It’s not metrosexuals.  No, they’re last year’s “trend.”  This year, it’s because non-metrosexual straights are adopting gay styles, and some of us homos are giving up on clubwear clothing and gym scuplture:

“The codes have broken down completely,” said Valerie Steele, the director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. “The other night I was at a dinner sitting next to someone who was talking about how he couldn’t tell anymore, that he just didn’t have any gaydar. And it was so funny. I couldn’t tell if he was gay or straight.”

If a straight woman directing a fashion institute has lost her gaydar, what chance to I, a lowly academic working mostly among heteros, have?

It used to be that we could use earrings as a marker, a code for homosexuality.  Remember the, “If you pierce your left ear you’re gay” thing?  Now, the rings I’ve been wearing on each ear for 15 years are on every other straight man.

Then it was Doc Martins.  Then it was certain tattoos.  Then it was body piercings.

Not all of these trends started in gay communities.  Some of them were borrowed from others (punk…) and adapted.  Then they were adopted by other social groups and re-adapted.  Guess what, social trends circulate.  In a society such us ours, in which fashion (and other cultural trends) is always changing due to the need to keep people buying new stuff, cultural minorities (be they gay, black, punk, hippie, pothead….) will often be raided, signifiers with meanings taken up and transformed, made into commodities.  There tends to be a cycle to all of this.

This is also one of the reasons those minority cultures continue to change and innovate.  As gay style is adopted more by straight men, new gay styles will probably develop, markers to be maintained as signifiers of difference.  (Indeed, such things as fashion aren’t the only cultural signifiers we use; speech codes are other areas where such things come into play.)

The article points to one difference in the cycle as it’s traditionally played out:

What has sped the change is the erosion of the time-honored fashion hierarchy. For years gay men were the ones to first adopt a style trend – flat-front pants, motorcycle jackets, crew cuts – and straight men would pick up on it more or less as gay men tired of it. Now gays and straights are embracing new styles almost simultaneously.

“The lag time between gay innovation and straight appropriation is nonexistent now,” said Bruce Pask, the style director of Cargo magazine, who is gay. “They’re picking up the trends as fast as we are.”

I think there are two things we can point to for understanding this: mass media and changes in some forms of masculinity.

The mass media aspect is, I think, easier to understand.  In the past several years, we’ve seen an explosion in the sites of media production.  Developments in cable, satellite, and internet technologies, along with a diffusion of the ability to produce content had resulted in an exponential growth in images and messages in circulation.  It’s also compressed time.  Cultural cycles of innovation, diffusion, adoption, and decline simply move faster now.  A fashion’s lifespan isn’t as long–once it’s been adopted it’s dead, with several new trends waiting to take it’s place.

I don’t know what relationship this has to masculinity.  Part of the reason is that I think we often talk of masculinity to broadly, as though it’s a singular thing.  There are many masculinities. Part of me wants to ask, In which groups of men is this fashion crossover happenings?  What class locations do they occupy and from what geographic region are they coming?  What contacts to they already have with gay men?  How is the concern for “looking good” integrated into other aspects of their masculinity?

It’s no uncommon, after all, for men to try and make themselves more attractive, be they straight or gay.  Is the style being adopted because gay men have developed a flattering way to show off the male body?  Is grooming the only transformation that’s happening?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but it would be fascinating to explore them.  After all, we utilize clothing as a social marker of who we are, be it brand names, particular styles, a certain piece that has subcultural meaning.  Sometimes what we wear demonstrates that we don’t care what message we’re sending, thus sending a message.

I’ve got a message to send: Please stop copying us. You’re throwing off the gaydar and confusing us.  We have to keep coming up with new ways of identifying each other.  That’s a lot of work.  

(Crossposted at dailyKos)