Fashion’s Gender Divide Is Costing It Customers, Creativity and Growth
Recently I came across an advertisement for a beautiful red-and-navy checked skirt: pleated, asymmetric, fastened with buckles and unmistakably indebted to the kilt, a garment whose history makes our contemporary insistence that skirts are inherently female seem particularly strange. “Meet the skirt you will wear all autumn,” the advert announced. I quietly thought to myself, “possibly, except the you in the statement clearly meant a woman”. It will be no surprise to anyone who has read my other articles that as a man, I wear skirts, and I might have bought this one, yet before I had even been given the opportunity to decide whether I wanted the garment, fashion retail had already made a fundamental assumption and by extension mistake about whether the garment was for me. Nobody was preventing me from buying it, and the retailer would undoubtedly have taken my money, but there is a considerable difference between being permitted to buy something and being recognised as one of its potential customers.
This article isn’t really about men wearing skirts, but that this small encounter captures a much larger contradiction in fashion. The runway has spent years dismantling the boundaries between menswear and womenswear by putting skirts, dresses, heels and traditionally feminine silhouettes on male bodies. In parallel, internet culture distributes those images instantly and consumers construct personal style from references that increasingly move across the old categories, while retail still begins the shopping experience with exactly the same question:
Are you a man or a woman?
For an industry searching for growth, that isn’t merely culturally dated, it may be commercially very, very expensive as fashion actually has a discovery problem since gender categories don’t simply describe clothes; they determine which clothes customers are likely to encounter, which means they can shape demand before the customer has had any opportunity to express a preference. The asymmetry is particularly obvious in menswear, because women can buy trousers, suits, shirts, brogues and almost every other garment historically associated with men without leaving womenswear, while mainstream menswear has not expanded in the opposite direction and skirts and dresses remain largely absent. In a physical shop, a man who might love a particular skirt may never encounter it because it is twenty metres away in a department labelled women; online, the exclusion can be even more complete, because the moment he clicks men, much of the retailer’s inventory simply disappears and he never sees it.
The resulting sales data for the brand can then reinforce the very structural assumption that created it: skirts are classified as womenswear, so men rarely encounter them, men therefore rarely buy them, and their failure to buy them becomes evidence that men don’t want skirts. Perhaps most men don’t, but that isn’t the point here. The lesson for fashion is that you cannot reliably distinguish lack of interest from lack of exposure when you control the exposure.
I recently found myself browsing a mainstream collection of maxi dresses and realised that I would happily wear several of them, including long tunic silhouettes, high necks, tailoring, substantial fabrics, belts and pockets. These are garments that could look extraordinary on different bodies without changing a single design detail. The retailer had already created products I wanted and I was already a potential customer, yet nothing in the merchandising suggested that somebody like me formed part of the intended market. And that’s the problem commercially, because fashion may already have product-market fit in places where its own segmentation tells it none exists, and the missed sale may occur not because the product is wrong but because the customer and the product are never given a reasonable opportunity to meet.
From permission to preference
Fashion’s usual response to this is increasingly inadequate: men can wear skirts, men can wear dresses, women can shop menswear, and anyone is allowed to wear anything. But who is doing the allowing and why exactly it is even needed? A permission based structure still assumes the existence of a rule, because it accepts that the skirt fundamentally belongs to women and then grants a man permission to cross the boundary and wear it too. Fashion doesn’t need a more permissive version of that model, because the model itself is wrong. What it actually needs to do is simply replace permission with preference. The relevant question isn’t for example whether a man is allowed to wear a dress, or a woman a masculine suit, but whether this particular person wants this particular item, and a retailer does not need evidence that men or women collectively want them before it can recognise those who do as potential customers. Nor do masculine and feminine need to disappear, because they are rich aesthetic languages with enormous expressive value; the mistake is treating them as inevitable consequences of the customer’s sex rather than aesthetic choices available to the customer.
