The Androgynous Look

by Catherine Lee and Rudi Matic

Is beauty really masculine or feminine? We find it in so many things that have nothing to do with gender. In nature. Music. Art. Yet men are expected to see beauty only in women, and women only in men. Are they right? Or are people who see beauty in one gender alone subtly crippled?

That is what the androgynous look implies. And why it tempts. It promises a liberation from limiting definitions. An entry into wholeness.

That is not to say that androgyny in fashion lacks paradox. For much of fashion is sexual, one person calling to another for attention, completion. The androgynous seems to seek completion in oneself alone. Absorbing everything. Requiring nothing.

And fashion has often created distinctly masculine and feminine looks and styles, and in that way served to differentiate the sexes. Yet what is androgyny if not gender collage, a crash and mesh of male and female characteristics? A place where the mind of a girl casts the shadow of a boy, and vice versa, and both intertwine, becoming one?

But androgynous style is more than simply that. The female Olympian combines masculine and feminine, but that hard look is not the cool slump of Calvin Klein advertisements, nor the tattered ambivalence of Rei Kawakuba’s classic Transcending Gender collection. The androgynous look doesn’t force together exaggerated sexual characteristics. It minimizes them.

The androgynous look is one from which blatant gender advertisement has fallen away. It is not a collision of extremes but a nexus of erasures. A post-sexuality of erotic minimalism.

But if all minimalism is a reduction to essences, what essence does the androgynous look express? Not the essence of the male, nor of the female. Rather, the essentially human.

The androgynous look dreams a harmony of forms. It is a longing for totality. A gathering together of all the elements of self. It returns to us everything that society and rigidity and fear have made taboo. It points past fragmentation towards oneness.

In the androgynous look, what is exiled within us returns. And seeing ourselves complete, we know ourselves completely for the first time.