Think of it like slipping into an ice-cold pool, one millimeter at a time, until the temperature feels almost normal. That’s the way men have eased their way into skirts over the past decade. One surprising thing about the feminine elements that showed up en masse at the Paris menswear shows today is that nobody laughed. It has to be said a lot of the men in the audience are already wearing some version of a clingy, layered tunic over cigarette jeans with biker boots, perfecto jacket and maybe a trilby. The tunic works like a dress, and the hat says I’m sartorial, which confers on men an androgynous cool.
In some ways, a Rick Owens show changes little from season to season, but then, men change their style little from season to season anyway. And Owens does have a distinct idea that he constantly pushes further along. One significant aspect of that idea is the dropped, skirtlike waistline often created with multiple draped layers of fabric. Occasionally an actual skirt appears, but usually some variation of a long shirt hem shows below the bottom edge of a suit jacket. Sometimes it just shows in the back, approximating the visual effect of wearing a shirt tied around the waist an easy jumping off point for understanding how a skirt can look masculine on a guy.
Rick Owens is really the mastermind of this feminization of a man’s wardrobe, which he began by making sweaters droop and taking all the rigid tailoring out of jackets and coats to let them hang loose, when he began showing his menswear in Paris in 2003.
Courtesy of Junn.J Versatile jackets, at Junn.J.
It’s a design student’s trick to sew on an extra shirt sleeve where it doesn’t belong, but the Juun.J collection proves that extra sleeves can work all you need to do is wear two jackets. The Korean designer took a few different approaches to this. In some cases the two jackets were discrete and separate, in other cases they were connected at their lower edge so the first could be worn normally, and the second worn on the shoulders or carried over the elbow elegantly. Trenches and leather jackets unzipped at the arm hole so that when worn as an outer layer, their sleeves could hang empty next to arms sleeved by the inner layer. (Interestingly, the otherwise sedate Louis Vuitton employed the same trick with a few looks.) On the right guy, all of this comes off as a bit opulent, showy in an awesome Keith Richards sort of way. Jackets are expensive, so if you can afford it, go for two.
Korea’s number-one menswear export, Juun.J, is similarly open to the womanly in us all. For his “Overlay” collection, pants are cut extra wide and deeply pleated, like full skirts worn with cinched waist jackets. The coats are elliptical, with an extra jacket layer that can be worn hanging down like a skirt, or held demurely over the arm. Juun’s finale, a lineup of guys in teddy-bear fur anoraks, looked like a chorus line.