Thursday, June 24, 2010

"“Women are looking very young. Imagine if a man is married to a 65-year-old who is platinum blonde, with huge lips and high heels — what are you going to wear as a man next to her when you go out? Can you still wear that black suit?” he said. “It’s the same woman you’ve been married to for forty-five years, but now she wants to look like her daughter. So how do you dress as a man? Do you want to look like her grandfather?” --Alber Elbaz in a NYT story today on the prolific gender bending on men's SS11 runways (shows for which just wrapped in Milan and kicked off in Paris yesterday).

I love that the quote above raises great points about the drastic changes we're seeing in both men's and women's wear. This relatively newfound interest men's wear has in the other gender (which I too wrote about yesterday) can't be talked about without touching on the new trend of the 'retrosexual.' The latter is best described as an averse reaction to 'metrosexual' that includes mustaches, flannel and other classical masculine touches by way of suspenders, bowties or frequenting old school barber shops (which are likewise sprouting up by the dozen). Want more proof that men are moving toward the Paul Bunyan look en masse? Gilt Man is selling ax slings. After all, today's fashion savvy male consumer not only shops flash sample sales in his spare time, he gets off on chopping wood.

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Alisa Gould-Simon is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn.