I am posting this especially for PRINCE OF CATS , who I hope will appreciate it !!!
KIT
http://shopping.guardian.co.uk/clothes/story/0,,1156913,00.htmlIt's a man thing
[FONT=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]For three years, Charlie Porter, our deputy fashion editor, has reported on women's fashion. But something has always been missing - he couldn't wear the clothes. Now, with menswear on the rise, he explains why it's time for him to find a new niche[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif] Saturday February 28, 2004
The Guardian
[/FONT] I have only ever once tried to be a transvestite. It was in my final year at college, and at the time cross-dressing seemed the next step. I can see it now as a subliminal form of protest: at my student newspaper, the new editor was forcing us to spend a weekend away discussing his proposed changes, none of which we agreed with. So I went into Topshop, found the skirt I wanted (a grey, fitted mini with a shimmer pinstripe running through it), and asked the assistant what size she thought I needed. She held one up against me. Size 14! And I'd always thought of myself as a rake. I didn't try it on, but took it to the till and paid up. Back in my room, the first shock was the fit. I was indeed a women's size 14. This was back when I was 21 - I'd be at least a 16 now. I have always tried to wean my female friends off their obsession with sizing because the numbers seem so soul-destroying. In menswear, our scale is higher and non-threatening - I find items with the mysterious number 50 usually fit me. But translate your big-boned body into women's sizing and you see where the suffering comes from. I'd be bordering on what's called plus-size. And in my three years covering women's fashion, I have never once written about the plus-size market - shameful.
Zipped up at the back, the next oddity was the way this skirt sat - the waistband so high and flush to the body. I was used to slouch and room, trousers vaguely staying in place at the hip. Men don't have clothing that acts so much like a sheath. Then there was the final shame - I felt nothing different in the skirt. No transformation or realisation. I wasn't a transvestite; I was just me, with air between my legs.
I went through with the public outing anyway, putting on the skirt in the student union toilets before we all set off, pretending everything was normal while wanting everyone to know something was different. But the protest only ever worked in my head, the newspaper changed for the worse, and by the end of the winter term I had quit and was soon doing work experience at Vogue. So began my faltering attempts to understand women's clothes.
Why do men feel they know how women should dress? It is something that has nagged the whole time I've been doing this gig at the Guardian. So many male designers, so many men deciding what goes on sale in shops, so many men choosing what is worn in fashion shoots, or writing about what they have seen. Of course, there are many women in powerful and respected positions: Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons and Vivienne Westwood are two of the most important designers of the late 20th century, and continue to inspire today. Yet at the fashion weeks, men play a dominant role.
That male designers "really get women" is a fashion cliché, but one that seems remarkably naive. We find it awkward when a male novelist attempts to write in a first-person female voice, yet don't see anything strange about men designing for women. If you've never had bosoms and curves, never experienced how these swell and change, you're not going to "get" women. It is why so much of fashion objectifies: because some male designers haven't a clue what women actually want to wear, they construct a fantasy about, say, how the female ideal is to be a glam-rich-b*tch in St Tropez, and try to dress them accordingly. They reveal how little they know women, and how they wish they themselves had been born.
It's only recently that I have been feeling phoney. The big story last autumn at the spring/summer 2004 shows was dresses. For my female colleagues it was a business-as-usual set of collections, but I could not find a link. Once I had thought about the strategic reason this dress thing was happening - that designers had saturated the denim/distressed/ dressed-down market, and needed to move on in order to appear fresh - there was little else to occupy my mind. I could tell the clothes were pretty, but I had no connection. Women understood them because they could wear them, but this was not the place for me. I lost my notebook somewhere in Milan, and panicked that an Italian PR would find it and use it against me - the number of times I had written "I am bored", "This is tedious", or spent a show doodling when I should have been noting what flower was featured in a print, and whether it was silk or chiffon.
I stopped feeling that buzz about the shows, wouldn't fight and struggle if I wasn't sent a ticket, wouldn't rush to make sure I got there on time. At the start of the final week of the shows in Paris, I got food poisoning and spent the day in bed. By the Friday evening I had done all my work, but there were two days of shows left. It suddenly struck me: I could go home, recuperate and see my friends.
Saturday morning, I was on the Eurostar (PRs, don't worry: my show tickets went to a worthier Guardian colleague). I've since handed in my notice. For now, it was my final season at the women's shows.
