Menswear Revolution: The Transformation of Contemporary Men's Fashion

Fashion Discourse, Gender, Inclusive Masculinity, Male Body, Masculinities, Men’s Fashion, Menswear, Sexuality, Subcultural Fashion over the past two decades menswear has transformed from a relatively obscure and uncelebrated discipline, relegated to the periphery of the catwalk schedule, to become a vital and vibrant field of design. In Menswear Revolution, Jay McCauley Bowstead draws attention to the creative and commercial vitality of contemporary menswear, while situating these recent developments in their broader social, cultural, and historical contexts. Through an investigation of archival sources he uncovers precedents for today’s vital men’s fashion scene in the innovations of the late 1960s and 1970s, and describes how 1970s influences were central to the pioneering menswear design of Hedi Slimane, Raf Simons, Tom Ford, and Ennio Capasa at the turn of the millennium.

The author describes the ways in which popular and academic discourses have frequently acted to stigmatise men’s self-expression through dress while highlighting recent challenges to these discourses through explorations of subculture, liminality, and androgyny in contemporary fashion. And he explores the ways in which shifting notions surrounding the body and sexuality have impacted on the masculine silhouette.
Over the past two decades, McCauley Bowstead argues, menswear as a design discipline has explored and interrogated masculinity more engagingly and thoughtfully than any other field of creative practice. Reviewing a recent sociological literature and empirical studies on male identity, that posits the decline of “‘hegemonic masculinity’,” McCauley Bowstead makes the case for men’s fashion as an important space for identity formation through which men find new ways of inhabiting their masculinities.

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