But their impact could be felt for a decade afterwards in “his-n-hers” clothing, promoted in cutesy ads, catalog spreads, and sewing patterns. department stores created special sections for unisex fashions, though most of them had closed by 1969.

As women burned their bras ( symbolically if not literally), U.S. The trend began on the Paris runways, where designers like Pierre Cardin, Andre Courreges, and Paco Rabanne conjured up an egalitarian “Space Age” of sleek, simple silhouettes, graphic patterns, and new, synthetic fabrics with no historical gender associations. The unisex clothing of the 1960s and 70s aspired “to blur or cross gender lines” ultimately, however, it delivered “uniformity with a masculine tilt,” and fashion’s brief flirtation with gender neutrality led to a “stylistic whiplash” of more obviously gendered clothing for women and children beginning in the 1980s.Īs far as the American fashion industry was concerned, the unisex movement came and largely went in one year: 1968. The term “gender” began to be used to describe the social and cultural aspects of biological sex in the 1950s-a tacit acknowledgement that one’s sex and one’s gender might not match up neatly. As Paoletti tells it, unisex clothing was a baby-boomer corrective to the rigid gender stereotyping of the 1950s, itself a reaction to the perplexing new roles imposed on men and women alike by World War II. In her new book Sex and Unisex: Fashion, Feminism, and the Sexual Revolution, the University of Maryland professor Jo Paoletti revisits the unisex trend, a pillar of second-wave feminism whose influence still resonates today. In an era when gender norms-and many other norms-were being questioned and dismantled, unisex clothing was the uniform of choice for soldiers in the culture wars. As Freud put it: “When you meet a human being, the first distinction you make is ‘male or female?’ and you are accustomed to make the distinction with unhesitating certainty.” Had Freud lived through the 20th century instead of the 19th, he might have had good cause for hesitation.

Fashion runway crossword