Fashion that blurs the gender boundaries
By Jodie Sinnema, Postmedia News May 24, 2014
http://www.leaderpost.com/life/fashion-beauty/Fashion+that+blurs+gender+boundaries/9873128/story.htmlChevi Rabbit is a man, but dresses like a woman.
Terah Jans and Beni Lauren are women, but dress like men.
The Edmonton residents use style and fashion to explore their identities and challenge rigid boundaries between male and female.
They are hardly alone in subverting norms. Boy George and David Bowie are among them, as are Adam Lambert, Annie Lennox and Prince. Even mainstream media and high-end fashion magazines embrace androgyny or gender-benders. Think of the brand MAC Cosmetics that hired drag queen RuPaul and Alberta cow-punk lesbian star k.d. lang to hype its products in the 1990s. Not only are boyish female models with no breasts or hips all the rage, but Elliott Sailors, a 31-yearold former beauty-pageant contestant living in New York, actually cut off her blond locks in 2012, bound her breasts and began modelling menswear. Sailors is now often mistaken as the samesex partner of her husband. Blurring the man-versuswoman binary through style choices isn't always easy, but as Rabbit, Jans and Lauren say, expressing themselves any other way wouldn't be true to themselves:
