Contemporary Menswear: Hybridity, Flux and Globalisation

By taking apart iconic sartorial forms to produce strangely abstracted, fractured reiterations of the lounge suit, contemporary menswear designers not only explore tailoring as a metier, but also articulate shifting dynamics of gender, taste and subjectivity. In what follows, I will argue that innovative men’s fashion, and the contested role of tailoring within it, represents a meditation on contemporary masculinities and their increasing porosity and plurality. In recent decades as the discipline has evolved, tailoring has increasingly drawn attention to the body, its vulnerability and sensuality: deconstructing and remaking tailored garments can therefore be understood as a way of re-forming and pluralising masculinities.