One of the features of fashion in the postmodern era has been the increasing prevalence of gender border crossings, where elements of male and female dress are mixed together in apparently arbitrary ensembles irrespective of the "sex" of the wearer. This has been exemplified by the fashion spreads in i-D magazine and The Face, for instance, where both male and female models sport outfits combining a mélange of gender signifiers, such as bomber jackets teamed with tutus, and pink sleeveless tops juxtaposed with cycling shorts and Doc Martens boots. Likewise, in haute couture, designers such as Jean-Paul Gaultier have freely mixed gender signifiers, presenting outfits for men employing sensuous fabrics and colors normally associated with female dress, such as pink satin and gold lamé accompanied by "feminine" accoutrements such as handbags, gloves, and frills, on the one hand, and "masculine" style garments such as sailor suits for women, on the other. Other fashion designers such as Gianni Versace, Issey Miyake, Katherine Hamnett, Rei Kawakubo, and Calvin Klein have created androgynous style fashions where there is no longer a clear differentiation between male and female garments. Beauty products such as perfume are now also being marketed for men and women without a clear differentiation between them, for instance, Calvin Klein's fragrance One for him and her.
The great popularity of "gender-bending" celebrities such as Boy George, David Bowie, Grace Jones, Michael Jackson, Annie Lennox, kd lang, and Madonna is also testament to the growing occurrence of this freewheeling play with signifiers of gender. While the phenomenon of gender border crossing in dress is not new, there are some features of the postmodern manifestation of this that distinguish it from examples in previous eras. In particular, whereas in the earlier part of the twentieth century, most border crossings involved the adoption of elements of male dress by women, trousers being the most notable example, increasingly, men are appropriating elements of female adornment, such as items of jewelry (including earrings and neck chains), as well as fragrances and skin care products that were once almost exclusively a female domain. More colorful and decorative elements are also entering into men's fashion, particularly in the area of leisurewear. Accompanying this apparently greater reciprocity in the crossing of gender boundaries is a sense of gender markers as no longer being connected with particular "sexed" bodies. Rather, they emerge as arbitrary signs that bear no necessary relation to the "sex" of the body of the wearer who appropriates them. No longer signifying anything beyond themselves, they are treated as "free-floating" signifiers, which can be adopted or discarded at will and mixed together in a myriad of different combinations. The modern day consumer, conceived of or promoted as genderless by advertisers and the fashion industry, purchases for him- or herself an identity that can be assembled and reassembled from an apparently endless repertoire of signs.
Gender becomes a "performance" that is not seen to represent anything beyond itself. As Evans and Thornton point out, in magazines such as i-D and The Face, which were aimed at both sexes, "sexual difference [is deployed] as a pure signifier, detached from biological difference. In such images, the play of clothing signifiers present[s] gender as just one term among many". Detached from their referents, gender signifiers come to be seen as artificial constructs-that is, as artifacts of culture- rather than expressing essentialist biological categories. A number of theorists, such as Baudrillard, Schwichtenberg, Polhemus, and Garber, have interpreted this freewheeling play with signifiers of masculinity and femininity as indicative of a breakdown of the binary logic of gender distinctions. Jean Baudrillard, for instance, characterizes postmodernity as a "transsexual" era in which the dichotomous distinction between male and female has been replaced by the infinite convertibility of gender signifiers. However, in contrast to these above theorists, it will be argued in this article that the postmodern play with gender does not represent a transcendence of gender distinctions, but rather a renegotiation of those boundaries. That is, the recent play with gender signifiers is more about redefining masculinity and femininity than with collapsing the distinction between them. Indeed, as will be demonstrated, the more one seeks to blur gender boundaries, the more they keep reasserting themselves. Rather than disappearing, what constitutes each gender category is continuously being redefined. Instead of regarding the cross gender borrowings in contemporary dress as being subversive of gender boundaries, they can more properly be seen as an inherent characteristic of fashion. As Fred Davis has pointed out gender border crossings have been a constant feature of fashion since its inception in the fourteenth century.
Throughout the history of Western fashion, as he demonstrates, the masculine/feminine dichotomy has constantly been renegotiated without the distinction between the two disappearing. Indeed, it is the continually shifting nature of the distinction that has been one of the primary motors driving the changes in fashion.
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