Curating an exhibition charting the evolution of menswear was never going to be easy. Not even for the V&A. Firstly, for the sheer scale of the task the museum had set itself up for – Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear took four years to create. But looking to a wider context, fashion’s new generation is already plotting an ungendered fashion future. You can see it on the streets, you see it on TikTok, and on catwalks, too. Big houses are showing co-ed and London Fashion Week is no longer divided by men’s and womenswear collections.
Claire Wilcox and Rosalind McKever, the exhibition’s co-curators, present around 100 looks and 100 artworks that trace how menswear “has been fashioned and refashioned” over centuries, from 1565 to now. “Rather than a linear or definitive history, this is a journey across time and gender,” say the pair, splitting the exhibition thematically across three ideas: Undresseed, Overdressed and Redressed. Each sets out to explore how masculinity is performed through dress, celebrating the designers, tastemakers, cultural leaders who’ve dressed and created clothing that reaches beyond the binary.
Throughout, the contemporary designs of the likes of Martine Rose, Grace Wales Bonner and Harris Reed are coupled with historical paintings and garments to show the parallels between how men dressed before and now. Opening with a deconstructed suit from Craig Green’s SS21 collection, Gucci’s Alessandro Michele christens the exhibition with a defiant statement on masculinity’s changing ideals. “It’s time to celebrate a man who is free to practise self-determination, without social constraints, without authoritarian sanctions, without suffocating stereotypes,” he writes.
The house is the exhibition’s official partner, with a Gucci outfit appearing in each section. From a radical look from Michele’s first menswear collection for the house (AW15) – which saw the designer pair shrunken tailoring with womanly pussy bow blouses – through to a Tom Ford-era suit jacket-and-leather trouser combo (SS01) and the custom Gucci gown Harry Styles wore for his monumental US Vogue cover in 2020. The latter appears amongst a trio of viral gowns which dissolve the traditional three-piece suit, the others being the Christian Siriano tux-ball gown Billy Porter wore to the 2019 Oscars and a wedding dress donned by Bimini Bon-Boulash for the season 2 finale of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK.
Amongst the chiselled torsos of Apollo Belvedere and the Farnese Hermes sit Tom of Finland’s juiced up sex symbols and intimate Calvin Klein ads by Willy Vanderperre, in the exhibition’s opening section: Undressed. An exploration of underwear and ideal male body types through time, its highlights include Jean Paul-Gaultier’s 1996 trompe l’oeil body suit jacket from 1996 (recently reprised by Y/Project’s Glenn Martens) and Zanel Muholi’s ID Crisis, a 2003 work from the non-binary artist which shows a person binding their chest flat. At the section’s centre is three mannequins, stood in embrace. They wear looks from Ludovic de Saint Sernin, JW Anderson and Virgil Abloh’s Off-White; three brands which have reshaped how the modern man shops and dresses.
Overdressed is a tour de force of fashion peacocking at its finest. A study in how history’s elite used flamboyant dress as a marker of their wealth, the likes of Giovanni Battista Moroni’s The Tailor are placed with a men’s couture gowns from Kim Jones’ debut Fendi collection and the work of the brilliant Rahemur Rahman, who fashions his queer-coded designs from traditional Bangladeshi textiles.
Its closing chapter, Redressed, pieces together how menswear favoured rationality and practicality over showiness following the French Revolution to the modern day. From Anglomania – a Nicholas Daley Scottish tartan get-up is shadowed by a 1925 portrait of Prince Edward VIII wearing a Fair Isle knit – to the Men In Black, a line-up of frock coats and tailored suits, including one worn by Marlene Dietrich and another donned by Gary Oldman in the OG Prada all-star actor catwalk in January 2012.
While it’s impossible to cover the entirety of menswear’s history in a singular show, it’s likely some guests will leave the exhibition feeling that certain designers and menswear phenomenons had been glossed over, or left out completely – it felt, at large, that streetwear has been abandoned in the V&A’s exploration of masculinity’s changing face. But with its clever collisions of menswear’s past and present, Fashioning Masculinities plots an exciting future for men’s clothing, one that’ll hopefully be free from the shackles of gendered dress altogether.
