Men’s Fashion in the Twenty-First Century: Contestation, Inclusive Masculinity, and the Body

Men’s Fashion in the Twenty-First Century: Contestation, Inclusive Masculinity, and the Body is a critical appraisal submitted as part of my PhD by published work. This thesis brings together five pieces of research published between 2015 and 2022 investigating how innovative men’s fashion has enabled the expression of a greater plurality of masculinities. By tracing the thematic, theoretical, and methodological connections between the discrete publications, the thesis explores how competing discourses of gender have circulated in Western European menswear and fashion media from the turn of the millennium to 2021. The significance of the slender male body in fashion representation is examined in the context of shifting corporeal ideals and emerging image-making practices. The publications gathered in this thesis combine discourse analysis with close-reading to analyse visual and written sources – including runway shows, photography, and fashion journalism – supplemented by semi-structured interviews, principally with figures from the fashion and media industries. These approaches enable an exploration of gender and embodiment in menswear representation and design while also examining how individual men negotiate subjectivity through clothing and styling the body.

My 2018 book Menswear Revolution was the first fashion studies text to deploy Inclusive Masculinity Theory (IMT), and the research comprising this thesis is viewed through the same conceptual lens. In analysing the symbolic deconstruction of normative masculinity in designer menswear, I draw upon Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of reparative reading which emphasises the possibility of reforming dominant systems through pleasure and resistance. The thesis also makes use of Michel Foucault’s concepts of discourse and discursive formation to examine how ideas about masculinity are circulated and contested in fashion media and how such discourses may give licence to emergent forms of identity. I argue that innovative menswear in the twenty-first century mobilises as a set of discursive practices through which a variety of masculinities are made visible. Deploying novel conceptual frames, including IMT and reparative reading, and investigating the creative output of practitioners often neglected in an existing academic literature, the research gathered in this thesis contributes to the theorisation of men’s fashion and masculinities. While scholarly work on the idealised masculine physique in ‘the west’ has largely focused on muscularity: my research has instead contributed to an analysis of the slim male body.