BEAUTY: Clothing--Edward Crutchley

At London Fashion Week, Edward Crutchley presented another men's and women's collection but with some of the most blurred gender lines in his work yet. For this Fall-Winter '22-'23 collection, models strode out into a subterranean cement nightclub to The Sisters of Mercy singing "This Corrosion," clearly setting the mood of the show in the Goth 80s. Of the show, marvelously astute fashion journalist Luke Leitch at Vogue noted, "this [collection] was a celebration of fabulous otherness in multiple forms that came finely garlanded with garments that harked in part back to a decade where a virus left the gay community both mortally at risk and subject to demonization. The addition of goth—an aesthetic that comes loaded with self-declared societal marginalization—added an extra layer of angst."

Crutchley is an expert in fabric, having previously worked with Kim Jones at both Dior and Louis Vuitton before that...in fact, in addition to his eponymous label he also carries the title Director of Fabric for Dior Men. So it is no surprise that he uses sumptuous materials, expressed here with amazingly fine knits, purple and pink crushed velvet, Lurex, and bouclé. But the forward part of the collection certainly comes from the pieces on men that are traditionally seen as more "feminine." Of course, despite historically rigid gender lines, there really is no such thing as "men's" or "women's" clothing. If I own a sheath dress and wear it, then it is a piece of men's clothing because I am a man. It's mine. And I can't help but think that if those rigid gender lines did not exist, if the definition of what it is to be a man, of what it is to look like a man, if what is allowed to be associated with men could be more inclusive, there would be room for gender non-conforming people to express themselves. Imagine if the paradigm of what a man is ran from A to Z instead of A to C,...then someone could wear a piece of clothing that is perceived now as feminine but proudly claim to be a man because that expression would be included in being a man. Maybe the work of designers like Crutchley and others are advancing us toward a better, less restrictive future.

http://www.edwardcrutchley.com/