Posted by
Gene on Monday, June 30, 2008 12:50:16 PM
Just coincidence, I’m sure, but as worldwide “Gay Pride Week” was in progress, European clothing designers were revealing a new fillip—well, relatively new—to their collection for men: androgynous.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080629/ap_on_re_eu/france_fashion
By JOELLE DIDERICH, Associated Press Writer Sun Jun 29, 3:41 PM ET
PARIS - The French menswear collections ended on Sunday in a sea of sequins, silk and all things pink, challenging the adage that boys will be boys.
Fine fabrics like silk, gazar and crepe de Chine crept into the male wardrobe for spring-summer 2009 as Paris designers increasingly blurred gender boundaries…
A black silk puff-sleeved blouse was worn over a T-shirt encrusted with black beads, while accessories included lace-up sandals and crinkly straw hats laden with thick ribbons.
It's clothes you want to have, clothes you want to keep," [designer Lucas] Ossendrijver told the AP.
Even at Paul Smith, the British label famed for providing classics-with-a-twist, the model who opened the show was strikingly androgynous, his silky hair flowing well past shoulder length.”
Now, I don’t offer myself as a couturier (which, I believe, only refers to an expert in the design of women’s clothing anyway) and I’m not ashamed to concede that I haven’t the foggiest notion of what gazar and crepe de Chine mean, but I do know what sequins, pink, puff-sleeved blouses, and beads are. They’re the accoutrements of the fair sex, not of males. And, as for being parts of “clothes you want to keep,” I could see that but only if I were the producer of The Boys in the Band.
Another article, http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080629200339.bztl1xwu&show_article=1, reported on the Paris “show:”
“At YSL, [shorthand for Yves Saint Laurent, for my fellow fashion dunces] designer Stefano Pilati used quotations from Plato to explain why he combined female detailing with a masculine silhouette.
"The original human nature was not like the present ... the sexes were not two as they are now."
‘Pilati underscored the union of genders with a line for men made in fabrics normally worn by women -- crepe de chine, organza, shantung and silk voile, all fabrics which float rather than fall.’ “
Now, again, organza, shantung, and silk voile are also words that are foreign to me, in part because they are foreign, but I do know something about Plato, that brilliant philosopher of 2500 years ago, student of Socrates, mentor to Aristotle at the Greek “Academy,” and I know something of the Greek—and subsequent Roman—culture of the time when males were considered far superior beings to females. I also know they pleasured one another and/or defenseless and vulnerable young boys sexually since it was the thing to do, so to speak. . .
(For the rest of this article, please see http://genelalor.com/)