In the years to follow these events, Parisian couturier Jacques Esterel (1918 – 1974), née Charles Martin, launched a timely couture collection for men and women. The collection, which debuted in 1970, grasped these shifting gender ideals with pieces for women, matching his­ and­ hers outfits and unisexwear. A video of Esterel’s collection, ‘Alice 71 in Wonderland,’ aired on French television in February 1971.² It reflects a breakdown of the fashion system and the gender issues that resulted from the events; an exemplar that periods of crisis are not only foreshadowed by, but also directly result in, changes in systems of dress.

Prior to his career as a couturier, Esterel was trained as an engineer before becoming a composer and singer. His previous career as an entertainer may explain why many critics called him ‘the court jester’ of the Paris couture.³ Never one to shy away from attention, Esterel decided to shave the heads of his models for his July 1964 collection: in his opinion, women were ‘imprisoned by their own hair.’⁴ Whether or not this was purely for publicity, Esterel was exploring gender in the presentation of his collections long before launching his unisex couture. In 1970, six years after Esterel announced he was freeing women from the shackles of their own hair, an article in French Elle discussed the opening of a ‘monosex’ hair salon in Paris:

Why persist in segregating men and women? You must admit that men and women can dress in the same manner. Even their bodies have undergone a transformation: women are more muscular and men are less beefy. We are taking part in a kind of physiological erosion.

– Elle France, September 1970.

In the opening sequence of ‘Alice 71 in Wonderland,’ a male and a female model walk in from a garden holding hands as large French doors open. The male model is dressed in a floor­-length yellow silk kaftan. Esterel narrates over the video: ‘If I am attempting to dress men not as women, but rather put men in dresses, it does not mean that they have to, but that they can if they want to. It is just another door towards freedom.’⁵ Alice is represented by the French actress Brigitte Fossey, an attractive blonde who serves to reassure men that if they wish to dress like women, their virility will not suffer as a result.

Virility is a topic that also appears in the aforementioned issue of French Elle in an article about the new male dandies, accompanied by photographs of well­-known male actors and musicians wearing ‘feminine’ dress. Tellingly, these gestures of reassurance reinforce traits attached to gender, and as a result, weaken the idea of uniting the sexes. As philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky writes, ‘the progressive, undeniable tendency toward the reduction of extremes does not culminate in the unification of appearances, but in a subtle differentiation, something like the minimal distinctive opposition between the sexes.’⁶ In fact, it could be argued that unisex clothing and the prevalence of ‘gender neutral’ clothing has been more successful in eliminating social class through the concurrent rise of ready­-to­-wear, than it ultimately has been in redefining gender binaries.

Lewis Carroll’s Alice continues to be a popular and symbolic character because of her malleability; researcher Kiera Vaclavik writes that she is ‘something of a blank canvas, able to absorb a huge range and combination of emphases and directions… she continues to multiply in a constant stream of new editions and interpretations.’⁷ Her adaptability as a subject, and one that has often been associated with the psychedelic and hippie movement of the 1960s,  translates naturally as an emblem for the gender crisis and the message of freedom that Esterel emphasises. In an article, ‘Weekend in Alice’s Wonderland,’ that appeared in the May 1969 issue of The Journal of Sex Research, author Hugo Beigel uses Alice to tell the story of the desperate and unhappy life of a transvestite: ‘Alice invited us to visit her wonderland… She performs in night clubs. But after her last fandango, when she takes off wig and costume she is a man.’⁸

Esterel was not alone in his quest to create a more unified and genderless sense of dress. Other designers that also explored unisex fashion in the 1960s include Marimekko, Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Cardin. In 1969, Esquire magazine featured an editorial of a man and a woman dressed identically. The accompanying text likened unisex kaftans to Roman togas citing art historian James Laver’s publication Modesty in Dress.⁹ In his book, published the same year, Laver concluded by predicting unisex clothes as the future of dress.¹⁰ Unisex dressing represented a utopian ideal and universal equality.

The designer Rudi Gernreich, who also made a foray into unisex clothing in 1970, proposed that, ‘clothing will not be identified as either male or female… women and men will wear skirts interchangeably.’¹¹ He made unisex swimsuits and kaftans, and like the models of Esterel’s collection in the early 1960s, used models with shaved heads. However, unlike Esterel, Gernreich’s choice of models, as well as his use of synthetic fabrics, was far more aggressive. Esterel’s approach was gentle: he emphasises the point that if a man wants to wear a dress he should not feel uncomfortable doing so. Lipovetsky noted that gender crisis has often gone hand­-in­-hand with mass production and economical dressing; Esterel may not have been unique in his unisex collection, but he was unique in that it was not ready­-to­-wear, but unisex couture.¹²

Though it is unclear how the fashion press reacted to Esterel’s collection, he was a member of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, and any controversy surrounding it was not mentioned in the major fashion publications of the era. Esterel is only mentioned briefly in the French Journal de L’annee in the article ‘A Dress for Him, too,’ which notes his collection as a success, and that the dresses for men were rapidly snatched up by specialty stores.¹³ It begs the question: did men buy his couture dresses?

