Women's Wear Daily

Tipping Point: Fashion Brands, Schools and Stores Navigate Shifting Gender Norms

By Miles Socha

Fashion’s future is gender-neutral: Fashion’s distribution channels, including digital, are not there yet.

“There has been a significant move away from traditional women’s wear toward men’s wear/unisex, sportswear and less gendered fashion,” agreed Andrew Groves, professor of fashion design at the University of Westminster in London. “This has been driven in part by students not wishing to impose ideas on who or how their garments are worn, presenting them as ‘proposals’, consciously moving away from the dated notion of the designer as an autocrat.”

Yet the creative bubble of fashion school and the working world is something else, according to Groves.

While students at Westminster are free to create gendered or nongendered fashions, students’ perceptions “radically change once they go on internships. It is startling how many say they want to switch to men’s wear when they realize how much more collegial and supportive the men’s wear industry is in comparison to women’s wear,” he said.

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Women's Wear Daily

By Miles Socha

Surgical face masks, most an unsightly shade of blue, have become a daily necessity — and also a popular meme, doubling as a swimming pool for tiny human figurines, a disquieting flag for the pandemic, and a cringe-worthy mankini on comedian Sacha Baron Cohen.

But when designers and fashion brands started creating face masks, they began mirroring an industry still firmly devoted to men’s and women’s departments.

“They started to fall back on gendered tropes, i.e., floral and pastel masks being specifically marketed to women, while the ones marketed to men drew on the language of Savile Row, the military or pseudo-science,” marveled Andrew Groves, professor of fashion design at the University of Westminster in London. “We use this as a case study to show students how hard it is to change the realities of an industry that uses design to propagate ideals of gender roles and identities….It is incredible how even a small, seemingly unisex rectangle of fabric has become gendered and marketed differently for men or women.”

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Teen Vogue

How Police uniforms Are Getting Scarier, Too

By Tim Forster

After September 11, the changes kept coming: body armor became part of the everyday attire for the vast majority of American police departments, a bulky item that makes almost any body type seem larger and more intimidating.

Andrew Groves, professor of fashion design at the University of Westminster, says that this kind of uniform is “designed for conflict.”

“Those uniforms are very much confrontational, they escalate [situations]…it’s like, well, I came out to protest and you’re dressed for a riot.”

If police departments are sticking around (although there’s plenty of good arguments to say they shouldn’t), it seems obvious that beyond losing their military weapons, they need to change their look. Groves has one idea for where to look for a new uniform — although it’s almost certainly one that plenty of police would hate.

“I would look at service industries. I’d look at airlines, I’d look at fast food industries, I’d look at Starbucks — [those uniforms] are friendly, on the same level, and helpful…they’re there to serve,” he says. “When the police stop looking like us, they stop being us, they become this other entity — it becomes a ‘them and us,’ that’s where the problem is.”

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