GENDER BENDERS

It’s a rare fashion season that doesn’t have some interplay between the genders. I’m not talking about something as specific as androgyny, or of a designer like Jean Paul Gaultier very deliberately reconfiguring the same items for men and women. It’s more often the use of a men’s fabric or a man-tailored silhouette in womenswear.

During the Spring ’08 shows, for instance, we saw the tuxedo assert itself as an evening option for women. Even now, a woman in a man’s suit still has a vestige of the frisson that Marlene Dietrich exploited to such great effect. It was, unsurprisingly, Dietrich whom John Galliano evoked when he marched the statuesque Australian model Catherine McNeil (shown) down his Dior catwalk in a white tux and matching top hat. And over at Saint Laurent, Stefano Pilati is toying with elements of Le Smoking, the tuxedo for women that Yves originally introduced in 1966. (It was so controversial at the time that, legend has it, tux-clad YSL client Nan Kempner was turned away by a posh Manhattan restaurant due to a “no women in trousers” rule. Kempner whipped off the trousers and entered wearing the jacket as a minidress!)

But, this spring, something a little less predictable unfolded on the men’s and women’s catwalks. The shared vocabulary was more two-way than usual. It’s sometimes said you can catch a foretaste of the women’s shows from what designers offer their male clientele, especially because the men’s shows for spring take place at the end of June, a good three months before the women’s. This was one season when that notion actually made sense. One of spring’s most visually striking womenswear trends was the use of transparency and veiling in the most anticipated collections: Jil Sander in Milan, Nina Ricci in Paris and Marc Jacobs in New York. But we’d already caught inklings of the trend in June, when Dries Van Noten and Fendi showed organza shirts for men, and Raf Simons layered translucent nylon jackets over shirts.