I could still do this job. My way into womenswear has been to concentrate on design. I am obsessed with clothes the same way my friend Roger is obsessed with cars, or Liz with furniture. It's the basics of construction that get me, not the flip and frills of embellishment but the cut and fit that make a garment feel right. Sometimes my writing has sounded more like a technical study than a puff of fashion, but I hope that by talking about the nitty-gritty, I've helped people to see if these highly priced clothes were worth buying.
It has been an honour to see shows by designers who work with original thought, rather than those whose shows are there to cultivate trends. I feel flush at Comme des Garçons, Junya Watanabe, Helmut Lang, Azzedine Alaïa, John Galliano and Alexander McQueen. Miuccia Prada sets trends with her labels, but the intelligence behind her work can be staggering. And it has been my misfortune that my time in womenswear coincided with Jil Sander's recently ended exile from her own label.
As you can see, there are male designers on my list. But these men are always thinking about the effect of their clothes on the body before they deal with the surface noise that makes something look fashionable. Although the results may be extreme and outlandish, especially with Galliano and McQueen, underneath is an utmost respect for women. Whether it is Galliano with his bias cut or McQueen with his tailoring, they use their skills to the advantage of the female form. Their example is in direct contrast to so many men who enter fashion for the wrong reasons, be it for fame and celebrity, or to fake a lifestyle they would otherwise have no way of attaining.
I will miss all my favourite shows, and many others besides, but I haven't yet felt a pang of regret. One of the great pleasures of the past three years has been to witness the flourishing of menswear. Post-attempted-transvestitism, I still assumed that the future of men's clothing lay in some sort of move towards femininity. A couple of years ago, I wrote in Weekend about the Victoria & Albert museum's Men In Skirts exhibition, which has recently been shown at the Costume Institute in New York. The curator, Andrew Bolton, has since published a book of the show, but the thought of men wearing skirts still seems a curiosity rather than a vision of the future. I felt no bonus wearing mine - in fact, I actively wanted to return to the tailored form of trousers. And so it is that the best exponents of menswear know they don't have to shock or provoke to make advances in fashion. Instead, they have to look at the male body, and design accordingly. From this, great clothes follow.
Sexual honesty has helped in an industry in which most of the designers are gay. Menswear has taken a long time to recover from the 1980s, when clothes were made for the idealised beefcake shape of those more closeted times. Nowadays, designers create outfits to enhance a more realistic silhouette, because most find a normal body more attractive than a pile of tense muscle. It means the clothes have more desire, more vigour and more intelligence than those for the unattainable fantasy that went before.
There is also a barely tapped market of men who are ready to consume fashion as ravenously as women. The massive success of Dior Homme, set up from scratch by Hedi Slimane, has shown the controlling conglomerates that a male market could become as lucrative as womenswear.
In January, Alexander McQueen introduced his first menswear line under his current owners, Gucci Group. On sale in late summer, the clothes are an audacious display of traditional tailoring updated with modern verve and sexuality. John Galliano's first men's line since his 1983 graduation collection is apparently close to selling out in Harvey Nichols. Meanwhile, Givenchy is the next label to follow the Dior Homme model, with Oswald Boateng designing its first men's ready-to-wear collection in July. All this shows that if there is money to be made, the big houses will ensure there is the product to buy.
That consumption is at the heart of it all may depress some, but it is what makes fashion so fascinating. I don't understand why I am willing to spend three-figure sums on single items of clothing; I just know it is the market price for a work of unique talent. Indeed, none of my favoured designers is a fool: they balance creativity with commerce to run successful businesses in a ruthless field. I find gripping these machinations that make it all happen, and I'm excited that menswear is hot with new passions and schemes. That I can try on the clothes, and understand fully why a design works, completes the picture.
If you want to work in menswear, you have to go to GQ, so that is where I am heading. But I shall still be around in Weekend, babbling on about double-breasted this and pinstripe that and whatever else comes our way. I hope there are fashion students who are watching all this activity and realising this could be their place: their design spark and drive could move menswear in directions as yet unforeseen. They will be following the lead of successful young designers such as Kim Jones, whose single-minded dedication to menswear is a glimpse of how viable this side of the business can be. Maybe in our time menswear will become an equivalent force to womenswear, though in its own valid context. It could happen. Or maybe I'm just deluding myself, once again.
KIT
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He made lots of valid points...I still think his lack of suits is highly disturbing and I went for an electric blue mini for my first time...I obviously just have more class...
