It was 1985, a whopping 37 years ago, that I first caught sight of a man walking down a catwalk in a skirt. Snapshots from Jean-Paul Gaultier’s wonderful Et Dieu crea l’homme collection had made their way onto the news pages of a copy of i-D magazine sat on my big brother’s bedroom floor. Even then, Gaultier resisted making a big deal of his man-skirt. The Roman Empire loved a robe. So do samurais. Why not the runway of a visionary Parisian iconoclast?
Why, in fact, not the wardrobe of a highly bankable screen actor almost four decades later, during an unprecedented heatwave? When asked about his appearance in a fetchingly distressed linen skirt during the European promo schlep for his summer blockbuster, Bullet Train, Brad Pitt said he appreciated the breeze. Come now. Pitt knows, as does every unfathomably handsome screen star sporting a skirt in public, that it will still cause a certain curtain-twitching ripple, as if generations haven’t moved on since JPG dressed models in his ingenious wraparounds.
Hollywood men in skirts is already a major trope for 2022. Ewan McGregor on the cover of GQ. Oscar Isaac cutting his reliably rugged dash in a Thom Browne pleated grey two-piece. Pete Davidson at The Met Gala. Kid Cudi on Saturday Night Live in a light summer frock. Now Brad. What’s to see here? All of these men look categorically fantastic in skirts. Next!
Are we still pretending men in skirts is a radical thing? Each time it happens there’s a rush of reactive excitement, as if some wild act of sartorial insurrection is upon us. It isn’t. It’s just another man in a skirt, like the Scots have done forever, like regional kids in nightclubs do every Saturday night and vicars do every Sunday, like the whole genderqueer movement has systematically deradicalised during the last decade.
The generation incubated on endless giddy international heats of RuPaul’s Drag Race has long since come of age. Bimini was guest of honour at the Kate Moss/Diet Coke launch. All this translates onto the high street. At this stage, I’d be more amazed if there wasn’t at least one man in a skirt on the busy 55 route every time I jump aboard a bus midway down Hackney Road.
For a man of Pitt’s immense stature, wealth and influence, there is a pleasing undercurrent to popping on a skirt while promoting a film about a luckless assassin. It’s a nod to the breakdown of strictly binary dress codes, rules which stifle and inhibit us all. The only surprise is that he wasn’t quicker off the mark. But it isn’t is new. What we are reacting to in Hollywood men wearing skirts is their adoption of something long since entrenched in menswear and reactivating it as gimmick.
Nothing could feel less 2022. After Gaultier sent men in skirts down the catwalk, he adopted the style for himself, encapsulating it into his signature wardrobe as seamlessly as his bleached hair and Breton stripes. A skirt is for life, not just for publicity.
In other news...
The sadness of the imminent demise of the Ausralian soap opera, Neighbours, is not about the loss of drama to the daytime TV schedule. It’s about the end of a sort of fame school employment scheme, a stardom farm which has thrown out from its punishing schedule a couple of Hemsworth brothers, one significant Minogue, Guy Pearce, Alan Dale, Russell Crowe and the luminescent talent of Margot Robbie, pictured.
Whenever I’ve interviewed a former Neighbours cast member they’ve got repeatedly dewy-eyed, misting over on the subject of their first break. Robbie attested to it, equipping her in the most ruthlessly effective tricks of her new trade.
She still learns her lines the way she learned back then. This week, her £12.5million fee for the forthcoming Barbie movie was leaked.
How many future stars are about to lose that valid avenue out of the slipstream of fame, directly into its centre when Neighbours goes?
