Boy-Skirts for One, Boy-Skirts for All
Is it liberating to put men in skirts?
Hello, happy Labor Day! Another treat for you while the next season of the podcast is percolating.
This is a delightful essay from writer and researcher Ekemini Ekpo about the recurring fashion phenomenon that is somehow supposed to liberate us all: men wearing skirts. It’s a trend that always tries to bill itself as SO MUCH MORE THAN A TREND. But is it? Take it away, Ekemini.
In March 2023, British GQ published an online article titled Men wear skirts now. Get used to it. There's an underlying assumption here: men wearing skirts is a novelty. If a person’s version of history extends only to the past few decades and to the outermost borders of the West—a hazy construction that has less to do with geography, and more to do with whether your government was present at the Berlin Conference—then sure, that logic holds. If and only if.
That's not to say that a man putting on a skirt is an apolitical or riskless act. Certainly not in Dundee, Scotland; Sydney, Australia; or Bilbao, Spain, just to name a few places where men have faced social ostracization or physical violence for precisely that.Which is wild because of how ironic it is. We’re talking about Scotland, home of the kilt, and Australia, where Aboriginal men wear lap-laps.
But I do think it’s more honest to say that The West is just now, after a couple centuries, only starting to come back around to a place that billions of men have been inhabiting this whole time. I, personally, have been living in Skirts-For-Men™-Land-ia my whole life. So have my parents and their parents and their parents before them, whether or not they'd frame it in this way. As for my own ethnic group, the Ibibio people of present-day Nigeria, we do have wrappers for men and don’t have gendered pronouns1
Call it pettiness from a member of the Commonwealth's diaspora, but I think British GQ really ought to have titled their article something like Men wear skirts here once again.
And yet, even here, in Skirt-For-Men-Land-ia, boy-skirts can sit comfortably right alongside an vehement adherence to pink/blue dichotomies. This was the case when Richard Akuson, also in Nigeria, faced severe backlash for creating an editorial spread that featured men wearing miniskirts. It’s entirely plausible that the people who decried Akuson’s publication returned to their homes, saw etebom amọ/ nna nna ya/ baba a baba ẹ/ their grandfather wearing a wrapper that is structurally and functionally identical to a skirt (albeit maxi- rather than mini), and batted not a single eyelash.
For a Nigerian to hold the wrapper as a masculine clothing item and the skirt as a feminine clothing item, and experience no sense of cognitive dissonance means that that person, even in attempting to impose a rigid view of gender, recognizes that both masculinity and femininity are quite malleable.
Perhaps part of the difference is in understanding what makes a lower body covering a skirt, and how this came to be defined.
For much of the Middle Ages, the tunic, a sort-of cousin to the skirt, was an “everybody” article of clothing. Regardless of gender, everyone in Europe wore a shapeless frock. As the art of tailoring grew more sophisticated, the gendered differences in clothes grew more pronounced. Even so, it was more important that clothing connoted social status than gender. The rich, men included, would don colorful, spectacularly impractical ensembles to demonstrate how little work they had on their agendas. If someone was walking your way from a distance, you’d probably pick up on their class before their gender.
According to British psychologist John Flügel, clothes for men got boring around the end of the eighteenth century. In the wake of the French Revolution, “men gave up their right to all the brighter, gayer, more elaborate, and more varied forms of ornamentation, leaving these entirely to the use of women…Man abandoned his claim to be considered beautiful. He henceforth aimed at being only useful.” He called it “The Great Masculine Renunciation.”
That naming was as dramatic as the change it described. Some paintings of men in Europe in the 18th century and before:
And images—some photos, some paintings--of men in America and Europe in the 19th century:
Flügel argued that in a post-Louis XVI, nominally egalitarian Europe (“Do you hear the people sing?”), social cohesion required sameness. To achieve sameness, The Rich needed to downgrade their wardrobe to the lowest common denominator. Plus, doing actual work was now en vogue, and the flowy capes of yore weren’t gonna cut it. Clothes needed to move in a utilitarian direction in order to meet the moment.
Flügel, a contemporary of Everett P. Wheeler, also had a hypothesis as to why there was (allegedly) no comparable fashion shift for women alongside the Great Masculine Renunciation. According to Flügel, men were more plugged into social life than women and were therefore more susceptible to the waves of social change. And also, women are more narcissistic and prone to sexual competition (“perhaps by nature” [yikes]), and were therefore less likely to relinquish the individualistic practice of puttin’ that shit on.
Luckily for us, Chloe Chapin presents a counter-narrative in Masculine Renunciation or Rejection of the Feminine?: Revisiting J.C. Flügel’s Psychology of Clothes. She writes that while Western men’s clothes became more drab in an attempt to model a more Anglocentric, Republican political ethos, women’s clothes also shifted--becoming more elaborate, more flowery, more frivolous. In her view, though the Great Masculine Renunciation ushered in significant changes in men's fashion, it also helped to construct femininity as “materially impractical.” As in, women’s clothing began flirting with the idea of being incompatible with life, or rather, with living.
