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f Gender fluidity in men’s fashion: From Shakespeare’s modern English to the new millennium
- Source: Critical Studies in Men's Fashion, Volume 4, Issue 2, Sep 2017, p. 171 - 184
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- 01 Sep 2017
Abstract
This study explores how art, performance and the fluid construction of gender identities have significantly influenced men’s fashion over the trajectories of both time and place. Comparisons are made to the similarities and differences between everyday dress, and dress for performance. Studies of particular epochs indicate noteworthy changes in men’s fashion, such as sixteenth-century dress and costume in Shakespearean England, the nineteenth-century Aesthetic Movement, twentiethcentury counterculture and the new millennium. Emphasis is placed on the transformative development of New English, and how this linguistic trend, as well as the increase in world travel, may have augmented changes in men’s dress. Western fascination with eastern influences and emerging concepts of exotic dress during the nineteenth-century Aesthetic Movement to the present are noted. Other pivotal moments, such as the development of twentieth-century fashion subcultures, mirror specific contemporary shifts in men’s attitudes towards the construction of gender identity and fashion influence. Cross-analysis is introduced through visual and verbal linkages as well as diverse art genres so as to further examine men’s styling at decisive points in fashion history.