Fashion and Gender

Andrej(a) Pejić for Schön Magazine, 2011

The theme of this years FASHIONCLASH Festival 2015 is “Gender, celebration of diversity and selfexpression”. 

Gender stands for the sociocultural implications that come with our biological gender. This concept focusses on the relationship between male and female aspects of life. It’s the role that men and women are expected to play in society and it refers to the problems that occur when the reenactment of this role deviates from the norm, like when women have succesful careers and their spouses stay home to take care of the children. 


A persons genderidentity is the individual experience of their own gender, which can lie as close to or as far away from the accepted average as a person likes. Time and place are very important for the common perceptions of gender. The culture in which a person grows up is determinative for their genderidentity because a society is organized as a balance between contrasts and the male/female opposition is a very apparent and historic one. In every age, there are certain expectations of men and women in a social context, but in the 21st century it’s not evident that everybody has to follow these since there are a lot of people who find themselves in a grey zone between male and female. We’ve come a long way in the accepting of genderdiversity but there are still people that don’t feel completely included in our society, like transgenders and homosexuals.

With FASHIONCLASH Festival 2015, we want to celebrate the diversity of people and stimulate them to express themselves as who they really are, whether they would be perceived as provocateurs or conformists. We believe clothing is a way to express oneself and it could be used as an aid to ease a coming-out as something else than they or others have been projecting onto them. Rachel Tutera from The Handsome Butch said it well when she exclaimed that “If you dress (and therefore act) braver than you feel, you’ll grow into that braver version of yourself”.

Rachel Tutera @thehandsomebutch

Fashion has played a very progressive role in this subject, male designers have always been more flamboyant than the average man. Fashion’s enfant terrible Yves Saint Laurent was openly gay which was still a taboo in his time. Marc Jacobs likes to shake things up by occasionaly dressing in drag. Andreja Pejić is a transgender supermodel who in 2011 was both in the Top 50 Male Models list from models.com and in FHM magazine’s Top 100 sexiest women in the world. After years of balancing between male and female, she underwent sex reassignment surgery last year. She said in an interview with People Magazine that although she was very proud of her gender nonconforming career, it was her biggest dream to be comfortable in her own body. She is now planning to make a movie about her life to raise awareness.

Marc Jacobs for Industrie Maganzine, 2011

The 7th edition of FASHIONCLASH Festival 2015 tries to create a narrative on how to engage in the gendertopic. Just like everything else in the world, fashion is divided in men’s and women’s clothing, in collections, stores and brands. FASHIONCLASH Festival 2015 wants to abolish this division and establish a more included environment for fashionlovers by transcending these boundaries. Both in the exhibition as in the collections, FASHIONCLASH Festival and the designers endeavour to create an intelligent, thoughtful interpretation of gender and how it should be put to future use.

We invite aspiring young designers and artists to reflect and express their vision on 'gender in fashion'. This years exhibition on the main venue will be curated with work related to the gender theme.
 You can submit your work for the exhibition before March 1, 2015.

More information and application form

Emma Watson on gender equality.

Written by Nicky Cremers.