Imagine, for example, replacing the existing men and women categories with masculine, feminine and all. The visual difference is tiny, but the conceptual difference is enormous, because men and women classify the customer while masculine and feminine describe an aesthetic, and all allows the customer to decline the assumption altogether. Better still, make those optional filters within a catalogue organised primarily around garments, i.e. skirts, trousers, dresses, shirts, tailoring, knitwear and outerwear. It then allows customers to navigate by silhouette, fabric, length, colour, construction and aesthetic. Gender doesn’t need to disappear, rather it simply needs to stop functioning as a gate that bars the other half of the population by implication.
What if the binary is restricting design itself?
Broadening discovery could expose existing products to customers currently unlikely to encounter them, but there is a much more exciting possibility that is intriguing. What if dividing fashion into menswear and womenswear isn’t merely limiting who discovers the finished product, but limiting what gets designed in the first place? Imagine a dress in an exceptionally soft, fluid fabric, substantial enough to drape beautifully but light enough for an expansive A-line skirt to move as you walk, with a dramatically adjustable waist, large functional utility pockets, exposed two-way zips, adjustable tabs and substantial industrial hardware. Wear it loose with heavy boots and it becomes architectural and utilitarian; pull the waist tightly in and the proportions transform as the skirt explodes into volume; wear exactly the same garment with heels and its character changes again.
The immediate response from the current system is to ask what department does it belong in? It’s completely the wrong question. The first and most important question is do I want to wear it? Once designers stop beginning with the sex of the intended wearer, fashion’s vocabulary becomes much larger, because softness can meet utility, romantic volume can meet workwear, silk can meet industrial hardware, severe tailoring can open into extravagant pleating, and technical outerwear can borrow the movement and drama of eveningwear without any of those combinations first having to justify themselves as menswear or womenswear.
This doesn’t require fashion to become less masculine or less feminine; on the contrary, it gives designers permission , perhaps freedom is the better word to use more of both. That is why so much supposedly gender-neutral fashion feels like a missed opportunity, because removing gender restrictions shouldn’t require reducing clothing to oversized T-shirts, loose trousers and neutral-coloured sweatshirts until nobody could possibly object to wearing them. The objective here is NOT to neutralise the clothes, it is to liberate them.
Fashion may be designing out its own growth
I would buy the utility dress shown above, and that is a commercially interesting point. My own individual enthusiasm obviously doesn’t establish a market, but historical sales cannot measure my demand for a garment nobody has made, just as the absence of male/ female / non-binary or transgender customers for products hidden from them cannot conclusively demonstrate the absence of demand. Fashion executives spend enormous amounts of time discussing growth, customer acquisition, new markets, collaborations, personalisation and technology while continuing to accept a powerful constraint on product development: very early in the process, an idea generally has to become menswear or womenswear, dividing the creative vocabulary before it has been fully explored.
Removing that constraint creates two distinct opportunities: the first is market expansion, by showing existing products to customers currently unlikely to encounter them; the second is product creation, by making garments that the old division made less likely to exist in the first place. The second may ultimately be the more interesting opportunity, because fashion has always created demand partly by showing people something they didn’t know they wanted until they saw it, and its greatest products do not emerge from historical purchasing data alone but provoke the reaction on which the industry ultimately depends and is magical. That is, I’ve never seen anything quite like that. But I want it. For an industry concerned about growth, that suggests an uncomfortable but potentially lucrative question. How much demand is fashion failing to create because it has divided its own creative vocabulary in two?
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Preference is better data
I have become so disenchanted with mainstream menswear that I rarely even look at the men’s section of fashion websites anymore, not because I reject masculine clothing but because the category too often offers a narrower version of fashion than I find elsewhere. From a conventional segmentation perspective, that makes me an awkward customer: I am male, yet the part of the catalogue supposedly designed for me is often the part I find least interesting.
From a preference perspective, however, there is nothing awkward about me at all, because I like particular silhouettes, fabrics, proportions and details; I respond to skirts, dresses, movement, dramatic volume, cinched waists and interesting construction, and those preferences are considerably more useful to a retailer trying to predict what I might buy than the simple fact that I am male. Show me those things and I am more likely to engage; show me another assortment determined principally by my sex and I may not even open it.
