Gay men's style: fashion, dress and sexuality in the 21st Century

Cole, Shaun (2023) Gay men's style: fashion, dress and sexuality in the 21st Century , London. Bloomsbury Publishing, 169pp.

Abstract

Through a series of interviews, Gay Men’s Style will take the reader on journey spin through shops, bars, clubs, gyms, workplaces and global city streets. Based on the lived experience of gay men of all ages from the UK, USA, Europe, Australia and Japan, this book calls for a more nuanced understanding of gay male dress and style.
Gay male identities in the 21st century are increasingly intersectional, fluid and flexible, from hyper-masculinity and muscularity seen in clubs and on the pages of gay magazines to self-knowing drag culture and androgynous gender play in the fashion industry. Gay Men’s Style explores these multiple identities and the ways in which gay men self-identify and present themselves to the world through dress. This analysis is set alongside seismic shifts in technology, global communication and gay rights to redress and readdress the subject of gay men’s style in a time of social and sexual upheaval.
The first chapter of Gay Men’s Style examines the ways in which gay men might dress differently to straight men and whether it is possible to tell a gay man by his clothing choices. Building on concepts of embodiment, performativity and ideas of gendered bodies, Chapter 2 investigate how gay men negotiate binarism of gender and the ways these are articulated through dress choices. Chapter three addresses how gay men chose to dress or modify their bodies, and present their bodies on social media and the internet. The relevance of “coming out” in gay men’s lives and in constructing identities is examined in Chapter 4. The fifth chapter is concerned with how gay men described the gay venues they frequented and the choice of clothes they wore to them or observed other gay men wearing. Chapter 6 looks at the ways men dress to attract partners and within ongoing relationships, considering shared wardrobe spaces and negotiations over dress. In Chapter 7 the variety of ways in which gay men create their personal collections of clothes is considered, while chapter 8 explores gay men's relationships to shopping for clothes, addressing preferred shops and brands, physical and online purchases and ideas of vintage and second-hand. Returning to consideration of particular physical spaces, Chapter 9 addresses the ways in which gay
men choose to dress for work, reflecting on different occupations and considerations that were taken into account. Chapter 10 explores how my interviewees discussed ideas of “comfort,” both in the physical and emotional sense, in relation to the fit of their clothes on their bodies. The penultimate chapter examines how gay viewed concepts of age and ageing, while the concluding chapter summarises the major ideas raised in this introduction and throughout the book and offers thoughts on further development of studies of gay men’s style-fashion-dress

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