After decades of strict separation between men’s and women’s “floors” comes “gender neutral” fashion, valid for both sexes: Selfridges, the historic London stores, has opened in the first and most famous store in Oxford Street a space dedicated to neutral fashion and accessories, pragmatically called Agender. In the age of hyper-genderisation of clothes and objects, right from the cradle, Selfridges is looking ahead, to the generation of the millennials and is proposing five unisex private label collections and a selection of 40 brands.
The new “genderless” approach implies a rethinking of spaces (both on and off line) and the ambience, designed by designer Faye Toogood and developed over three interconnected floors of the store. Away with the shop window and internal mannequins, the collections are worn online by models of both genders. The collections range from avant-garde street wear to high fashion, with names like Ann Demeulemeester and Comme des Garçons.
“With AGENDER we don’t want to follow a “trend” but rather approach a forma mentis and respond to a cultural change that is happening now. We will explore the relationship between gender and retail in the physical and digital world and in all our stores. The project will be a test, a trial on the idea of the sexes, both to enable our customers to get closer to the experience without preconceptions as well as for us retailers to push ahead with the idea of how you sell and buy fashion today”, explains Linda Hewson, creative director of Selfridges.