When a customer stops browsing the department supposedly designed for him because another department contains the clothes he actually wants, the problem isn’t the customer. It’s the taxonomy.
This is particularly strange at a moment when retailers are investing heavily in personalisation, because if a retailer knows that I look at skirts, save dresses and repeatedly respond to particular silhouettes, those behaviours tell it something concrete about what I might buy next, whereas continuing to prioritise the fact that I am male risks discarding the richer information that my actual behaviour is providing. The logical endpoint of personalisation isn’t better demographic stereotyping, it is less need for demographic stereotyping. Don’t use identity to predict preference when preference itself is available.
Fit is not gender
A preference-led model cannot stop at merchandising, because simply putting an existing womenswear garment into an “Everyone” category accomplishes relatively little if many of the newly invited customers cannot find a size or proportion that works for them. That is a genuine problem, but it is fundamentally a fit problem rather than an argument for restricting discovery. Fashion currently asks gender categories to perform two quite different jobs, namely to describe an aesthetic and approximating a body shape; those functions could be separated, allowing garments to be offered in different fit blocks reflecting relationships between chest, waist, hips, shoulders and length, with useful measurements enabling customers to select according to their bodies rather than the department to which they have been assigned.
Adjustability could become part of the design vocabulary too, with belts, tabs, variable waists, two-way zips, modular construction and different lengths allowing a garment to accommodate different bodies while also creating different silhouettes. None of this is operationally trivial, because it requires serious work in pattern cutting, grading, manufacturing and inventory, but it addresses the actual engineering problem rather than using gender as a rough substitute for solving it.
It comes down to this. Bodies have dimensions and different shapes and garments have dimensions. They need to be matched with fit being an engineering problem, and the good news is that the technology now exists to do this.
AI shopping will accelerate the shift
Now imagine asking an AI shopping agent, “I want an autumn skirt, midi length and pleated, preferably check or tartan, with some weight and movement; kilt-inspired would be excellent, I don’t want to spend more than £200, and here are my measurements.”
A competent agent should search the available inventory and identify the best matches, and for that task the useful information is the garment’s dimensions, silhouette, fabric, construction, stretch, length, colour, hardware, fit and price. “Women” is remarkably poor product data by comparison and becomes actively unhelpful if it prevents an otherwise ideal product from being considered simply because the person asking for it happens to be male. AI shopping therefore arrives at exactly the same principle from a completely different direction, and what was mentioned previously. Preference.
The retailers best prepared for that world may be those whose inventories are richly described, accurately measured and searchable independently of legacy gender categories, because once a machine can understand what the customer actually wants, forcing every search through men or women begins to look less like useful merchandising and more like obsolete information architecture. Sustainability points in much the same direction, because an industry trying to extend garment life and increase utilisation should surely be interested in expanding the population able to discover, wear and eventually resell a product rather than unnecessarily narrowing it.
Give us the whole vocabulary
Fashion tells us that clothing is about individuality, experimentation and self-expression, yet much of its commercial structure still begins by reducing the customer to one of two categories and then deciding which portion of fashion that person is most likely to want. The opportunity here isn’t merely to make fashion more inclusive; it is to make fashion more interesting, while giving brands access to demand that their existing categories may be hiding and giving designers access to combinations their existing categories may be preventing them from imagining.
For merchandising, the question shifts from Who is this for? to Who might want this? For product development, it shifts from What should we make for men or women? to What extraordinary garment could we make, and how can we make it work on different bodies?
And for marketing, it moves beyond the faintly patronising proposition You are allowed to wear this towards something much more powerful, seductive and fundamentally fashion-like. Look at this. Do you want it? Some men will never want a skirt or a dress, while others will. Some women will love highly feminine clothing while others will prefer severe tailoring. Some people will move happily across the entire vocabulary, wearing a suit one day and a dramatically cinched A-line utility dress with heels the next. That variety isn’t a problem for fashion to solve, it is demand for fashion to serve. For an industry worried about growth, the proposition is remarkably simple.
Move from permission to preference.
Make extraordinary clothes, make them discoverable, and let people decide. Fashion supplies the vocabulary and the wearer writes the sentence.
