One of the things that caught me up a bit in that imagined world was how clothes shopping would work. On one hand, all styles should be available to everyone and in no way require gender (or sex) designations. On the other hand, bodies have different shapes and a person MAY want to dress in those shapes.
So how do you communicate that these clothes are meant to fit around breasts and those are meant for a body with some lumpy bits down below and these have smaller waists while these other ones are more billowing?
You could advertise them based on actually anatomy they are meant to fit, with the boobies section or the penis section in the store, but that might be a bit crass for Sears and also it still categorizes shapes or clothing around secondary sex organs and that is only one of the things people take into account when they pick clothes.
You could make little icons with different shapes that the clothes are meant to fit: hourglass, ruler, spoon, octopus, whatever. You could also just mix everything up and let people look around until they find clothes tailored into the particular shape they want, which is fine except it's not very efficient.
WELL! Now there is a clothing brand that is stepping into this world! They are called Ullac and their clothes are all advertised as gender neutral.
They seem to have solved the problem by creating all their clothes in one shape: a sort of loose rectangle.
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| Source: Ullac |
This is classic androgyny, and there are people in all places on the gender spectrum who like rectangular clothing, so I bet they will do well. Plus, their website is the hippest of the hip spaces for hip people to know they are hip on the internet.
But it doesn't actually solve this differently-shaped-clothing communication problem that plagues me. How, oh how, do you have an efficient store that is easy to navigate??? (I mean, this is actually a problem right now. Go into a women's clothing store and they don't separate the clothes with fitted waists from the boxy blouses, you just kind of figure it out. Maybe it's fine. Am I over thinking things? Either way, Ullac is a gender neutral clothing brand and that's pretty cool.)
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