"Who decided that men and women should dress differently?"
This is the question thrown by The Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto to the fashion industry in 1983.
Yohji Yamamoto | Image source: Secret Room
Genderlessness across the century, which has gone through several ups and downs, is now carving up the cake of China's clothing consumer market, and its share is increasing day by day.
In 2017, NOCAO Was established. The brand, which originally positioned itself in the tide of men's clothing, because female consumers surpassed men, and plunged into the tide of "genderless clothing".
In 2018, bosie was born, and the brand name was derived from Wilde's nickname for lover. Bossie, which does not distinguish between men and women in terms of fit and cut, has targeted the back wave group, with revenue of more than 150 million yuan in 2019 and has completed three rounds of financing.
Image source: bosie; DASH FUTURE
Nearly the same time, Jiangnan Cloth launched a genderless series of regional LINES REBEB. Last year, Chinese designers Wang Tianmo and Melon entered the market with genderless brands Oinkpink and DASH FUTURE...
Clothing, as a means of self-expression, is also a way to quickly establish identity. Behind the de-genderization of dressing styles is the de-gendering of the aesthetic ideology of the Chinese people - men can pursue refinement, elegance, and beauty, women can have handsomeness, freedom and independence, or you can become any adjective that cannot be summarized by sexual characteristics.
From the rise of de-gender culture to the pursuit of consumer brands, why can genderless clothing emerge in the domestic market? In the red sea of clothing, is sexlessness a concept or a category? Can it open up a whole new differentiated track under the chaos? How far can the territory of sexlessness reach?
1 Student uniform
Maybe it's the sexless costume you first wore
In fact, from a global perspective, the trend of clothing that breaks the gender boundary is not new.
The term unisex first appeared in the New York Times in 1968. It refers to a natural existence that is not limited by biological sex, and whether it is a monosexual, intersex, sex-mobility, or hermaphroditism, it can occur in the same person.
The movie "Velvet GoldMine" | Source: Douban
In the 1960s and 1970s, at the height of the Western sexual liberation and hippie culture movement, the fashion industry set off a "Peacock Revolution" (Peacock Revolution), feminine elements reconstructed traditional men's clothing, and herring ties, tight trousers, and velvet dresses together composed a gorgeous psychedelic new world.
David Bowie created fictional images of hermaphrodites
Ziggy Stardust | Image source: Network
The reshaping of gender consciousness is also in the enlightenment women's wear market. Yves Saintlaurent's le smoking outfit (originally referred to as a casual dress worn by a high-society man who took off his tuxedo after a dinner party and sat in a smoking room) became an icon of sexlessness.
Women's smoking clothes (LeSmoking) | Image source: Network
Bianca Jagger, a 70s collective muse, wore a white smoking outfit at the wedding
| Image source: Network
Opposing the same aesthetic, respecting self-expression outside the framework, such an ideology has irreversibly shifted the trend of fashion. At that time, the department store's catalog also began to add his & her classification.
Subsequently, luxury brands, sports brands, and fast fashion have entered this territory and set off another boom in recent years. Gucci, Paul Smith and many other brands have combined men's and women's clothing at fashion weeks, and embroidery, lace, satin and other elements that have been judged to be feminine have been used by Gucci in men's clothing. In 2018, more than 5 brands showcased their sexless collections at Fall/Winter New York Fashion Week, forcing the Fashion Design Council (CFDA) to add a new category of "Unisex."
Sarah-Lin Tran&Christophe Lemaire
Such a trend has also "invaded" the domestic apparel market. As an imported cultural gap, the concept of genderlessness has "helped" many domestic entrepreneurial brands to open up a differentiated track in the red sea of clothing.
The genderless clothing that has evolved so far has not formed an independent category or a style, and the masculine elements and feminine elements in the traditional sense can be applied interchangeably under the concept of genderlessness, or completely blurred boundaries.
However, in the current domestic market, gender-free clothing is not much different from the "unisex style" in the past, and the overall looseness in the version, in order to coordinate the differences between men and women, it will weaken gender characteristics, such as the use of dropped shoulder sleeves or shoulder sleeve designs.
Doesn't that sound a bit familiar?
Yes, the school uniform of the nine-year compulsory education student may be the earliest genderless clothing worn by young people today. If you look back, the military civilian clothes, Zhongshan suits, and liberation clothes in the special period also carry genderless branding.
The movie "Young You" | Source: Douban
Different from the demands of systems and norms, today's clothing has more individual expression needs, which is true for designers, brands or consumers. The founder of Nikko Grocery, a genderless clothing brand established in 2019, said in an interview with CBNData that he hopes to do the basic model with more details, and will expand the basic product version by 2 yards when designing, and add more design sense and stylized elements.
Image source: NikkoGrocery
2 With one production line
Do business for two crowds
In the domestic consumer market, does the budding of genderless clothing have its historical inevitability? The answer is yes.
In recent years, the fast fashion scenery that once contracted the wardrobes of young people is no longer there, and many brands have ushered in a wave of large-scale store closures, clearing up a considerable market space for the rise of local clothing.
The changing consumer force has ignited a new spark of clothing. Post-95s and post-00s young people are often labeled on the body - willing to be constantly new, the pursuit of personality, aesthetic upgrading, cultural self-confidence, all of which increase the possibility of the "superiority" of new domestic brands.
As the topic of feminism and sexual minority equality in the public sphere grows louder, young people's gender concepts are also moving away from the traditional context of binary opposition, which in turn affects consumer behavior. According to CBNData's "2018 White Paper on the Development of Fashion Culture", the market growth rate of neutral style in trend brands is as high as 341%, and the consumption of "unisex" clothing in the trend market is constantly increasing.
Source: CBNData "2018 Trend Culture White Paper"
CBNData's "This is the National Tide Territory of the Post-95s" report released last year also shows that de-genderization is a prominent feature of post-95 trend consumption. From women wearing oversized jackets to men choosing pink-and-infrared covers embroidered with flowers, the gender differences between men and women are increasingly blurred.
Source: CBNData "This is the post-95 national tide territory"
From the perspective of upstream production, genderless clothing is more flexible in supply chain control and has its natural advantages. In the case of men and women, the cost of R&D to the supply chain and other links will be halved - the original men's and women's clothing even if the design is the same, they also need to make their own plates, sample clothes, and invest in two production lines, while gender-free clothing does not need this, and the same model allows a sku to obtain customers at the same time, and the inventory pressure is also reduced by half.
Source: Crying Centre Crying Centre
Then there is the "field" of consumption. Genderless clothing has found a way to infiltrate the general public in the era of e-commerce, but their ambitions do not stop at tao brands. At present, it is the reshuffle period of offline channels, and it has also become an excellent time for national tide brands to be shortlisted. For example, bossie has been actively exploring offline channels in less than 1 year after its launch, opening 11 offline stores in 9 months, and opening up stores and e-commerce channels through the pre-sale system.
Offline stores, bosie uses the "genderless fashion lab" method to create creative spaces such as "space capsules" and "fun sock machines", so that young people can buy clothing and participate in the store experience at the same time, so as to realize the spontaneous dissemination of social media such as Xiaohongshu, Douyin, and Station B.
The "Genderless Lab" | Image source: bosie
3 Beauty, fragrance, jewelry...
How will the genderless territory expand?
The outbreak of sexlessness in the field of clothing is due to the fact that clothing is the most obvious and intuitive in the external projection of psychological cognition.
But in fact, the genderless territory has long crossed the territory of clothing. As Alessandro Michele, Creative Director of Gucci, puts it, "Everything can be true on both genders," and many consumer circuits such as beauty, skincare, jewelry, fragrances, etc. can become gender-free territory.
As with clothing, the de-gendering of jewelry dates back to the last century, with Cartier's nail bracelets and Tiffany's T series not being gender-specific. Last year, Mikimoto and Rei Kawakubo's joint work chose a combination of Nanyang pearls + silver chains to blend masculinity and femininity; Yin Yin, a domestic cutting-edge jewelry brand interviewed by CBNData, also canceled the product title of "men and women"," starting last year (click to view the original text).
Mikimoto X Rei Kawakubo | Image source: Network
There are also traces of the genderlessness of perfumes. For more and more consumers, the past male/female fragrance division is no longer fully convincing, "men will be attracted by floral fragrance, women will also be impressed by wood fragrance", Xiangxiang brand House 17 once pointed out: perfume should be gender-neutral artistic creation.
In the beauty industry, genderlessness seems to be a "contrarian" move. Korean gender-neutral beauty LAKA and domestic makeup brand HASHTAG mainly focus on the naturalness of makeup by weakening gender differences, highlighting the characteristics of "solving basic needs".
In the beauty market where the category is becoming more and more subdivided and the pursuit of "skin conditioning", because such products are not distinguished by skin color and gender, it is expected to broaden the target consumer group, in the red sea of giants, it is a new idea of reverse operation, but its market performance has yet to be tested by time.
Image source: LAKA
In the dialectical relationship between supply and demand, is supply determining demand, or is demand driving supply in reverse?
The game is difficult to clarify.
But through the penetration of genderlessness in the consumer industry, we see the importance of "potential". The "potential" here is not a consumer trend, but a cognitive trend.
In today's gender ideology change, genderless aesthetics are no longer just subcultures, but gradually penetrate into the whole people. According to the psychologist Jung's personality mask theory, everyone has heterosexual traits in their hearts, and clothing, jewelry, and beauty can help us externalize the inner personality mask in a relatively relaxed and natural way.
For brands, it may be necessary to look forward to such cognitive changes, and take the lead in responding to brand positioning, product innovation, and marketing strategies, in order to come ashore in the morning before the tide breaks the embankment.
From another point of view, the concept of management can add points to the brand, but it does not seem to be a long-term solution for the consumer to pay for the concept. If you just use genderlessness as a marketing gimmick, the market will eventually verify its existence.
Author: Jin Jin