Market Research:
Wales Bonner’s “Havana Short Sleeve” and
“Oraa Cardigan”

I had experience using it. Since last summer—a time that seems both far away and just the other day—I had been dressing like a man, whenever and however I wanted. The aesthetic thrills of the roomy, but uninviting, t-shirts, sweaters, button-downs, and pants that made me take up more space yet buffered me from others, were matched by the physical pleasure of having them on: feeling free from performing femininity, staying at a remove. Putting on menswear felt like daring strangers not to fuck with me, and then seeing that they didn’t. It was an auspicious moment to switch sides. Men’s fashion has been metamorphosing for several seasons now, and its best inventors are changing the way we think about masculinity, while enabling us to feel like the kind of men we want to be.

In the weeks before my city, New York, began self-quarantining in mid-March, I was wearing a Wales Bonner Spring/Summer 2020 cardigan on most outings. Hitting a few inches below my hips, with sleeves that extend past my fingertips, the cardigan is slimly cut, ribbed, and made of a weighty black cotton; an orange, white, and sage-green geometric design embroiders the front. I folded the sleeves and wore it open, or partly buttoned, over collared shirts to dinner, therapy, interviews. It was relaxed and striking and made me feel like that guy who secretly cares about clothes almost as much as books, though he won’t admit it to anyone.

Since last summer, I had been thinking about what it meant to dress in a gender-nonconforming way—how I could be most authentic to the feminine and masculine impulses I had, depending on the hour, day, mood. For most of my life, I had excelled at dressing like a style-conscious woman. All the while, I had watched male friends with envy for their jackets with pockets big enough to fit a paperback, tailored suits, sweatshirts and hoodies they could float in. Their clothes combined usefulness and style; comfort and ease were paramount—nothing was more important than a man being able to get things done, no matter what he was wearing. I wanted to get things done and look good while doing them, too. Before self-quarantine, I was getting ready to wear another Wales Bonner piece, a men’s shirt that was more blouse than not, lemon-yellow with big red flowers and meant to be worn with several buttons undone with the collar flaring open. Loose and alluring. With it on, I felt like a sweet-at-heart rude boy on his way to meet friends at a nightclub in Miami. It hadn’t become warm enough for me to wear the shirt like that just yet, but I was planning the ankle-length pants and flouncy miniskirt I wanted to wear with it.

Both the cardigan and blouse remind me of other men I have known. Photos of my father in his youth, after arriving in the United States for college, wearing bell-bottoms or flared pants with half-unbuttoned shirts in wild, loud prints; my uncles in Nigeria in cozy jumpers with slacks and flip-flops or slippers. Like most women, I’ve had a complex relationship with what we call the male gaze: the visual preferences of the men I tended to like had affected many of the decisions I made regarding self-presentation when I was in my teens and twenties. But as I leaned into menswear, I was discovering another type of male gaze, one that I began to crave and seek out—a thirst from men not for what they believe they wanted from me, but for what they wanted to emulate or have for themselves. At drinks one night, my best friend’s partner took a look at my outfit, and proceeded to ask where I had gotten the quilted navy vest I was wearing. He was looking to acquire a similar item himself, he said. It was one of the best compliments I had received this year.

Walking down the street and getting appreciative glances for my Wales Bonner schoolboy cardigan; there was an important distinction between desire and admiration. If I had a style philosophy, it was to embrace the most classic and utilitarian of menswear, with ladylike accents. The cardigan feels both rugged and delicate, like something the young lover in André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name would throw on to wander the Italian countryside, heartsick over his unavailable object of affection. I finally put on the flowered shirt for a Zoom book talk, and it was light on my shoulders, breezy. I recently watched Scarface during quarantine for the first time; looking at myself on the computer screen, I felt not like Michelle Pfeiffer in her slip dress, but Al Pacino charmingly, if awkwardly, trying to pick her up on the dance floor.

Many folks are familiar with the story about why women’s clothing is not nearly as practical as men’s. European designers learned to seamlessly sew pockets into men’s coats and waistcoats, according to the Victoria and Albert Museum, yet maintained that pockets disrupted the silhouettes of dresses. White women in the 17th century wore pockets on belts around their waists instead, beneath layers of skirts, accessed through slits. Some theorize that European societies did not want women to be able to conceal possessions out of sight; it is true that white men did not expect white women of status to carry around money. And so we now roam cities in garments that often have no storage space for even a phone and wallet, forcing us to carry bags to have what we need to make it through the day.

I’ve mostly ditched purses in my daily life—well, back when I had a daily life that required me to go places—and, at first, it was disorienting. I kept feeling like I was missing something, had left a belonging somewhere. Wales Bonner clothes often have a sporty energy, giving the wearer a look of probably unearned athleticism. Even with the cardigan on, I felt nimble jumping out of a subway seat, utterly unencumbered, and plowing through sidewalk crowds.

Menswear designers currently can be split into different camps: those pushing the imagined boundary between the masculine and feminine, both playing with androgyny and queering norms; and others who are refining the staples of men’s clothing through design, color, print, and structure. Feathered blouses, sheer tunic dresses, and Emily Adams' Bode airy patchwork in the first corner; Hedi Slimane and his funky, lean suits in the second. I appreciate these efforts. They have expanded what it means to dress like a man in a time when what it means to look like a man, and feel like one, have mutated considerably. Despite the breakdown of the gender binary, and of gender more broadly, many of us still have a sentimental attachment to forms of male expression. We just want to be able to blow them up, too.

Alexis Okeowo is a staff writer at The New Yorker.