PARIS (AP) — It was supposed to be men’s fashion season. But women were a constant presence throughout.
At Amiri and Ami, women and men shared the runway together. At Vetements, female models wore much of what was billed as menswear, with Sharon Stone closing out the show in thigh-high boots.
Within the fashion world, none of this raised an eyebrow.
The blurring of gender lines wasn’t happening on the fringes — it was woven into the fabric of Paris Men’s Fashion Week, which concluded Sunday. The event is where a multibillion-dollar luxury industry previews what it believes men will want to wear next.
The trend has made its way into advertising as well. In 2023, a pregnant Rihanna served as the face of Pharrell Williams’ debut Louis Vuitton men’s campaign, appearing on a massive Paris billboard with her baby bump on display and her arms draped in Vuitton bags.
Joseph McBrinn, an art historian at Ulster University, noted that this isn’t entirely new territory. Women have been appearing in menswear collections for so many seasons that fashion insiders barely take notice anymore — even as a Gen Z audience, only now discovering the gender-bending style that David Bowie made famous in the 1970s, treats it as something revolutionary.
Over recent decades, McBrinn said, fashion has shifted “from very binary understandings of gender and fashion to something which is today very fluid” — a reflection, he added, of how younger generations now see the world.
At Issey Miyake’s IM Men, the brand said the entire cast was male — yet the show still carried a distinctly androgynous feel.
The boundary between men’s and women’s clothing keeps wearing away, both on bodies and on the fashion calendar. It hasn’t disappeared entirely, and that erosion has as much to do with money as with gender identity.
Andrew Groves, a menswear systems professor at the University of Westminster, put it plainly: “Androgyny only works because people understand what is being crossed.” He added that the real story isn’t that menswear has broken free of its rules, but that designers are discovering new creative freedom within one of fashion’s most restrictive playbooks. The runways may look like they’re dissolving gender — but it’s precisely those categories that make the statement meaningful.
At Dior, Jonathan Anderson — the first designer in the house’s history to oversee both its men’s and women’s lines — dressed models in pearls, pink, and sheer blouses with soft bows at the collar. He told reporters the collection was about how he “connects with the feminine.”
At Saint Laurent, male models went shirtless in body-hugging tops, wore leather briefs, and walked in transparent shoes borrowed directly from the women’s runway. Saint Laurent opened Paris Men’s Week, and its investment in menswear goes beyond aesthetics — reports indicate the house has set a goal of doubling men’s sales by 2030.
Many fashion houses have merged their men’s and women’s collections onto a single shared runway. What once felt like a bold provocation became a scheduling strategy by the late 2010s — part creative vision, part convenience, and largely driven by commerce.
When Anthony Vaccarello took the helm at Saint Laurent in 2016, he eliminated the brand’s standalone menswear show and integrated men into the women’s runway, only bringing back a separate men’s show in 2018. Vetements and Balenciaga made similar moves around the same time.
Valerie Steele, director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, was candid about the motivation: “I don’t think having men and women on the same runway means a greater belief in nonbinary genders. That’s really more of an economic thing.”
A combined show consolidates media attention and allows a designer to tell one unified story — something that matters in a luxury market that has faced headwinds over the past couple of years.
Women already purchase menswear regularly, which helps explain why Ami, originally launched in 2011 as a men’s brand, eventually expanded into womenswear.
The blending of clothing styles is actually the older part of this story. Long before “nonbinary” entered everyday conversation, Yves Saint Laurent was putting women in men’s tailoring back in 1966. Bowie smudged the line in the ’70s. Jean Paul Gaultier sent men out in skirts in the ’80s. Fashion was speaking this language long before society had the words for it.
Veteran fashion critic Suzy Menkes traces the history even further back. Men once wore “the most dramatic, precious, glamorous and priceless jewels,” she noted, without anyone questioning whether such adornments were appropriate for them. It was the 20th century, she said, that narrowed the concept of male dress — before fashion began to push those boundaries open again.
The exchange between men’s and women’s fashion has never been balanced: a woman in a men’s suit, 60 years later, barely registers; a man in a skirt or heels still reads as transgression.
“Women’s bodies are still consumed in ways that men’s bodies are not,” McBrinn said. Men, he added, “can still be seen as deviant” when they cross that line.
Away from the runway, the cultural moment is tense: aggressive online masculinity movements, “manosphere” influencers like the Tate brothers, and a wave of anti-trans legislation are all part of the backdrop.
Last year, J.Crew sparked a conservative backlash simply by marketing a pink sweater to men — even as Dior, Paul Smith, and Willy Chavarria were sending pink down their own runways. The controversy was cultural, but there was a commercial dimension too: reports showed pink apparel sellouts climbed 17% year-over-year in spring-summer 2025.
Menkes said color is part of the same broader story. Post-war Europe helped cement the idea that certain colors were “suitable” for men, she said, and it took “a surprisingly long time” for shades like lilac or pale pink to be accepted as male choices.
Steele noted that openness to androgyny peaked in the 1920s, the ’70s, and the ’90s — and pulled back each time.
“Everything is moving to the right,” McBrinn said. “Fashion may go back to being much more entrenched within gender binary” — possibly, he warned, within five to 10 years.
After years of expanding legal protections for LGBTQ+ people, progress is now reversing in many countries, with transgender individuals at the center of the debate.
“We are seeing tremendous backlash internationally against trans people,” Steele said.
Ultimately, Steele argued, the runway matters less than everyday life. Real change happens when people see androgynous clothing on friends, coworkers, and the men around them.
Increasingly, she suggested, they’re just clothes.
