Why does the Guardian’s Weekend magazine major on women’s fashion, with a men’s lineup only once in a bluemoon? We need regular help too, you know.
Rob, by email
Rob, Rob, Rob. My poor fashion-deprived chap. Look, I could spin you a line about how, ACK-SHU-ALL-EE, the magazine now features menswear once every four weeks, which is much more than once in a blue moon, and the Guardian covers the menswear shows, and we do menswear features, and, and, AND …
But you’re right, of course. Womenswear does get more coverage than menswear, in this paper and everywhere else. I wish I could tell you about the secret cabal of fashion gurus who conspire to make this happen, and the annual Bilderberg-style meetings that take place in a chic salon in Paris, where GQ’s Dylan Jones is ritually humiliated by Vogue’s Anna Wintour and Alexandra Shulman as he begs to be given more attention and they laugh in his face and spray his made-to-order Armani suit with Diet co*ke (NO SUGAR!!!!!). But I’m afraid that, if Idid, I’d be found strangled tomorrow with a Fendi cashmere scarf. So instead, I’ll give you the more prosaic answer.
You want to know why womenswear gets more attention than menswear? Because womenswear can be fabulous, gorgeous, weird, ridiculous, breathtaking, game-changing, enviable, exciting, desirable, wonderful. Menswear, on the other hand, canonly be two things: weird orboring. And there’s only so much mileage you get from those two qualities.
It’s an impossible situation, really. Because men, by and large, are much more conservative about their dress than women and they have fewer garment options to boot; this means there is only so much menswear designers can do. Two options lie before them: don’t bother appealing to the mainstream and instead make three-legged trousers and boiler suits, or make boring but nice jumpers and suits. Womenswear can be like this, too – heaven knows there is weird womenswear and boring womenswear. But there is also beautiful, lovely womenswear, and men veryrarely get that sweet spot of a middle ground. When they do, they practically implode with excitement, as happened when Hedi Slimane, then at Dior Menswear, managed to make the suit look so cool at the beginning of this century that the menswear magazines all collectively wet themselves (and their new skinny suits.) Since then, somewhat proving my point, Slimane found making even his suits boring and he has ditched menswear for womenswear and is now at Saint Laurent, making some of the coolest dresses and shoes around.
Men can have style – Jarvis co*cker and Charlie Watts have style – but it seems they can’t have fashion. What Imean is that men don’t have the fun of reading about changing trends, as women do, and playing dress-up, being a severe monochrome one day and then a fun 50s flirt the next. Changeability, I think, is seen as girlish, or something, which is ridiculous. And while it means men do save a lot of money by not trying out trends, it also means they miss out on a lot of fun.
But this isn’t just about the limitations of the industry, it is also about the limitations of the customers. We can’t blame menswear for being boring because boring, to be honest, is what most men want. Some menswear designers attempt to do more fun-but-not-weird clothes, such as Jonathan Saunders and Marc Jacobs. But the fact is, men don’t buy those clothes in the same way women do. Too many men, in my experience, have a grave fear of breaking out of their navy-T-shirt-with-jeans or button-down-shirt-with-dark-trousers rut, fear that they will look stupid. Laughable. Attention-seeking. Camp. Far better to stick with the uniform that renders one invisible thanto risk something that makes you visible and might – might – result in youbeing mocked. Sometimes I marvel at what it must be like to be a man, so riddled with terror that swerving from the tested and oh-so-tired path will result in instant disaster. It is, really, the sartorial equivalent of obsessive dieting, when a person assumes that even a crumb of bread will lead to spontaneous fatness and therefore subsists purely on carrot sticks.
Anyway, the point of this is that men generally read fashion coverage less than women do, as you can see by comparing the circulation figures of men’s and women’s fashion magazines, which is why newspapers such as this one cover women’s fashion more. But the real problem is that we are all caught in a vicious circlewhen it comes to menswear: men tend to be conservative in their clothes – therefore menswear designers make conservative or, as rebellion, crazy clothes – therefore men don’t liketo read about men’s fashion – therefore they stick with their conservative clothes.
There is only one solution here, Rob. You’re going to have to be the trailblazer that breaks this tired mould. Embrace changing trends! Wear fun menswear such as Jonathan Saunders! Encourage your male friends to talk about fashion! Overthrow the status quo! What I’m saying is, BE MENSWEAR’S GANDHI. Make the change! It’s a lot to put on one man’s shoulders, but I feel sure you can handle it. And, yes, you might think that buying a brightly coloured jumper might not make a difference, but remember: the journey to a million fashion-clued-up men begins with a tiny step. Or jumper.
Post your questions to Hadley Freeman, Ask Hadley, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Email ask.hadley@theguardian.com.
