Let’s Hear It for the Boys: Menswear’s 10 Greatest Runway Moments Inline
Photo: Courtesy of Jean Paul Gaultier1/10Jean Paul Gaultier’s Sex Objects, 1983
Way back in the early ’80s, menswear was a very different kettle of fish: After the psychedelia of the ’60s and the unisex experimentation of the ’70s, menswear had lost its moxie. Enter Jean Paul Gaultier, who decided to set menswear back on a preened and powdered pedestal. His first own-label menswear show, staged in 1983, was titled L’Homme Objet—The Male Object—and his models slinked down the runway in cutaway Breton-striped sweaters. They didn’t sport the famous skirt for men (introduced a year later), nor his later corsets and high heels, but nevertheless, Gaultier’s willful transgression of accepted gender norms—as simple back then as men as sex objects for women, rather than the other way ’round—caused a furor in an era otherwise dominated by the emergence of the power-suited yuppie. “There is something in what he does which . . . I don’t think it was ever touched on again,” says Jonathan Anderson, fan of a fellow in a frilly skirt himself. “The idea that you can get away with murder and it could become attractive.” We know who inspires J.Dub’s own eyebrow-raising fashion, then. (Anderson’s show, incidentally, is this Sunday.)
Photo: Courtesy of John Galliano2/10The Incroyable John Galliano, 1984
John Galliano’s feminine bias has often been discussed—understandable when you’re talking bias-cut slip dresses—but his earliest collections were as much for him as for her. Example? How about his graduation show, Les Incroyables—literally translating as “The Incredibles” (but not the Pixar type)—named after the masculine incarnation of a band of flamboyant aristocratic ne’er-do-wells during the French Revolution. (The females were dubbed les merveilleux—“marvelous women.”) These early incarnations of punks incited outrage and violence through their clothing, and Galliano harnessed their spirit to the similarly outré and gender-fluid London club scene for a magnetic collection that ended up in the window of London’s Browns boutique. It was modeled—and subsequently purchased—by men and women alike. Easily seen as a philosophical precursor to his current gender-bending work at Maison Margiela, if you’re into your fashion history and theory.
Photo: Courtesy of Vivienne Westwood3/10Vivienne Westwood’s Cutting Wit, 1990
Vivienne Westwood has designed menswear since her earliest collections in the ’70s; she learned to cut clothes by copying 1950s Edwardian-inspired jackets for her then-partner Malcolm McLaren, in extreme fabrics like Lurex and faux fur—think Divine meets Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. She also mixed it with womenswear throughout her ’80s shows. But in 1990, she staged her first men’s-only collection as part of the 38th installation of Pitti Uomo in Florence. Rather than take her inspiration from the city’s tailoring, she instead delved back into the Renaissance, slashing her clothes like 16th-century nobles—although Westwood’s were in denim, a grandiose reimagining of the style you may be more familiar with from New Kids on the Block’s heyday. Marky Mark meets Medici? Only on a Westwood runway. The show’s crowning glory was Westwood’s revival of the eye-popping, priapic codpiece. Less wearable for everyday than that shredded denim, it was best modeled in an intricate fencing match–cum-waltz devised and danced by famed choreographer Michael Clark. Dame Viv keeps up the hijinks to this very day.
Photo: FirstVIEW4/10Putting the G(-string) in Gucci, 1996
Lee Alexander McQueen may have reinvented buttock cleavage as an erogenous zone via his Bumsters (for men and women), Vivienne Westwood may have stuffed guys’ unmentionables into puffed and padded codpieces, but it took Tom Ford to drop the pants completely—and literally. The standout garment from his Spring 1997 Gucci show was a mere slip of a thing: a spandex G-string slung with a glistening metallic Gucci logo, perfectly positioned between the cheeks. Shown on Georgina Grenville, barely an eyebrow raised, but nestled between the pert glutes of a male model, there was outrage. Why? It’s back to that old Gaultier thing—of man as a sex object. But as we all know, sex sells.
Photo: FirstVIEW5/10Raf Simons Shows His “Krafty” Side, 1998
Simons exploded onto the menswear scene in the mid-’90s, launching his eponymous label in 1995 to immediate and lasting acclaim. Why? Because Simons is an experimenter, an innovator, a designer who takes risks. And menswear labels are often a timid lot. Today, Simons’s Fall 1998 collection, Radioactivity, looks pretty standard: skinny suits, scarlet shirts, black ties—the whole electro-clash neo–New Wave thing we got used to circa 15 years ago. But Simons’s show predated its popularity by a good quarter-decade, proposing looks dedicated to his teenage obsessions with the music of Joy Division, Depeche Mode, and, above all else, Kraftwerk. Part of Simons’s power is how personal each collection seems to be—perhaps few more than this one, which in retrospect looks like the unpacking of Simons’s pubescent mind, and a preview of a decade of menswear still to come. Plus, I’d still kill for one of those killer black suits.
