What's the masculine version of "all dolled up?"  How about "action figured out"? Or "toy soldier styled"?  There I was in dandified dress for the newly formed Style Advisary Council (SAC)'s first foray into fashion philosophizing, Texstyle. An edited group of fashion insiders and fringey friends gathered on Thursday, June 4th in the name of pantsuits, pumps and gender bending.  

The topic of the evening was androgyny and I-a girl's school girl's-girl from a family of les filles-was testdriving the masculin/feminin look: where tomboy ends and unisex commences.  Thinking Grace Jones (the femme on everyone's inspiration board) I settled on leather cigarette pants, a sterling spiky shouldered blazer and bowtie-Grace meets Gossip Girl and away we go!

Arrived at the party (wait.was it a party? a symposium? not so sure.) fashionably late to avoid idling. Walking up the stairs at the Textile Museum of Canada (55 Centre Avenue, Toronto) I nary heard a peep from partygoers.Tiptoeing, quite tricky in platform booties, I approached the space where my fellow androgynies awaited.  Suddenly, I was not a fashion reporter, but once again, a baffled pupil who got lost on the way to lecture hall.  There they all sat in neat little rows listening to a panel of speakers as I squished (blame leather pants) past the sideways glances in search of a seat.  Once seated, I listened to an interesting group discuss and debate the role of androgyny in fashion. 

Moderated by museum curator Patricia Bentley, the panel included acclaimed fashion writer David Livingstone, on-the-rise designer Mikhael Kale and poignant novelist Derek McCormack, who respectively dueled their opposing views on the subject.  Livingstone waxed most poetically about the "language of presenting oneself" and the role of sex in fashion.  Thought provoking and opinionated, the conversation veered off the track at times, especially when Kale referenced Rodarte's designs as the "new androgyny" for their use of metal and wood, which he deemed male materials. Ladies and gents, we're all for redefining the terms, but spiked Louboutins juxtaposing Rodarte's floaty masterpieces doesn't equal androgyny in our textbook.

The most insightful contributions of the evening came courtesy of McCormack, who had the intelligentsias intrigued.  Given his lack of fashion background, he was able to approach androgyny from perhaps a broader scope-seeing it as a form of madness that "takes the language of masculine and feminine and twists it around using psychoanalytic perversity."  Now we're talking.  The master class continued as McCormack expressed disdain for David Bowie's mass marketed androgyny prototype and lauded the prolific work of fashion designer Martin Margiela's gender-bending creations, which he characterized as "not in your face, but a quiet blending of the sexes without bells and whistles." 

I took one philosophy course in university, remembering more of my female Professor's hypersexual self-fashioning (over-the-knee stiletto streetwalker boots, spiked peroxide blonde boy haircut and irreverent pearls) than Foucault and Beauvoire's theories on gender roles.  No matter my lack of understanding for oft-convoluted topics like "What is the other?" I did absorb that androgyny is more about the absence of gender than gender reversal.  Nice try, Bowie and Dietrich.

After class was dismissed, the conversations continued as we explored the diverse textiles in the museum's collection and observed fellow attendee's riffs on gender aesthetics.  Jumpsuits, les smoking and fedoras galore!  Sephora set up shop to give brave boys feline-eyes.  The ultra-feminine lady at the helm of the evening, Ms. Amy Burstyn-Fritz, founder of the SAC, made sure her boyfriend went where many men will not-guyliner.  After an evening spent contemplating gender, this seemed most suitable.  Clearly, women will always wear the pants.