Official Rebrand: WHAT IS A MAN

Couture

Feb 14

I’m a man, but not the man my father wanted me to be. He wanted a son who was “manly”, as defined by men who drank hard, beat their women, and were basically misanthropes. Dad didn’t want me to cry, to buck the system, or become an intellectual. He wanted me to be a blue collar worker like him, and be “tough”. Beyond that, my father offered no real guidance to either me or my younger siblings. My sister was fortunate to have my mother, to teach her about her body. But back in those days, it was assumed that a father would teach his son these things, so my brother and I were out of luck. My stepfather was great, but sadly, he didn’t live long enough to have an impact on my teenage development.

My mother, however, taught me a great many things. She encouraged my intellectual and artistic pursuits. When I began to socialize, she would let me use her unisex scents and jewelry, so that I could feel confident looking and smelling good like my male peers. But as I grew older, I grew conflicted over how I should dress and behave. It was the eighties, and I liked the “pretty boy” look that artists like Prince and Jesse Johnson rocked. But ultimately, I ended up being miserable, because I subconsciously became my father in certain ways not conducive to my happiness and well being. In my head, however, I was a pretty boy. I did magical things in my daydreams! In my fantasies, I dressed in ways I felt I could never bring myself to dress in the real world. So when I heard about Official Rebrand’s “WHAT IS A MAN” New York Fashion Week event, I was intrigued, to say the least.

MI Leggett is the brilliant designer, whose work has been shown at venues such as Berlin and New York Fashion Weeks, and featured in Teen Vogue, WWD, Vogue Italia, and more. While their efforts to revive “discarded clothing, breathing new life into what was once considered waste” are admirable, it was their NYFW F/W20 theme that struck a chord with me. This season’s theme has been described as:

Grounded in the celebrations and struggles of gender queerness as well as the designer’s observations of and experiences with the social ills wrought by normative gender expectations, WHAT IS A MAN challenges the position of masculinity as a specific ideal to which one must aspire, or a hegemonic force to which one must succumb, based upon assigned gender and sex at birth. The collection proposes a masculinity that is a fluid and porous mode of self-expression.
Official Rebrand garments are created exclusively from upcycled materials and therefore reject the patriarchal treatment of the Earth’s natural abundance as resources to be extracted for profit, and aims to instead express fluidity through nonviolent material transformation.

If humanity is to progress, if we are to survive to witness another millennium, the behavior of men must change. More importantly, the definition of what a man is must radically change. The patriarchy must die. I am immensely pleased that the young men of today have an opportunity that I didn’t have as a younger man; that is, the opportunity to embrace ones unique qualities. Young men need not grow up angry and resentful at the world as I did, because society will not allow them to be themselves. The changes may not be happening as fast as we would like, but it’s showing no signs of slowing down.