity. But this isn't the first time that androgyny has been witnessed so widely gelling into fashion. Androgynous fashion has been visible throughout the 20th century, when the first androgynous look was also recognized. In addition to flapper dresses that were famous at this time, men clothing had started to become known in women’s fashion; Coco Chanel being one of the first to introduce more comfortable and less feminine outfits in her collections.

Lately, androgyny has been comparatively more popular in woman’s fashion. It’s simple and more relaxed; a look that can be achieved by mixing and matching masculine pieces with their own girlish bent. Androgynous looks for women have been so prominent over the last few years that it’s almost a whole part of the women fashion world.

Though androgynous looks for men have not been fully experimented with yet, men have started to mix androgynous elements to their style. Designers like Giorgio Armani, Pierre Cardin and Rick Owens embraced the look as fashion developed an appeal for androgynous style. A style which was only reserved to Hollywood and high-profile fashion fanatics is now prevalent in Bollywood too. The Indian fashion industry is all starting to change now, and designers and celebrities are introducing and inspiring androgynous silhouettes to the masses who’ve never dared to try these before.

So androgyny can be really cool, but everybody’s probably unsure of what it would look like on them. To gather a look that’s actually androgynous, one doesn’t necessarily need to start shopping in the men’s or ladies section at the mall. Instead, they must start with statement pieces of clothing that have a masculine cut and a feminine print or the other way round. Similar goes for women, pair masculine fitting pieces with girly colours of prints.

Androgyny isn’t about dressing exactly masculine or feminine; it’s about having a duality of traits. Introducing more gender specific pieces into your wardrobe can seem overwhelming, and that’s because wide-of-the-mark turns and fashion disasters aren’t hard to come by. Keeping it simple and comfortable is the key, and if done right, Androgynous Fashion can make a fashion statement in daily life.