Gender Bending

Andy Reilly (Fashion Design & Merchandising) just published Crossing Gender Boundaries, which he co-edited with Ben Barry. This collection presents some of the most recent scholarship on the relationship between gender and fashion in historical and contemporary contexts. Through fourteen essays divided into three groups—looking at how dress creates, disrupts, and transcends gender—the chapters investigate gender issues through the lens of fashion. 

Crossing Gender Boundariesfirst examines how clothing has been, and continues to be, used to create and maintain the binary gender division that has come to permeate Western and westernized cultures. Next, it explores how dress can be used to contest and subvert binary gender expectations, before the final section considers the meaning of gender and how dress can transcend it, focusing on unisex and genderless clothing.

The essays consider how fashion can both constrict and free gender expression, explore the ways dress and gender are products of one other, and illuminate the construction of gender through social norms. Through these analyses of the relationship between gender and fashion, readers will gain a better understanding of the world around them.