Les Girls Les Boys: Androgyny Without Representation
When I heard “gender-fluid lingerie”, my first thought was an almost-impossible one: wait, is a mainstream lingerie designer launching a brand that accommodates genderfluid people’s needs? And then I thought: what would that even look like?
But then I saw the current collection and the website on which it’s housed. It’s not so much that I’m disappointed as that I’ve returned to my usual level-of-appointment over the state of lingerie made for trans or nonbinary or genderfluid folks. The lingerie that is actually made with our needs and desires in mind tends to be made by us. And this isn’t it.
To start: on the Les Girls Les Boys website, the front page splits into “Shop Les Girls” and “Shop Les Boys,” which immediately suggests less fluidity than I expected. The logo on the site is an artfully arranged jumble of the letters in “les girls les boys,” suggesting a kind of lazy orgy of genders. Yet rather than matching that logo with an artfully arranged jumble of lingerie, the suggestion is made right away to choose a side.
On the Les Girls side are lace bodysuits and bralettes. On the Les Boys side are briefs and sweatpants. Some specific items are shown modeled on both men and women, such as a pair of white boxers. Some items are in both sides of the store, like t-shirts and socks. Some items in the Les Girls side are loosely inspired by masculine styles, but taken in a very feminine direction such as Henley bodysuits and feminine-styled “boy briefs”.
However, I noticed pretty quickly that all the “fluidity” in the store flows in one direction: masculine and masculine-inspired pieces crop up in “Les Girls,” but there isn’t a similar smattering of more feminine pieces in “Les Boys.” For example, the girls’ side features masculine-styled sweatpants, but there is no accompanying lace bodysuit, or even any lace detailing, on the Les Boys side.
In case you think I’m making something out of nothing, I counted the term gender-fluid in no less than three publications. Rees herself is quoted in W Magazine saying, “The younger generation really doesn’t care about what is traditionally meant for men and what is traditionally meant for women…they all share clothes, no one cares about traditional gender marketing, it’s about diversity and it’s important that fashion reflects that.”And yet the fashion of Les Girls Les Boys reflects a strong gendered split. So does the website. It’s chockablock with gendered marketing strategies, from the dividing line down the middle to this mailing list popup I captured, which asks me to give not just my e-mail address but my specific preference of targeted advertising: les girls or les boys?
This collection is not the prize I thought it might be, and it’s left me with lingering questions about what it means to be marketed to. There’s enough in this collection that I like that it’s almost like seeing myself in a funhouse mirror (i.e. so this is what someone far removed thinks someone like me looks like). Which, of course, happens all the time to marginalized folks. Mainstream fashion sees something they like, and they manufacture it and sell it to a mass market. The process of making it appealing to the masses changes it.
