https://twitter.com/dieworkwear/status/1801768302718685380
It’s always interesting to me to see how the semiotics of clothing design changes over time. About ten years ago, Haider Ackermann helped popularize this hoodie silhouette: cropped body, elongated sleeves, and dropped shoulder seams. It was VERY oversized.
Ackermann is a Columbian-born gay designer who was adopted by French parents when he was a child. Although he’s not very outspoken on political issues, his shows have been described as gender-fluid.
For example, in 2019, he marched models down the runway in teams of two and three to show how men and women could wear his clothes, as they were cut in similar silhouettes. This is a write-up from Vogue at the time:
On Twitter, gendered fashion is often coded in cartoony terms: men in power suits and women in sundresses. But in reality, things are more nuanced. Cut, color, and fabric can come into play. Many will remember that cropped hoodies used to be considered a feminine silhouette.
To understand the change, we should go back to 2011. Coming off the success of his album MBDTF, Kanye wanted to make strides in the fashion world. He set up an atelier in London and debuted his first collection at Paris Fashion Week.
However, his first real breakthrough came in 2015 when he collaborated with Adidas to create a line called Yeezy. This was a full fashion line, not just shoes or a capsule collection. It was a full line. Seasons one and two of this line were a huge hit.
Those with a keen eye will have noticed that many of the silhouettes were influenced by Ackermann (oversized, cropped body with dropped shoulder seams and elongated sleeves). The color palette was also influenced by Robert Geller, who played with similar silhouettes in his line:
This was obvious because a few years earlier, Kanye and Kim were often seen wearing Ackermann’s creations. Notice the similarity in silhouettes here. The change in how we read gender is starting to take place.
No one really reads “cropped sweat with dropped shoulder seams” as a feminine silhouette anymore. It’s more of a “streetwear silhouette.” The recasting happened sometime around 2015-2017 when young men copied whatever Kanye wore.
Anything that could have been considered challenging or edgy in 2014 was almost entirely lost a few years later, as it had become a total hypebeast thing (a derogatory term for men who chase hype in fashion). These are photos from Ackermann’s 2014 men’s collection:
Today, ten years after that show debuted, Nick Fuentes is at the Turning Point’s Peoples Convention wearing … a cropped hoodie with dropped shoulder seams and elongated sleeves.
Wearing a cropped hoodie does not make you gay, straight, masculine, or feminine. I’m simply telling a story about how what was once considered a feminine silhouette has now been recoded. And how it’s now worn by someone who laments the “normalization of homosexuality.”
The story is not too dissimilar from how the tight jeans that Hedi Slimane helped reintroduce to men’s fashion in the early 2000s, first as a way to celebrate androgyny, are now being worn by people who lament the lack of stronger gender distinctions in Western society.
Of course, the story of how gender in clothing is expressed in complex and changing ways stretches back hundreds of years. There is nothing new here. I only find the loss of memory to be interesting.