Fabrics got “more expensive, easier to wrinkle, stain or snag,” and “harder to launder, iron, and mend.” Designs such as corsets and high heels limited the wearer’s freedom of movement. Women’s clothing became something to be seen by an onlooker rather than something to be used by the actual wearer. This perceived lack of substance in women's clothing was projected onto women themselves, as well as “nonwhite, non-western, and non-heteronormative men,” all of whom were less likely to dress in linear monochrome.
This trajectory persisted into the 20th century, see: these portraits of Louis N. Kenton, T. S. Eliot, and Norman Rockwell. It’s only relatively recently that color and curve have clawed back some mainstream sartorial real estate from the clutches of the dark and the angular. (Remember when Fox News et al. tweaked out because President Obama wore a tan suit to a press conference?)
Taken altogether, the Great Masculine Renunciation rendered men of color visible only when those men were fashioned in the West’s image. Before the concept evolved into the subversive practice that inspired the 2025 Met Gala, a Black dandy was simply an enslaved person who wore expensive suits as a walking monument to their master’s wealth. And Captain Richard Henry Pratt, one of America’s foremost architects of Indigenous cultural genocide, wanted to “kill the Indian…and save the man,”—that man wore trousers, not a Hopi kilt.
Legacies such as these set the stage for Harry Styles, the first man to be featured on the cover of Vogue magazine, as the harbinger of the boy-skirt—for better or for worse. In one corner of the internet, American Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote about the cover “it looks bomb so [shrugging emoji].” In a digital elsewhere, conservative commentator Candace Owens used her Twitter fingers to implore society to “bring back manly men.”
Naturally , the discourse invited a flurry of counter-discourse articulating reasons why a messianic or archfiendish view of the situation was incomplete. In an interview with The Sunday Times, Billy Porter had words about the cover. Porter, an openly-gay Black man, said that he’d spent his “entire life” pushing the boundaries of gender and fashion (including wearing skirts) at his own personal, political, and economic risk. He accused Styles, a straight-assumed white man, of being elevated by Vogue, despite not having the same level of political investment (allegedly allegedly allegedly).
Though Billy Porter was at least partially motivated by his own feelings of grievance—the thing he left only barely unsaid was that he himself would have been a far more deserving cover star—I don’t feel he’s totally off-base. I think it's fair to point out that Styles, a rich white celebrity who's never overtly dissuaded the public of his straightness, possesses a safety in his fashion escapades that a regular man doesn't have. Especially if that regular man counts himself among the “nonwhite, the non-western, and [the] non-heteronormative.” Reporter Rachel Askinasi took a more diplomatic approach in Business Insider, simply asking, “Why are people acting like Harry Styles is the first man to wear a dress?”
All that said, I don’t think the main point is that “men be wearing skirts.” That’s just the pretense to another point, which is that for a lot of people across time and space, skirts have always been men’s clothing. They just don’t call it a “skirt.” Instead, maybe it’s a wrapper, or a kilt, or a sarong, or a lap-lap, or a cassock, or a chiton, or a fustanella, or a veshti, or a lungi, or a longyi, or a lavalava, or an izaar, or a sulu, or something else.
So, no. I don’t think the (re-)emergence of the boy-skirt is some panacea for patriarchy or oppressive gender roles. I don’t put too much stock in Harry Styles or Bad Bunny donning a skirt for a paparazzo's benefit. I think there’s something to be said about the skirts I encounter as I go about my devastatingly unremarkable day. The skirts worn by people with so much more to lose, more than the skirts at the center of celebrity spectacle, might actually portend a future where the phrase “boy-skirt” is obsolete, along with all the -isms and -phobias that went with it. That one day we all just wear what we want, and still get to be who we are.
Just like my grandpas did.
Ekemini is a writer and researcher (often), theatre-maker (sometimes), and southerner (always). She loves using asterisks to censor words that are not actually pr*f*ne, and invariably yearns for the last place she left. For exactly one minute, she ran a Substack titled Keep Your Change with her friend Des'ree Brown. Nowadays, you can catch her @e.u.ekpo on Instagram, or on her website
añye" is Ibibio's only third person singular pronoun. Sometimes, people say that "añye" translates to "he/she" "his/hers" etc. In my humble 1st-gen opinion, while this works for idiomatic translations, a better literal translation of "añye" is "they (singular)" because the word doesn't imply gender in of itself
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<3 <3 <3 yes, the quiet dignity of the men around the world who are already going about their day in skirts!!!
I don't have a problem with anyone wearing a skirt. Or a dress. Or trousers, jeans, suits, dungarees. The colour, length, breadth, pattern, fabric. The occasion, provided it doesn't risk health or safety. Travelling,I've seen all kinds of clothes. What you wear is no business of mine. There again, what I wear is no business of yours. Fashion is entirely optional, and wobbles, wavers, and wends its way through every country , culture, class and choice, frequently regardless of gender or orientation or tradition.
Don't wear what you don't like. But remember others won't like what you wear either, so best not to comment out loud.