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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2402 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 21, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Have any female articles of clothing been masculinized recently?

For example, the vast majority of people around me wearing what used to be hypermasculine clothing like double riders, sheepskin bomber jackets and trench coats are women. However, I can't think of an article of clothing that has crossed the gender line in the opposite direction. Or am I selectively blind? I can only think of jewelry.

I saw a """unisex""" over the shoulder handbag at a Costco last week. Some people would call that a purse. As humorously discussed in the movie The Hangover in which one guy pretends his purse is a "man bag" and another guy with the same purse calls him a "gay boy" and says it is a purse.

The virgin man bag fan versus the chad openly gay purse enjoyer.

For some reason, it only seems to go one way. I've also noticed that boy names often become sex neutral but don't know of a single example of this happening to a girl name.

Tight pants, painted nails, and short shorts.

short shorts

I don't like the look of shorter sorts of shorts on men. But, it's ridiculous that we pretend they aren't functional proper shorts. Men's shorts used to be really short. It wasn't a woman thing pre-1990s or so.

I'd say bring them back. Don't let women take functional clothing from us.

I used to have a pair of satin short shorts with a side slit in the mid 90s.

It's not clear to me that tight pants are a female article of clothing. Men just used to walk around in leggings all the time.

This is just what peak male performance looks like. Those high heels are actually cavalry combat shoes.

Don't get me started on those garters.

True, but then one arguably runs into the same thing with most items of ‘female’ clothing that could be ‘masculinized’.

Short shorts are a bit tricky. They could just as easily be a return to masculine styles of the 1970s and earlier, rather than a feminization of modern clothing.

So I'd say the depths of the Great Male Renunciation probably hit around 2004 when I was a teenager. We were actually laughing about the things that would get you labeled gay when we were 14-16. Not exactly articles of clothing that were strictly feminine, but that around 2004 were strictly feminine or gay but have come back around:

-- Skinny jeans. Guys in local emo bands used to literally buy girls jeans.

-- Scarves. You could not wear a scarf without being called a fag.

-- Coats that are below hip length. Being cold is gay.

-- Pink.

It's not pink, it's lightish-red.

I haven't seen this for twenty years and I knew what it was from without clicking on it. What a blast from the past.

Pink.

Excuse me, it's "salmon"

Dyed hair, painted nails, and cardigans? According to the TikTok via GQ, crop tops (but all the examples look terrible)

It seems like a man wearing clothing associated with women is a much stronger signal of sexual preference/identity than the inverse, creating a stronger barrier for men who aren't actively trying to signal that.

Painted nails? Must be different in the US, I don't see more men with painted nails than I see women. Actually, I barely see them these days.

To within roundoff error 0.0% of American men have painted nails.

Crop tops? Surely only gay men are likely to wear those? While they're still men, I would imagine that's not quite what OP had in mind.

One football athlete in high school wore them occasionally and never in class. But that was some sort of flex where he was showing off his cut abs.

I've also seen it on heterosexual men who identify as queer/non-binary to bang rainbow-haired wokescolds.

deleted

It's also a weird body builder thing you see on occasion in the gym. I'm not quite sure why.

As muscle mass increases, the probability of finding off the rack clothes that fit approaches zero.

To work around it, you buy oversized and cut down. Unfortunately, if you're spending that much time lifting, you don't learn much about tailoring. The end result is that you cut to a length that "looks right", but you forget that the fabric will pull up after you cut the hem and it ends up too short.

Maybe something to do with them being gay?

(Only half a joke)

Something, something rising pants waists: "Hamza Abou Ammo first got the idea for cropping his T-shirts from his wife, who had been doing it herself from a young age." (https://www.gq.com/story/male-crop-top-tiktok-trend) Every time TikTok trends make their way into my field of view, I find myself confused.

That... wasn't what I expected. I expected something that would leave a conspicuous gap between the hem and the belt, not a tshirt that is a bit too short to tuck in.

Tiktok is banned in India.

While I'm against restrictions on freedom of expression, I still sighed in relief.

I own a cardigan. Basically clothes like cardigans amd leather jackets can be used to soften or harden an outfit.

Feminine women wearing a leather jacket over a dress doesnt have anyone bat an eyelid. Conversely i dont get strange looks with the cardigan due to the rest of my appearence (an behaviour) being very masculine.

Maybe its an example of people showing what they can get away with like that fad for pretty girls ro dye their hair grey.

It seems like there's been a bit of a grandpa core trend going lately. I first noticed it when a couple years ago most of the baby clothes (for both sexes) were suddenly little grey cardigans with low saturation knit pants. Then the women's sections were selling waistcoats with their softly tinted cable cardigans. And the Swift song, of course. Coatigans are apparently still on offer (eg https://www.lemaire.fr/products/felted-cardi-coat-dark-mustard-fall-winter)

Personally, I've been enjoying the recent iterations on knitwear (I am a woman, but the textiles on the sweaters and even low cost t-shirts my husband buys have shifted noticeably lately). I buy a lot of stuff from Uniqlo, which has been advertising its "3-D Knit" manufacturing process over the past couple of years, and I do like some of the results, especially the edges, and the way it handles transitions between different stitches. It looks like I am not imagining things, there are articles about a technological movement away from knitting then sewing bolts of fabric, towards machines that knit in the round and waste less thread, apparently starting in 1999, as well as need less labor to piece together. Looking at the (fairly inexpensive) sweater I'm wearing, all the seams are completely flat and the rows line up perfectly, and there aren't very many of them (no shoulder seam or side seam, for instance).

I dont really have anything to add to this except I'm also a huge fan of Uniqlo. Just amazing at wardrobe basics and staples of high quality for a reasonable price.

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