The article “Jaden Smith for Louis Vuitton: The New Man in a Skirt” by Vanessa Friedman, identifies the Louis Vuitton advertisement campaign as a step forward into a world of “forward thinking and millennial sensitive”.
This particular ad campaign resulted in controversy. It was something other brands hasn’t really taken a stance for yet in the past – not an ad promoting a man in transition, or a model as transgender, but rather a “man who happens to be wearing obviously female clothes”. People often identify men wearing women’s clothes as someone who is ‘gay’; but upon the release of this ad campaign, it questioned and revised our morals entirely, based on the beliefs our society has constructed on gender, since the rise of the clothing industry.
Socially, our ‘ideal’ representation of men were constructed based on the representation of their masculinity. The intention of this ad campaign is to ‘unmark’ what it means to be a man that society has embedded upon us – a considerable stepping stone in individuals’ expressive freedom. We are slowly entering the era of “wear what you like”. This largely relates to Fashion and Cultural Studies, by Susan Kaiser, as she talks about what it means to ‘unmark’ in the “context of gender relations through style-fashion-dress.
Conclusively, this article ‘sparked’ a thought in my head on why our society initially constructed gender through clothing in a uniformed way. “We want to understand what we are seeing, and we want those seeing it to understand what we are saying;” although, I don’t necessarily agree with it. There shouldn’t be a restriction on how we are allowed to dress, based on our sex or sexuality. Similarly to how women were not allowed to wear trousers in the early nineteenth hundred (but now we are), men should also now be able to wear skirts and dresses without raising questions externally.
