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When Fashion Gets Gender Wrong
Techwear is supposed to be a boundary-breaking, avant-garde fashion subculture. So why is the community mostly men?
Techwear is centered around one simple principle: utility through innovation. The fashion subculture’s aesthetic leans toward the futuristic (think: urban ninja meets astronaut chic), but nothing is inherently gendered; everyone wants a raincoat when it rains. Yet, for the most part, the big-name techwear designers are all men, and the popular brands produce only men’s sizes.
Recently, a Reddit user asked whether the popular techwear subreddit r/techwearclothing was only for dialogue around men’s clothes. The majority of commenters replied with a welcoming attitude: Techwear is androgynous, unisex, or gender neutral, they said; anyone can wear anything, and women are welcome to participate.
The community’s response is encouraging, yet the Redditor’s question hits at the heart of a problem pulsing through this otherwise vibrant subculture: If techwear is, in fact, androgynous, then where are the clothing designs for anyone who is not male?
It’s easy to design something for men, call it unisex, and say it’s for everyone. This bias is extremely common even outside of fashion, with everything from adventure gear to artificial hearts to medical care. This is where techwear’s relationship with androgyny becomes a problem. Without addressing how gender bias affects techwear, women, transfolk, and gender nonconforming people will continue to be outliers in the subculture.
Techwear’s gender problem filters down from the fashion industry as a whole, which has long treated androgynous styles as little more than roomier versions of men’s clothing. Our general culture presents men as the default body type, so androgyny is expressed as not-men wearing men’s clothing.
In current fashion, androgyny carries the added connotation of hot women wearing men’s suits. A simple Google image search for androgynous fashion shows image after image associated with (thin, often white) women wearing men’s styles. As Bustle’s Meg Zulch notes, fashion items are presented as “cis-passing women modeling loose and boyish neutral-hued clothing.”
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