Bravehearts: Men in Skirts

This monograph, which accompanied an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (November 2003–February 2004) and, previously, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (October 2001–March 2002), is the first and only book to provide a critical and contextual analysis of the makers and consumers of the male skirt.

The monograph examines designers as well as individuals who have appropriated the skirt as a means of re-defining ideal masculinities, as a means of transgressing moral and social codes, and, at its most fundamental, as a means of injecting novelty into male fashion. By providing an historical and cross-cultural analysis of the male skirt, the book challenges the gender specificity of clothing conventions. It also examines the role of exoticism in relation to the popularization and legitimization of the male skirt in the West. British self-exoticization is examined in reference to the kilt, the long history of which is presented as a product of outside intervention and deliberate reinvention.

As well as looking at the ways in which the male skirt has been promoted as a utopian ideal and contemporary lifestyle decision, the monograph also looks at the ways it has been co-opted by various sub-cultural movements as a means of transgression and self-expression. The monograph provides a critical, historical, and cross-cultural examination of ‘men in skirts'.