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queeringperspectives
Jul 9, 20235 min read

#32 - The Role of Fashion in Shaping Gender Expression

Updated: Aug 24, 2023

This week we talk with Shan de Silva about gender non-conformity in fashion. In this article, we expand on the themes presented in our conversation, like the relationship between fashion and gender, and how South Asia provides an interesting perspective to question the history of how the gender binary became so ingrained in clothing.

The fashion industry has been one of the biggest contributors to enforcing a version of gender that is determined by the binary assignment of a sex at birth. You are assigned either male or female and must wear the clothing that is predetermined as appropriate for each. Even in the most "progressive" places in the world, wearing a dress while sporting a beard still provokes ridicule and violence, and for many of us, the trauma of walking into a retail store and being forced to choose the appropriate section to buy our clothes is still very much alive.

But it is in recognizing the power of clothing on shaping how we are perceived by society that we can understand and deconstruct the historical importance that fashion has played in creating and limiting our own gender identities.

For most of human history, clothing was not an indicator of gender, but rather of social role, which is also true of pre-modern Western societies. The concept of gender in the West, with its attendant dress norms, arose only out of the modern need to categorize and confine society to the ideals of progress and civility, to prescribe what was socially acceptable and what wasn't. This, along with other modern concepts such as race and sexuality, emerged as a direct response to colonization, in an attempt to dismantle, restructure, and ultimately control the lives of the colonized.

When we say that "gender" appeared in Europe after colonization, we don't mean that gender roles or even gendered clothing didn't exist. What we do mean is that it was during this period that gender began to be seen as a natural attribute of the body, and thus inextricably linked to a binary system that assigned one of only two possible sexes at birth. More importantly, the two sexes/genders were not born equal. Men emerged as the "norm," the ideal form of humanity, while women were defined in opposition, as not-men, encompassing the human aspects deemed undesirable for respectable citizens, such as emotionality, softness, and preoccupation with physical appearance.

Fashion developed along these lines. With the advent of market capitalism, the fashion industry could only reinforce the norms of the gender binary that came with the division of labor during industrialization by producing, marketing,

and exploiting the social differences assigned to men and women. In this way, the relationship between clothing, gender and sex became predetermined and naturalized from birth, as if it had always been this way.

By the 18th and 19th centuries, men's abandonment of fashion was complete. With the fall of the aristocracy, which until then had used clothing to signal its opulence, the men of the emerging bourgeois class favored utilitarian clothing, reserving fashion to confine women to being decorative elements of society, emphasizing an ideal of femininity in servitude to the heterosexual male gaze.

The role that colonialism played in using fashion as a tool to enforce the gender binary is often overlooked. The catalyst for this, however, was the cultural shock that colonizers experienced when they encountered individuals from indigenous societies who defied their own expectations of the gender binary, particularly men dressed in what they considered to be feminine clothing.

Before coming into effect on the European continent, dress codes were tested in the colonies. Laws restricting the use of "inferior" native garments, such as the sarong in India, were enacted in an attempt to "protect" the decency of native women. In the same vein, laws prohibiting the use of clothing associated with the "opposite sex" were specifically aimed at eradicating the third gender and gender-fluid expressions. These were seen as evidence of the savagery and sexual deviancy of indigenous cultures, which needed to be taught the "correct" way to perform gender. Racialization thus goes hand in hand with the binarization of gender, justified in terms of the seemingly "inferior" and "defective" biology of colonial subjects.

Before colonization, gender did not exist as a social organizing principle for many indigenous communities. And in contexts where it did exist, it was not determined by genitalia, but gender responded to a social role that each individual fulfilled according to an inner calling. In these cases, the clothes one would wear were there to communicate a gender role, which often took into account genders beyond the binary.

Here we can see the historical importance of clothing in expressing gender. For example, as we have seen with the nupa maibis in Manipur or the hijra in the rest of India, visible physical markers of "biological sex" were secondary to the presentation of gender roles in society through clothing. Even when these roles required initiation, there was no need to hide physical characteristics or 'transition' to the 'other' sex, as the embodiment of the feminine in these cases was reflected in the ritual garments reserved for this position. In this sense, clothing was not conceived as a natural attribution of gender to an individual, but as an expression of an internal state that signaled belonging to a specific function in society.


Recently, the fashion industry has been slowly opening up to reform its strict gender norms. Major fashion houses such as Maison Margiela and Gucci have introduced gender-neutral and gender-fluid collections. But this is not entirely new. Androgynous and unisex trends have come and gone.

And they have always failed to challenge the binary, largely because these trends continue to base their aesthetics on the "neutrality" of the male body, which is still considered the norm. Breasts and hips are hidden, while the only "feminization" of the traditionally masculine is the removal of facial and body hair. All in all, mainstream fashion has not been able to escape thinking about gender beyond the binary because it still can only think of neutrality as a fusion of two opposites.


The solution is to stop thinking in terms of an inherent gender attributed to garments. The focus should not be on "what" we wear, but on challenging the limitations and expectations associated with "who" and "how" someone wears something. For example, the visibility of gender non-conforming people has allowed an increasing number of non-binary models, like our guest Shan, to walk the runways beyond the confines of the gender binary.

We must acknowledge that the work of non-binary fashion designers and models, especially in the Global South, is one of reclaiming and reconstructing the ways in which clothing has historically been related to gender: an act of affirmation that signals to the community how we want to be perceived.

The phrase "clothes have no gender," which drives the reform of gender fluidity in contemporary fashion, really means that clothes do not have to reflect an individual's biology in a strict binary. A skirt is just a piece of fabric, and there is no historical, biological, or moral justification for restricting a particular garment to a particular body type.

But clothing is also a fundamental aspect of gende identrity, and we cannot simply erase the historical and cultural role it plays for all of us as humans in communicating and affirming our gender expression.

The trick is to understand that while clothes as objects have no gender, the way we style them expresses the workings of our inner selves, so they take on the meaning we give them. The difference then is to accept that gender and the clothes we associate with that gender construction are determined by us, never by someone else.


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