It’s one thing to take on androgynous styles like flinging on your boyfriend’s slightly oversized shirt and transforming it into a svelte shirt-dress or casually throwing on a checkered shirt atop a dress and calling it a carefree chic day. But when you take a masculine dress shirt and deconstruct it down to a distinctly feminine piece of clothing in the form of a skirt, then you’ve deftly pushed the envelope on androgyny.
Fashionably speaking, what we have here is ingenious. On first glance, I was unsure what was before me: a tattered skirt perhaps or maybe a traditional garment of Swedish culture like the kilt is to the Scottish. Curiosity got the best of me as I continued to pore over the picture a few more times and an “aha! moment finally surfaced.
In a gutsy attempt to move away from the tedium of fashion conservatism, it came to me that this young lady from Stockholm, Sweden had decided to alter her father’s shirt into a skirt! With several folds and tucks, she was able to render a men’s dress shirt into a very complicated silhouette that serves as a skirt.
However, as I revisited the look a couple more times (I was kind of dazed and confused by it all), the complexity of the skirt became a gift and a curse. On one hand, the oddity of the skirt was a definite lure, but at the same time it seemed all too fastidious with the make-shift skirt’s undulating folds and creases.
All the same, applause is owed to the young Swede. The mere idea can only be fathomed by a few like minds—Marc Jacobs and his inverted heel pumps—that tick to the rhythm of a different drum. That being said, curiosity did kill the cat so I’m not expecting hoards of you to all of a sudden start rummaging through your boyfriends’ closet (men, breathe easy) to scrunch up his shirts into skirts, but consider this hodgepodge skirt as a rather convoluted addition to current androgynous styles women have at their disposal. Mind you, it’s not for the fainthearted!
[Image: The Sartorialist]