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Teo van den Broeke
8 August 2021
It’s important to note from the outset that I’m not tarring all cultures with the “men scared to wear open-bottomed garments” brush. Arabic men have worn breezy white kameez tunics as an antidote to the heat for centuries, while airy dhotis and lungis are worn by men across the subcontinent to this day.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the reason men in the West (in Britain specifically) don’t wear skirts and kilts as a matter of course is really down to the Victorians. An age of puritanical pedants with a penchant for all things sad and sober, the Victorian era saw a distinct diminishment in the use of colour in masculine clothing and plain trouser suits in black, grey, brown and blue became order of the, well, centuries now.
The truth is, however, that there is absolutely no legitimate reason – practical, social or otherwise – why men should not wear skirts on a regular, if not daily, basis. It’s a point that the great Scots knew well before the boring old English came along and ruined things. Indeed, to this day even the most masculine men who live above Hadrian’s Wall revel in the act of throwing on a kilt and it’s important to remember that it’s considerably colder up there than it is down here in balmy old Sasann.
Personally speaking, I’m slightly irritated that I don’t feel entirely free to wear a skirt. I’ve long envied my female friends who are able to sport floaty maxi dresses on hot holidays and don’t even get me started on muumuus – if I could wear a muumuu every day for the rest of my life, in seasonal-appropriate fabrics, of course (a cashmere muumuu for winter and something in silk for summer, perhaps), I absolutely would. But thanks to those long-lingering Victorian prejudices that permeate our trousers and shorts-dominated wardrobes, I just don’t feel like I can.
The good news is that a wide array of influential men in the fields of music, fashion, film and beyond have started flying the flag for men wearing skirts in a meaningful way. Kid Cudi wore a party frock in the style of the late, great Kurt Cobain for his turn on SNL earlier this year and Harry Styles was pictured wearing a Gucci dress on last December’s cover of American Vogue. More recently, A$AP Rocky sported a tartan kilt by Vivienne Westwood for his shoot with American GQ, while a host of nonbinary trailblazers, including Harris Reed, Tommy Dorfman and Ezra Miller, have been flying the skirt-wearing flag for years.
And the even better news is the aforementioned style mavens aren’t just stealing their garments from the women’s section of the store (though there’s nothing wrong with that; buy yourself a pair of women’s carpenter jeans from Arket and you can thank me later). A whole host of totally legitimate designers have started producing breezy skirts and dresses designed specifically with men in mind. From Gucci’s crimp-topped party frocks, which come imbued with a grungy appeal, to Westwood and Thom Browne’s classic kilts and the forthcoming mini-skorts shown as part of Raf Simons and Miuccia’s second outing for Prada, there’s quite literally something for every leg type.
Listen, I’m not saying that it’ll be easy or that you won’t get some troglodyte commenting that you should have done a better job of shaving your legs if you do decide to go full skirt down the pub, but the benefits have got to be worth it. Just think of the freedom – and the breeze. If you do it, I’ll do it. G’wan! It’s exactly what those pesky Victorians wouldn’t have wanted. And if you can’t take my word for it, then listen to global style deity Harry Styles instead. Because if not him, then who?
“When you take away ‘There’s clothes for men and there’s clothes for women’, once you remove any barriers, obviously you open up the arena in which you can play,” Styles told Vogue in his cover interview last year. “It’s like anything – any time you’re putting barriers up in your own life, you’re just limiting yourself. There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes.”
It’s time to stop skirting the issue
Teo van den Broeke
8 August 2021
Now is the moment to bare more leg than ever before, says Teo van den Broeke, and he doesn’t mean short shorts...
Having delved deep into the annals (minds out of the gutter, please) of sartorial history over the many years I’ve worked in menswear, one issue I’ve long grappled with is just where the Western aversion to modern men wearing skirts, dresses and tunics really comes from.It’s important to note from the outset that I’m not tarring all cultures with the “men scared to wear open-bottomed garments” brush. Arabic men have worn breezy white kameez tunics as an antidote to the heat for centuries, while airy dhotis and lungis are worn by men across the subcontinent to this day.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the reason men in the West (in Britain specifically) don’t wear skirts and kilts as a matter of course is really down to the Victorians. An age of puritanical pedants with a penchant for all things sad and sober, the Victorian era saw a distinct diminishment in the use of colour in masculine clothing and plain trouser suits in black, grey, brown and blue became order of the, well, centuries now.
The truth is, however, that there is absolutely no legitimate reason – practical, social or otherwise – why men should not wear skirts on a regular, if not daily, basis. It’s a point that the great Scots knew well before the boring old English came along and ruined things. Indeed, to this day even the most masculine men who live above Hadrian’s Wall revel in the act of throwing on a kilt and it’s important to remember that it’s considerably colder up there than it is down here in balmy old Sasann.
Personally speaking, I’m slightly irritated that I don’t feel entirely free to wear a skirt. I’ve long envied my female friends who are able to sport floaty maxi dresses on hot holidays and don’t even get me started on muumuus – if I could wear a muumuu every day for the rest of my life, in seasonal-appropriate fabrics, of course (a cashmere muumuu for winter and something in silk for summer, perhaps), I absolutely would. But thanks to those long-lingering Victorian prejudices that permeate our trousers and shorts-dominated wardrobes, I just don’t feel like I can.
The good news is that a wide array of influential men in the fields of music, fashion, film and beyond have started flying the flag for men wearing skirts in a meaningful way. Kid Cudi wore a party frock in the style of the late, great Kurt Cobain for his turn on SNL earlier this year and Harry Styles was pictured wearing a Gucci dress on last December’s cover of American Vogue. More recently, A$AP Rocky sported a tartan kilt by Vivienne Westwood for his shoot with American GQ, while a host of nonbinary trailblazers, including Harris Reed, Tommy Dorfman and Ezra Miller, have been flying the skirt-wearing flag for years.
And the even better news is the aforementioned style mavens aren’t just stealing their garments from the women’s section of the store (though there’s nothing wrong with that; buy yourself a pair of women’s carpenter jeans from Arket and you can thank me later). A whole host of totally legitimate designers have started producing breezy skirts and dresses designed specifically with men in mind. From Gucci’s crimp-topped party frocks, which come imbued with a grungy appeal, to Westwood and Thom Browne’s classic kilts and the forthcoming mini-skorts shown as part of Raf Simons and Miuccia’s second outing for Prada, there’s quite literally something for every leg type.
Listen, I’m not saying that it’ll be easy or that you won’t get some troglodyte commenting that you should have done a better job of shaving your legs if you do decide to go full skirt down the pub, but the benefits have got to be worth it. Just think of the freedom – and the breeze. If you do it, I’ll do it. G’wan! It’s exactly what those pesky Victorians wouldn’t have wanted. And if you can’t take my word for it, then listen to global style deity Harry Styles instead. Because if not him, then who?
“When you take away ‘There’s clothes for men and there’s clothes for women’, once you remove any barriers, obviously you open up the arena in which you can play,” Styles told Vogue in his cover interview last year. “It’s like anything – any time you’re putting barriers up in your own life, you’re just limiting yourself. There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes.”
