Genderless Design Is in the Air
Men in Dresses ≠ Gay
“Genderless danshi” in Japan are a group of young men who dress like girls. They manicure their nails, wear high -heeled shoes and use makeups as women. Same as Western men, Japanese men are changing their fashion gender norms. But if you think they are gay, you are totally wrong. Instead of being regarded as girls, they think they are genderless who don’t identify themselves with any gender. To them, the concept of gender is not necessary. They are developing a public identity and a career out of a new androgynous style.
We are born with a conventional gender identity. But in present days, a significant culture shift is happening. Gender fluidity is playing an important role in our mainstream culture. More and more people, especially young people, have become open-minded and highly accept themselves or other people choose to be genderless or transformed into other genders. We are proud that we can personalize our own experiences and identities. The market of genderless is expanding. To accomplish people’s need in the contemporary world, genderless design will eventually be an inevitable design response which contributes to personal identity. A genderless design can be applied for any genders. More than a trend, the development of genderless design is an evolution.
Remove Stereotypes, Be Genderless
As the previous discussion, gender should not be defined into only two categories. The truth is that according to a variety of studies and researches, gender ranges to over 50 types. The society has a stereotyping of genders. When we say “don’t act like a girl”, we impose a negative impression on women. When we say “be a man”, again, we define that men should be strong, at the meanwhile, we virtually increase the pressure on men. This definitely is unfair for both genders. We could not define ourselves by genders. This kind of stereotype also exist in design area. We will immediately think that pink relates to girl and blue relates to boy. So as flower patterns and sports elements. They all direct to a certain gender. The society or the designer in the past has already made a form for us. But does that has to be like it used to be? Just as we shouldn’t label gender, we should also remove the stereotype of typical visual language that relate to a specific gender.
Genderless bathroom is a success example of breaking the gender barrier. For transgender, gender nonconforming people, or parents who may wish to accompany their children to the washroom, gendered restrooms don’t work. A unisex bathroom is a toilet that people of any gender or gender identity can use. It stops the embarrassment when people who look different from their biological gender use bathroom. They no longer have to bear the discrimination from others in the gendered restroom, and there is no no more sexual harassment annoy them.
Androgynous Fashion Is For Everyone
“Transgender and pan-sexuality have gone mainstream. Part liberation and part revolt against the restrictive design codes that have long defined what it means to ‘be’ male or female, the genderless design aesthetic is rising in prominence to celebrate individuality over sex”, writes Ed Silk.
Genderless has became a new trend in fashion design in order to satisfy their customers. According to a report by Trendwatching.com, people of all ages in all markets are constructing their own identities more freely. The unisex design style is becoming a new stage of evolution. Recently, 17-year-old male model Jaden Smith has been featured in Louis Vuitton’s new womenswear campaign because he represents a generation that has the codes of free gender.
We can now find many fashion shows theme as genderless all over the world. Unisex style is like a cultural mirror. It shows what happens in society recently. It’s very common in street style already. Girls like to wear boy-friend style shirts, and boys also begin to wear skirts. Women love to borrow their boyfriend’s stuff. Some couples even have a unisex wardrobe.
Fashion designer Wolfgang Jarnach stresses that it’s better to described “unisex”as “multisex,” because it is one style that works for many. Wolfgang Jarnach, who’s a fashion designer bases in Munich says that more than the sum of the two genders, he tries to look at how to erase them both, giving shape to a body that is entirely new, freed from typical characteristics. The goal is to re-create an aesthetic, linked to physicality, which respects the features of both sexes, annulling the notion of gender itself.
One little problem in genderless style design may be proportion and balance. The size needs to be adjusted for all genders. The retail store may also create a new “genderless” department to keep up with the cultural change.
How Communication Design Can be Genderless? Create A new Visual Language!
Design writer Alice Rawsthorn describes design’s mission towards personal identity, “Design has to find new ways of enabling individuals to express an increasingly fluid and nuanced multiplicity of gender identities, not just in easily customizable fields like fashion and graphics, but in objects, spaces, software, and so on.” She thinks transgenderism is a great opportunity for experimentation.
Gabriel Ann Maher, a designer who identifies as gender fluid and investigates gender through design media, presents a distorted system of gender representation. Using the vehicle of the media it contributes to the establishment of gender norms, through the production of cultural artifacts. This research seeks to extend the current discourse on design and gender by exploring this relationship beyond the binary of male and female, and positioning the exploration within a framework of queer theory. The aim is to deconstruct the gendered meanings inherent in these systems of representation, and explore the condition of the ‘mediated body’ in design. This is done through an act of DE___SIGN, which searches for and pulls apart a complex system of signs related to gender. The visual language of gendered signs is used to present and describe a collection of re-appropriated cultural artifacts. Research and design come together in a performance that demonstrates how gender is constructed and how it can be reconstructed. Maher declares, “Design is inherently genderless but it is designers who create gendered objects.”
Design doesn’t just propagate stereotypes in the worlds of marketing and advertising — but that gendered definitions are inscribed in the shape and language of design itself. Today, subversion is taking a different form, a new visual language need to be created. “To develop a more nuanced visual language, we need to move further than visual opposites,” says Maher. “We would have to question the systems of visual language through culture and through the study of their meaning. In other words, through the signs and symbols attached to visual representations.”
Genderless Design in the Future
A bold guess is that the society are being transformed into a totally genderless world. No matter if it will become true, the next generation will be much more aware of gender codes. There’s more opportunities for people to say who they really are.The cultural shift will definitely influent the design shift. For designers, pay more attention to contemporary attitudes and respect of gender identification in the design process is the first thing to do. In the future, more and more design works will have a neutral aesthetic free from gender associations, so that every customers can see a different version of that work in their interpretation.