This article first appeared in Harper’s Bazaar Singapore, the leading fashion glossy on the best of style, beauty, design, travel and the arts. Go to harpersbazaar.com.sg and follow @harpersbazaarsg on Instagram; harpersbazaarsingapore on Facebook. The September 2023 issue is out on newsstands now.

SINGAPORE – Half a century ago, Yves Saint Laurent created his iconic Le Smoking and changed womenswear forever. The menswear-inspired tuxedo was first a scandal, and then quickly a sensation.

Now, his successor Anthony Vaccarello is channelling that contrarian spirit and doing the inverse – applying the language of Saint Laurent’s womenswear into menswear. This meant silk and chiffon blouses, giant pussybows, floor-sweeping coats and vertiginously heeled boots.

For years, Saint Laurent menswear has felt like, if not an afterthought, then just a commercial continuation of the skinny rock-god aesthetic put in place by Hedi Slimane.

It was not until Vaccarello tapped the inherent femininity at the heart of the brand that his menswear finally clicked.

He is not the only designer who has sensed this shift in the air.

The interesting thing is that it is the world’s biggest brands and most established designers who are keying into this new, more feminine mood for menswear.

It is almost a given that young, indie and/or queer designers – your Ludovic de Saint Sernins and Palomo Spains – will push the boundaries of gender and identity in fashion.

But big brands, by the very nature of their businesses, which need to appeal to the widest possible audiences, have a tendency to not rock the boat so much.

This season, in menswear at least, that has been upended.

At Dior Men, Kim Jones is best known for merging streetwear with high fashion, and for translating Christian Dior’s language of French couture into menswear.

For fall/winter 2023, he focused less on the street and more on the couture. His suits were soft and fluid, with gently nipped-in waists, draped lapels and the occasional flowing train.

There were skirts and skirt-like shorts. Despite these feminine accents, the collection never read as anything other than menswear.

At Fendi, Silvia Venturini Fendi referenced her own youth spent dancing nights away at Studio 54.

This translated into a collection filled with disco-ready one-shouldered tops, scarf dressing and a generous dose of rhinestones and crystals. All of it made for one of Fendi’s most interesting menswear outings yet.

At Dolce&Gabbana, that bastion of virile Italian masculinity, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana looked to their own repertoire of ultra-precision suiting from the 1980s and 1990s, and adapted it for a 2020s context.

The duo took their signatures and cinched, sculpted and whittled them into volumes that evoked their sensuous womenswear. As a result, the clothes were the freshest and most fashion-forward they have looked in years.

Sarah Burton of Alexander McQueen was inspired by McQueen’s time on Savile Row. Hence, her starting point of razor-sharp tailoring, to which she applied the dissection and subversion that are the house’s core qualities.

Some of the suits were fashioned into bustier-like forms. Others were sliced open like the cut-out dresses she showed in her women’s collection.

At Loewe, Jonathan Anderson wanted to achieve purity of line. The shapes he showed were reminiscent of mid-century couture, but stripped of fuss and stuffiness. Shown on male models, they looked almost radical. 

The most electrifying thing about this new movement is that it does not ignore the old gender binary of yore.

It is not about erasing boundaries completely – the way Alessandro Michele used to do it at Gucci – and putting men and women alike in the same flowy dresses.

The aforementioned collections are still very much rooted in the classical codes of menswear – suits and tuxes, and the like.

The womenswear touches are subtle – a cowl neck here, a pussybow there.

The intention is not to make men look effeminate, but to push the aesthetic limits of what is often thought of as traditional masculinity.

There is a reason most of the models chosen by these designers fit the mental image of a typical hunk.

At this point in the cultural moment, you kind of expect stars like Australian singer Troye Sivan or American-French actor Timothee Chalamet to play around with gender-coded clothing.

It is a far more powerful visual when you see Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny in a backless blazer with a flowing floral stole or Spanish actor-singer Manu Rios in a plunging silk blouse.

They still very much look like symbols of manliness, but they also represent a far more tender vision of masculinity. And people can all use a little more tenderness.