First up from London Fashion Week Men's is a Fall-Winter '19-'20 collection from Charles Jeffrey Loverboy. Jeffrey's clothing is usually boundary-pushing, playing with scale and shape, and mixing pieces for genders, but this fun, theatrical presentation inspired by the heady days of the Weimar Republic and the Lost Boys from PETER PAN showed Jeffrey playing with the idea of gender non-binary clothing. Like a recent meme states, "When you stop to think, all clothing is unisex if you'd stop being such a little b**ch about it."
Fashion journalist Sarah Mower reported on the theatrical presentation of the show: "Outside in the freezing cold there was a man with slicked-back hair intently playing an out of tune piano, while crackling braziers lit the audience’s way into a dilapidated power station. With his upswept black eye makeup and moth-riddled camel overcoat, he looked not unlike the impresario of Loverboy, Charles Jeffrey himself... There were crashed chandeliers, an Edwardian bathtub filled with torn-out book pages, a stack of old mattresses, a festooned dressing table like something out of Sally Bowles’s bedroom."
But it was not all loose-goosey and anything-for-a-reaction. Jeffrey presented some marvelously tailored looks, in a beautiful tartan (he did intern at Dior after all). His sheer pieces for men are really beautiful too...remember, all clothing is unisex. There is no reason a man cannot wear something sheer, and if you think a man can't, then really ask yourself why not, and understand that the cultural idea of gender is an artificial construct. Indeed, the underlying idea behind this show was the frightening unfairness of the world and the hard right turn the globe has taken. There was a reason Jeffrey chose Berlin in the 1920s as his backdrop: anyone who knows history will recall that Nazism destroyed the era and the country. And we are seeing the rise of such a tide again. Anyone with a head is worried, and Jeffrey poignantly added in his show notes Peter Pan’s instruction to the Lost Boys to “take care of everything that’s smaller than you.”
http://www.charlesjeffrey.net/
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