The Boys in Their Summer Dresses

Gender fluidity enters its next phase as men increasingly step out in skirts and frocks.

It seems fairly unlikely that when Irwin Shaw wrote “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” his classic paean to “a million wonderful women, all over the city,” drifting along the pavement as warm breezes tugged at their hems, he could have envisioned a day when those “girls” would as likely be men. Sexist and dated as Shaw’s much anthologized 1939 story may be, it did lay out truths about urban existence and the unalloyed joy of looking. Those pleasures, largely withheld over the last 16 months, have returned as we venture forth from our caves. To the delighted surprise of at least one observer, a considerable number of us apparently used the time in confinement to rethink some shibboleths about who gets to wear what. Khoa Sinclair, for instance, treated lockdown as a time of experimentation, a chance to push a style already liberated from rigid binary conventions into the realm of “next-level femininity.”