The Boys Love Miu Miu Too
Writer Geoffrey Mak reminisces about Miu Miu's past while looking to its visual future, as modeled by photographer Quil Lemons and Ysham Adulahi.
Spring/Summer 2024: The collection that, to me, is most significant in its treatment of gendered dressing. Sixty-two models walk down the Miu Miu runway in Paris. The first wears half-rim glasses and a dark blue polo, almost black. I’ll call this model her: A blazer accentuates her shoulders, as if she were returning from prep school, or fancying herself a raconteur at the Knickerbocker Club for wearing no tie and her sleeves rolled up. She walks with her fists inside the pockets of what appear to be, on second look… board shorts, as if she’s headed from the Gentlemen’s Club to the beach — a charismatic fantasy — a white drawstring dangling from her waistband. Her flip-flops show different colored Band-Aids wrapped around her toes. I see blue plaid fabric bunched over her waistline, and while I know this is the fabric of the shirt, her bottom-most layer, to me they read like boxer shorts — a deliberate choice by Miuccia Prada — reminding me of the boys I knew in high school, who sagged their jeans so low I could see their bunched-up boxer shorts billowing out.
Even now, it is difficult for me to separate the rhythmic sound of a basketball on pavement, slowing and quickening, with a vision of these boys’ black hair slicked back with gel, and Tupac playing from a car stereo with the windows rolled down. These boys wore boxers. I wore briefs, because I was also a boy, though I didn’t always feel like one. I was too embarrassed to ask my mother to buy me boxers instead of briefs at JCPenney; because I was too afraid she might suggest I was trying to be someone I wasn’t. When I waited for someone to pick me up after school, I watched the boys on the basketball court, and I couldn’t tell if I wanted them or if I wanted to be them. I was fifteen years old.
Twenty years later, I found myself at a warehouse party in New York titled Fags Are Women. At the rave, people mix colors and outfits — leather with athleisure or those conceptual pieces with all the straps — the way DJs mix sounds and genres. My friend E, a self-described “T4T trans-masc faggot,” wore baggy basketball shorts, and danced topless, with Band-Aids over his nipples. We were discussing gender.
Q: What is the difference between feeling like a girl, identifying with a girl, identifying as a girl, and being a girl?
A: They are indeed different, but sometimes feel the same.
A girl is a many-gendered thing. At once, she is an ideal, as well as the failure to meet that ideal. Not all girls are girls. She is less a person than a place: a train station, through which several currents — images, language, nature — intersect at different points in time. Only from a distance or in retrospect does a girl seem like a coherent thing. Hell is a teenage girl, essentially discombobulated, a mess. Some are in a state of becoming, as if womanhood were a masked ball she is eternally getting ready for, but never actually attends. Some have no interest in that ball, have in fact already arrived at their destination, passing a joint in the back of a pickup truck when the clock strikes twelve. It was just a pumpkin after all, make-believe.
At the warehouse party, I admitted to my friend E that I sometimes feel like a girl. This could happen during the length of a subway ride, when I wear a black oversized hoodie with a pleated skirt and heels, or during six-month stretches of time when my gender can feel like being parked in a space reserved for someone else. I am at a cease-fire, temporary or permanent, with my own body. Once I discovered that my frustrations with having a male body was masking my internalized racism for having an Asian body, I accepted my present incarnation. But I still use clothes to hijack the meanings that have been inscribed on my very body that I am just now learning to love. Style is part of that love.
In Judith Butler’s essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” the philosopher’s definition of gender was a shot heard around the world: “an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts.” From this, we can glean a few things. 1. Gender is not a natural state, but what is left behind by a series of acts and performances. 2. Gender is also temporal, since repetition happens over time. 3. Gender isn’t embodied so much as stylized.
A stylized repetition of acts. This is also a description of a runway.
Consider look forty-seven: A girl wears a beige-colored top, like the upside-down triangle of a handkerchief. Like much of streetwear, the handkerchief is at once a historical situation, onto which masculine associations have been inscribed over time. Within menswear alone, that garment has been subverted, several times over. I’m reminded of a bygone era of gay history, when men wore handkerchiefs, either on the left or right side, to cruise. Some of them were girls. And they still wore their handkerchief on the left.
And consider look forty-two: A girl, with tattoos on her forearms, wears a pencil skirt seemingly covered in crepuscular gold flakes — a luxury spin on an office silhouette — over the thick waistband and white drawstrings of the kind of board shorts that I, as a teenager, might buy at PacSun in a suburban mall. Here is a vision of a girl as assembled, collaged, collected, and put-together. That a girl could be wearing board shorts underneath a pencil skirt does not destabilize her place in gender, but rather incorporates the supposed antithesis of a girl within girlhood itself — capacious, elastic, synthesized, witty.
Note that a majority of the SS24 Miu Miu show doesn’t take on the alien, nonbinary silhouette that codes as non-human, or effaces the body by engulfing it in oversize vestments, equally dreary and cartoonish. Rather, Mrs. Prada’s looks are composed of intensely gender-coded garments, whose meaning is informed by the spaces they have historically been worn in: the masked ball, the country club, the pool, the university library.
Butler goes on to write that if gender is “not a seemingly seamless identity, then the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style.” What Mrs. Prada is doing on a visual level is an analogue for what Butler is describing on a societal level. If the normative ideals of gender have been manufactured and policed by certain brands (e.g., Ralph Lauren, Lacoste, Billabong) creating images and advertisements around certain styles (e.g., Ivy, prep, swimwear), Miu Miu subverts those codes, and out came something… cohesive, even balanced. The concept is solid, but the harmony sings, which is the craft of a designer.
The arbitrary relation the mind makes between any of those garments is where gender happens. Where gender is made, and remade — to confuse, to energize, to delight. Anything that can be styled can be styled differently. With gender, too. When watching the Prada runway, I got a feeling, the way excitement is indistinguishable from dread, that invalidates my sureness of what I thought a girl was. A girl is a many-gendered thing. Some girls play basketball, and wear their jeans sagging low. Some girls take the N train to the C train from the Upper East Side to Rockaway Beach on a Monday afternoon. Some become a bride at fifteen, a queen at nineteen, and a legend by twenty. Some girls listen to New Order on repeat, find wonder in the taste of cake batter, and don’t care if they ever see the Grand Canyon in person.