Considering the relative lack of writing on Esterel’s collections at the time, we can only speculate about what the feminist press, such as the magazine Ms., might have thought about his collection. In an article about the end of couture in the May 1973 issue of Esquire, journalist Patricia Bosworth interviewed the editor of Ms., Mary Peacock, who said, ‘high fashion is dead because women don’t need to use clothes for seduction purposes anymore. Clothes are simple now, more utilitarian.’¹⁴ If Peacock was more in favour of utilitarian clothing, Esterel’s couture collection did not fit into this ideal. The women who appear in ‘Alice 71’ still adhere to classical ideals of feminine beauty in clothing that is far from utilitarian. It is true that the collection has more fluidity, and is less stiff and freer in movement: the models do not appear to be wearing any understructure and their bodies look soft. Esterel may have considered himself anti­-establishment, but he still had a foot in the old fashion system – the key distinction is that he was making couture for men.

Fashion scholar Elizabeth Wilson has argued that the rise of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century sought a new definition of morality that led to more structured gender roles and dress. Both men and women in the 1960s were criticised for drifting from these social norms in regards to gender. Men’s attire (such as the trend for long hair and tight trousers) raised the question of masculinity, while womenswear abandoned an ultra-­feminine silhouette for short hair and trousers.¹⁵ Rebecca Arnold has argued that unisex fashion often appears at times of crisis and uncertainty in the twentieth century, in ‘periods when solace has been sought through this denial of difference.’¹⁶

Jacques Esteral and his contemporaries saw the blurring of the aesthetics of gender as a remedy and a hope for the future in both fashion and society in the wake of the 1968 events in Paris. Though recent media coverage on gender links unisex clothing with a shifting fashion system, in 1971 Esterel fundamentally questioned the tradition of haute couture with his monosex couture for men that erred on feminine, upturning the fundamental notions of femininity embedded in haute couture, and in the fashion system at large.

Ilene Hacker is a New York-based fashion researcher.

1. Arnold, R 2001, Fashion, Desire, and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the 20th Century, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, p.101. ↩

2. Poitou, R 1971, ‘Mode Unisexe de Jacques Esterel’ (video), accessed February 11, 2016, http://www.ina.fr/video/I10357955 ↩

3. McDowell, C 2000, Jean Paul Gaultier, p.38. ↩

4. Emerson, G 1964, ‘Esterel to Shave Models’ Heads For Fall Show,’ New York Times, Accessed March 1, 2016, http://libproxy.fitsuny.edu:2074/docview/115583424?accountid=27253 ↩

5. ‘Alice 71 in Wonderland,’ video ↩

6. Lipovetsky, G 1994, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, p.109. ↩

7. Vacklavick, K 2015, ‘Alice in Wonderland: The making of a style icon,’ The Independent, Accessed March 16, 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts­entertainment/books/features/alice­in­wonderland­the­making­of­a­style­icon­10 128741.html ↩

8. Beigel, HG 1969, ‘A Weekend in Alice’s Wonderland,’ The Journal of Sex Research, Vol 5, No. 2, Accessed March 16, 2016, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3811601 ↩

9. Stevenson T 1969, ‘Return to the time of the Toga,’ Esquire, Accessed March 30, 2016 http://archive.esquire.com/issue/19690801/#!&pid=116 ↩

10. Laver, J 1969, Modesty in Dress; An Inquiry into the Fundamentals of Fashion, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, p.181. ↩

11. Moffitt, P and Claxton, C 1991, The Rudi Gernreich Book, New York: Rizzoli, p.182. ↩

12. Arnold, R, p.119. ↩

13. 1969, ‘A Dress for Him, Too,’ Journal de l’annee, Accessed March 16, 2016, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1200567j ↩

14. Bosworth, P 1973, ‘Who killed high fashion?’, Esquire, Accessed March 20, 2016, http://archive.esquire.com/issue/19730501/#!&pid=124 ↩

15. Evans, SM 2009, ‘Sons, Daughters, and Patriarchy: Gender and the 1968 Generation,’ The American Historical Review, Vol. 114, No. 2, Accessed March 30, 2016, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30223782. ↩

16. Arnold, R, p.118. ↩

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Further Reading:

But no matter how similar the clothes of men and women may appear, or how different, the arrangements of each are always being made with respect to the other. Male and female clothing, taken together, illustrates what people wish the relation between mend and women to be, beside indicating the separate peace each sex is making with fashion or custom at any given time. Without looking at what men are wearing, it’s impossible to understand women’s clothes, and vice versa. The history of dress, including its current history, so far has to be perceived as a duet for men and women performing on the same stage. There may come a time when sexuality is not visualized in clothing as rightly divided into two main categories; but so far it still is.

Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits, 1994.

The line of demarcation between the dress of women, priests and servants, on the one hand, and of men, on the other hand, is not always consistently observed in practice, but it will scarcely be disputed that it is always present in a more or less definite way in the popular habits of thought. There are of course free men, and not a few of them, who, in their blind zeal for faultless reputable attire, transgress the theoretical line between man’s and woman’s dress, to the extent of arraying themselves in apparel that is obviously designed to vex the moral frame; but everyone recognises without hesitation that such apparel for men is a departure from the normal. We are in the habit of saying that such dress if ‘effeminate’; and one sometimes hears the remark that such or such an exquisitely attired gentleman is as well dressed as a footman.

Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899.

“Anytime I do a men’s show, I’m thinking this would be fantastic for women—or at least for me. And more and more, it feels instinctively right to translate the same idea for both genders.”

Miuccia Prada on her spring/summer 2015 menswear collection.

A hard-wearing cotton twill fabric, typically blue and used for jeans and other clothing. From late 17th century (as serge denim): from French serge de Nîmes, denoting a kind of serge from the town of Nîmes.

Oxford English Dictionary

JEANS ARE ONE OF the most powerful clothing icons of the twentieth-century. Famously named after the French town of Nîmes where the characteristic twill that forms the denim fabric originated, the etymological origin of the word is surprisingly literal: the simplification of the phrasing ‘de Nîmes’ into a single noun.

From their European origins, denim was adopted into American culture as a fabric ideal for workwear. During depression-era America, images of sharecroppers and farm workers in denim (like those by Walker Evans in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men from 1941) linked the fabric with the image of the ‘every man’. This symbolism was revived in later years with the rebellion of youth culture during the 1950s: the image of James Dean in a white T-shirt and jeans, for instance, is now embedded in the American iconography. Later, during the 1980s, Bruce Springsteen capitalised on this potential with his ‘Born in the USA’ tour and album. The cover (and the clothes he wore on stage for the tour) depict the singer, blue-jean clad, against the backdrop of the American flag, the blue of the denim fabric echoing that of the stars and stripes.

Today jeans have the capacity to connect to almost everyone, traversing the fashion industry from mass production to high-end. But for all the incarnations, a pair of jeans still bears most of the key features that distinguish them from just any pair of trousers: the twill fabric, the top-stitching, waistband, rivets, fly and belt loops. This makes them not only pervasive, but also singular as a powerful clothing archetype.

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Further Reading:

SUSAN: You know, I really like those new jeans Jerry was wearing. He’s really thin.

GEORGE: Not as thin as you think.

SUSAN: Why? He’s a 31. I saw the tag on the back.

GEORGE: The tag, huh?

SUSAN: Mmm-hmm.

GEORGE: Let me tell you something about that tag. It’s no 31, and uh… let’s just leave it at that.

SUSAN: What are you talking about?

GEORGE: He scratches off a 32 and he puts in 31.

SUSAN: Oh, how could he be so vain?

GEORGE: Well, this is the Jerry Seinfeld that only I know. I can’t believe I just told you that.

Seinfeld, episode 119, ‘The Sponge’, aired December 7, 1995 on NBC

A few weeks ago, Luca Goldoni wrote an amusing report from the Adriatic coast about the mishaps of those who wear blue jeans for reasons of fashion, and no longer know how to sit down or arrange the external reproductive apparatus. I believe the problem broached by Goldoni is rich in philosophical reflections, which I would like to pursue on my own and with the maximum seriousness, because no everyday experience is too base for the thinking man, and it is time to make philosophy proceed, not only on its own two feet, but also with its own loins.

I began wearing blue jeans in the days when very few people did, but always on vacation. I found—and still find—them very comfortable, especially when I travel, because there are no problems of creases, tearing, spots. Today they are worn also for looks, but primarily they are very utilitarian. It’s only in the past few years that I’ve had to renounce this pleasure because I’ve put on weight. True, if you search thoroughly you can find an extra large (Macy’s could fit even Oliver Hardy with blue jeans), but they are large not only around the waist, but also around the legs, and they are not a pretty sight.

