For an industry that is so traditionally gendered by the divisions between menswear and womenswear, fashion has been one of the leading commercial and creative arenas to embrace gender fluidity - from designers like Gucci, Rick Owens and J. W. Anderson presenting gender fluid collections, to magazines increasingly blurring the lines with editorial content.
Consumers are lending their purchasing power to the desirability of a collection regardless of its intended audience; dressing across gender lines is now more and more the norm, barely warranting a bat of the eye. Good design transcends gender, as do models; there's a cluster of models leading the charge, from transgender women fronting major campaigns, to female models succeeding in the menswear sphere. Their success and the acceptance and the celebration of it, is something we should (and will) see increasingly more of.
Hari Nef
Model, actress and activist (not to mention social media star) and the first transwoman to be signed to IMG worldwide, Nef champions openness, and her modelling road has followed her personal journey of "creating, re-creating, meta-creating" herself; she believes in "listening to people, not labels, not semantics." Nef favours a more ambiguous approach to beauty, preferring subtle femininity and a bare face rather than subscribing to a more traditional view of female appearance - something women collectively seem to be rejecting. With bone structure that could cut glass, and her signature heavy fringe, she has walked the runway for Hood By Air and Adam Selman, and fronted campaigns for the likes of Selfridges.
