Blurring the line. Fashion and masculinity, from the "Great Renunciation" to the metrosexual

As Jennifer Craik pointed out in her The Face Of Fashion: Cultural Studies In Fashion “the discourse surrounding men’s fashion resolves around a set of denials”. It is not by chance that one of the major turning points in the history of clothing, the Great Male Renunciation, evolves around men capitulation to adornment and beauty in favor of the new, sober monopoly of the suit. Across the decades, such a tendency of resisting the idea of a male fashion as well as the display of a sharp disinterest in it have been considered as weapons of patriarchal empowerment over women for through the continuous recreation of feminine dress codes women were gradually assigned the role of the fashionable gender stereotypically predisposed to an excessive interest in their appearance. However, if it is true that power has always been associated with the manly indifference towards clothes, it is undeniable that the whole XX century has put such an assumption to the hardest test. Since when and how have men become more and more concerned with their appearance? Why have they developed awareness, when not an addiction to, fashion? The answer to these riddles can only be accounted by considering some of the essential phenomena of the post-modern world: the impact of youth cultures and sexual revolution on the relationship between fashion and gender, the role of the visual imagery promoted by the media (films, magazines, advertising, fashion photography) and the increased trade in symbolic goods (branding). The aim of the following paper is therefore to analyze the way fashion market has been blurring the lines between genders, playing with both the notions of sexual identity and sexual orientation, queering the perception of contemporary masculinity from the first countercultures to the latest “metro-sexual” homoerotic imagery of the male fashion victim.