Recently, cutting down on drink, I shed the number of pounds necessary for me to try again some almost normal jeans. I under-went the calvary described by Luca Goldoni, as the saleswoman said, “Pull it tight, it’ll stretch a bit”; and I emerged, not having to suck in my belly (I refuse to accept such compromises). And so, after a long time, I was enjoying the sensation of wearing pants that, instead of clutching the waist, held the hips, because it is a characteristic of jeans to grip the lumbar sacral region and stay up thanks not to suspension but to adherence.

As a result, I lived in the knowledge that I had jeans on, whereas normally we live forgetting that we’re wearing undershorts or trousers. I lived for my jeans, and as a result I assumed the exterior behavior of one who wears jeans. In any case, I assumed a demeanor. It’s strange that the traditionally most informal and anti-etiquette garment should be the one that so strongly imposes an etiquette. As a rule I am boisterous, I sprawl in a chair, I slump wherever I please, with no claim to elegance: my blue jeans checked these actions, made me more polite and mature. I discussed it at length, especially with consultants of the opposite sex, from whom I learned what, for that matter, I had already suspected: that for women experiences of this kind are familiar because all their garments are conceived to impose a demeanor—high heels, girdles, brassieres, pantyhose, tight sweaters.

 

Umberto Eco ‘Lumbar Thought’, 1976, published in Faith in Fakes, Minerva, 1986.

 

Alright

Well my jeans they are a frayin’
And don’t talk Levi’s because I’ve tried
My hips they had no room to play in
and my little bum felt all trapped inside
There’s Levis all around
If there was Wranglers I would know
I’d turn the whole store upside down
and they don’t got Wranglers so let’s go
I said my jeans they are a frayin’
I said my jeans they are a frayin’ very bad

Uh oh

Why not Levis?
Why not Levis?
Cause they never seem to fit me
No matter what the size
Why not Levis?
Why not Levis?
Well the bum never fits, nor the hips nor the thighs
I said my jeans they are a frayin’
Oh my jeans they are a frayin’ real bad

This store’s got Wranglers in ’em
Even got size 31
28 bucks- now wait a minute
But these jeans they’re almost done
My jeans are nearly rags
My jeans are almost dead
And they’ve lost their little Wrangler tag
And you can see my knees right through the threads
I said my jeans oh they’re a frayin’
Oh my jeans they are a frayin’, real bad

Tell them

His jeans they are a frayin’ so bad, so bad.
Yeah you said it.
His jeans are frayin’ so bad, so bad.
What about it?
My jeans, My jeans.

Ok fellas.

Doo didoo doo doo di doo doo doo doo doop de doo de doo doo doo
doo doo de doo doo.

Jonathan Richman, ‘My Jeans’, 1985.

 

Try—I cannot write of it here—to imagine and to know, as against other garments, the difference of their feeling against your body; drawn-on, and bibbed on the whole belly and chest, naked from the kidneys up behind, save for broad crossed straps, and slung by these straps from the shoulders; the slanted pockets on each thigh, the deep square pockets on each buttock; the complex and slanted structure, on the chest, of the pockets shaped for pencils, rulers, and watches; the coldness of sweat when they are young, and their stiffness; their sweetness to the skin and pleasure of sweating when they are old; the thing metal buttons of the fly; the lifting aside of the straps and the deep slipping downward in defecation; the belt some men use with them to steady their middles; the swift, simple and inevitably supine gestures of dressing and of undressing, which, as is less true of any other garment, are those of harnessing and of unharnessing the shoulders of a tired and hard-used animal.

They are round as stovepipes in the legs (though some wives, told to, crease them).

In the strapping across the kidneys they again resemble work harness, and in their crossed straps and tin buttons.

And in the functional pocketing of their bib, a hardness modified to the convenience of a used animal of such high intelligence that he has use for tools.

And in their whole stature: full covering of the cloven strength of the legs and thighs and of the loins; then nakedness and harnessing behind, naked along the flanks; and in front, the short, squarely tapered, powerful towers of the belly and chest to above the nipples.

And on this facade, the cloven halls for the legs, the strong-seamed, structured opening for the genitals, the broad horizontal at the waist, the slant thigh pockets, the buttons at the point of each hip and on the breast, the geometric structures of the usages of the simpler trades–the complexed seams of utilitarian pockets which are so brightly picked out against darkness when the seam-threadings, double and triple stitched, are still white, so that a new suit of overalls has among its beauties those of a blueprint: and they are a map of a working man.

James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1941.

