How the Women Are Beating the Boys at Their Own Game

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• One of the fashion amusements of the past few weeks has been watching the women dressing like the boys outside the menswear shows—and in many cases, beating them at their own game. A witty sartorial sparring match has been going on between male and female dandies on the streets of London, Florence, Milan, and Paris, where the men’s shows attract thousands, dressed to kill. Women, naturally enough, are outnumbered dozens to one, in the menswear business. That hasn’t stopped more than a few of them going shoulder-to-shoulder with the guys in suits—two- and three-piece alike, shirts, ties, fedoras, brogues, and all. Well, it’s a funny female way of tipping a cap to the menswear business—as well as a surefire tactic for making heads swivel in the crowd. Because this is definitely not about chameleon dressing. Close observation shows these women’s canny methods for playing fast and loose with the menswear rulebook. As technically “masculine” as a tailoring might be, the looks being paraded around—light-colored suits, typically with narrow cropped pants and slim-fitted jackets—hardly come off as straightforward cases of cross-dressing. Other variants involve sportswear-appropriation, polo shirts, and (of course) sneakers. One or two have been spotted with bandeau and bra tops under their jackets—a modern “Madonna” tactic rechanneled from the eighties, with a side nod to Rihanna.
   
  
  Various thoughts occur while surveying this scene—firstly, how comfortable these women look, nipping about their business unencumbered by crippling heels. Secondly, that the blurring of the lines surely has a lot to do with the surge of excitement and energy that is turbo-powering the men’s fashion industry now. At some point, creativity in menswear has been accelerating, arguably at a rate which is outstripping innovation in womenswear. For young men, an interest in fashion—wearing any amount of color, printed shirts, natty tailoring—is now a generational given. So if boys are the new girls? Then it’s hardly surprising that the girls striding around the hundreds of shows and presentations over the last month have been grabbing their own piece of the action. Just one thing, though, in the summer of 2014, there are two universal rules which still divide the sexes: red lipstick for women, beards for men.