Is there any good reason for men not to wear skirts?
And is it just a western thing? While men in other cultures and parts of the world happily wear skirt-like garments every day, until the 18th or 19th Century, men wore skirts in Europe and Britain (or is that still Europe?) too. In fact it was only when the industrial revolution came around and there was a general move towards men wearing sober and functional clothing, that men stopped all this skirt-wearing lark at all.
And now, in 2021, as LGTBQ(+) moves steadily into the mainstream conversation, men-in-skirts’s time may just have come. Even though “agender” and/or unisex clothing has been a thing for a good few years now, it has tended to be more men’s clothing made for the female body, and less women’s clothing made for the male body.
But hey, skirts can be cool…and when I google “unisex clothing” and “agender clothes” what I get is generally kind of, let’s be honest, unsexy. As if unisex / agender by default has to be kind of bland and loose-fitting. What’s up with that? Blandness seems to be all the rage these days, if indeed the word rage fits in a sentence like that one, and it’s time we took a stand. Bright colours, outrageousness, sauciness, sexiness even, where did that go?
And in this vein, indieRepublik is proud to team up with Svitla Volka, Ukranian fashion brand, to run an experiment: a number of men will be sent skirts made by the aforementioned Ukrainian fashion house and instructed to wear their skirts in a day-to-day kind of way, and report back on a. how they felt about the experience, and b. how everyone else seemed to take it.
If you’d like to take part please get in touch here!
Now I know that Berlin is one of the easier places to run an experiment like that, seeing as how in Berlin it’s actually extremely difficult to get anyone to react to anything you might do, wear, espouse, other than a vaguely raised eyebrow (apart from late at night on trains from drunk men, for some reason that’s different).
But hey! We’re doing it! So keep an eye out for men in skirts…and give them a nod, wave, smile or wink, as is your wont.
Online magazine IndieRepublik with the Ukrainian brand Svitla Volka Design together present an experiment dedicated to breaking the limitations of self-expression.
Men will receive designer skirts, live their day in them and share their impressions. The experiment was named “Normal range”. One of the leading themes of Svitla Volka Design is agenderness of clothing
Svitla Volka strives to give a person more freedom through her garments and images and thus fight against categorization. After all, the latter makes garments a hook for gaslighting and manipulation. We want to convey the idea that clothing does not define gender, but helps to feel comfortable regardless of self-identification.
