Will The #MeToo Movement Affect The Fall 2018 Menswear Shows?

It’s that time again! Starting tomorrow in London, then continuing to Milan, Florence, Paris, and finally, after a brief hiatus, New York, the world’s preeminent designers of menswear are poised to unveil their designs for Fall 2018. What will we discover? Well, form suggests that the collections will play out as a series of on-runway dialogues; back and forths between conceptual and conventional, streetwear and tailoring, technology and tradition, minimalism and dandyism, and plenty of other dress code dialectics besides. Hundreds of highly honed design sensibilities will present their answers to the question: How should men look now? And it’s up to us as individuals who love clothes and the messages they transmit to choose the answers we like best.
So far, so fun. Yet there is another question—far less pleasant, far more awkward, but far more vital, too—that hangs in the air this season. In the time since the menswear industry’s last ceremonial dance of display that began last June, the landscape of gender relations has been radically refigured by the New York Times–catalyzed rush of revelations that has revealed, or at least has begun to reveal, the scale of modern man’s abuse of power for non-consensual sexual gratification. Masculinity might not be inherently rapey, but the #MeToo movement has exposed the fact that a significantly horrible proportion of men are. Read more at Vogue.