The designer’s story begins in the grim setting of pre-War Europe. Gernreich and his Jewish mother fled Vienna for California soon after the Nazis accessioned Austria in 1937. After a few short stints in Hollywood, such as his job sketching for famed costume designer Edith Head (much later he crafted delightful costumes for Otto Preminger’s awesomely bad musical Skidoo), he started producing designs for the fashion industry in 1950. Around this time, he became romantically involved with Harry Hay, a political activist often called the founder of the modern gay rights movement. During their three-year relationship, they co-founded the Mattachine Society, America’s first gay rights organisation. Gernreich’s participation in the group was brief but crucial; it lasted only a few years, and afterwards he never publicly acknowledged his homosexuality again. His co-founder and ex-partner Hay went in the other direction, going on to found the Radical Faeries, a ‘gay hippie’ group, in the 1970s, a group that continues to have active memberships internationally today.

Gernreich’s brief, but influential involvement in the history of the gay rights movement survives in a Mattachine notebook in the designer’s archive at UCLA in California. One particular page shows notes for a planned discussion about ‘camping’ – acting outrageous and effeminate. The tone of his questions is surprisingly circumspect for 1951, and reads: ‘Since we agree that camping is conscious homo [sic] expression, what then is unconscious homosexual behavior [?]’ and, ‘How can camping become an acceptable homosexual expression?’ After leaving the group (and Hay) in 1953, Gernreich never publicly acknowledged this or any association with gay rights again, although his work as a designer continued to embody ideas of radical thought and personal expression. When Gernreich’s topless bathing suit first appeared in 1964, the design was a succès de scandale, inspiring some 20,000 press articles in response. The design was created on the suggestion of Susanne Kirtland, editor at Look magazine, reading Gernreich’s pronouncements about the impending craze for ‘toplessness’. Kirtland contacted the designer in 1962 and asked him to make a topless suit, he demurred, fearing it would ruin his career. Kirtland’s response was, ‘Oh, but you’ve got to; I’ve already had clearance from the front office.’ Gernreich finally conceded, motivated by the fear that his competitor, Emilio Pucci, would make a topless suit first. Though the design was not a commercial success (only 3,000 copies of the suit sold), this single garment put Gernreich in the history books for its risqué and revealing nature. But this was not the statement the designer intended. For Gernreich, the gesture had roots in his European upbringing; the garment was progressive, and implicitly feminist: if men can go topless, why can’t women? In an essay for a touring retrospective of the designer’s work, ‘Fashion Will Go Out of Fashion’, author Elfriede Jelinek underscores the suit’s value, explaining that Gernreich ‘doesn’t do it to emphasise the nakedness of the top half of the woman’s body. Instead, in partially exposing this part of the body, he clothes it, but in a different way, and thus re-creates it.’ Despite this, the American media’s response was leering and thereafter Gernreich became associated with the ‘kookiness’ and ‘crazy’ styles of this revolutionary period of the mid-sixties, a cliché he never managed to escape.

In 1967, at the height of his fame, Gernreich shuttered his atelier, telling The New York Times that he was ‘exhausted’. He never mounted a major collection again but continued to offer dire predictions to the press. In 1970, Life magazine asked him to predict the future of fashion, Gernreich arranged for a pair of models to appear nude, and completely shaved, at a promotional event. He later explained, ‘What unisex means is that we are beyond pathology, and fashion is finished.’ The death of fashion became his great theme: ‘Fashion will go out of fashion,’ he told Forbes. To another interviewer, he said, ‘I’m not out to kill fashion. It’s already finished. The word has no meaning. It stands for all the wrong values. Snobbism, wealth, the select few. It’s antisocial. It isolates itself from the masses. Today you can’t be antisocial, so fashion is gone. Even the word has become a little embarrassing. Clothes. Gear. These are the words of today.’ These broadsides did little to aid the designer’s career, and were largely ignored by the fashion press.

Two years after his death in 1985, Peggy Moffitt, his muse and friend, gave an interview to the Fashion Institute of Technology that reveals the limitations of his activist approach for the designer. She explains that, ‘He liked the idea of being the prophet. It’s great to prophesise, but then you say, “Peggy, can we see the first piece?”… He loved being in the headlines. But he didn’t love making these clothes any more.” When examined more closely, Gernreich’s career has a profound implications beyond his ‘monokini’ design. He was an activist at heart, with progressive and controversial design statements that were often misunderstood by the press. What the industry wanted was the ‘kooky’ clothes so popular at the time; but what Gernreich had was an abundance of ideas. It’s interesting to speculate, fifty years after this radical – and misinterpreted – gesture of toplessness, whether he spent his final years wishing he had never made that bathing suit at all.

Alexander Joseph is a freelance writer and editor in fashion.