Masculinizing Feminine Fashion

[joreth]

I am in love with this corset vest meant for masculine fashion. I need to make one with feminine lines for me now.

Y'know, in my copious spare time.

The other corset vests seem to be more like standard corsets but with masculine lines.  The one in the thumbnail looks more like it's double-layered with a corset underneath and a vest on top.   That's the one I like and that's the one I'll be making, if I ever get around to it.

There was a great forum thread somewhere about how to make dresses for masculine fashion / male bodies.  The discussion was about how the trick was to not just put men in dresses, but to tailor non-pants to male bodies using "masculine" lines.

Feminizing male bodies or mixing masculine & feminine fashion is a different thing.   This was about taking "women's" clothing and turning it into something masculine people can wear and still be masculine.  Women have tons of examples of taking "men's" fashion and turning it into "women's" fashion by re-tailoring it to fit curvy bodies or using more feminine lines and elements.  Darting a button-up collared shirt, for example.

That's part of how we got away with expanding our available fashion choices into more masculine avenues, such as wearing pants - we feminized pants and now women in pants is just seen as "normal", whether they're feminized versions or not.

If men in our extremely patriarchal, fragile masculinity culture are ever going to move towards more freedom of fashion expression and break out of their much more narrow fashion boxes, one of the ways to do it is to masculinize traditionally feminine clothing, the way we feminized traditionally masculine clothing.

The examples in the thread (that I wish I could find now, so I could share it) gave some really great examples of do's and don't's for masculine skirt-wearing.  One suggestion was to avoid emphasizing the waist, which is the opposite recommendation for feminine styles because emphasizing the waist in a feminine style is intended to highlight the curve of the hips, waist, and ribcage.

Instead, drop or raise the waist, or pair it with shirts, blouses, or jackets that go about butt-length, to make more of a rectangular or triangular shape rather than an hourglass figure.  We see this in tuxes, where the waistline is hidden beneath a cummerbund or vest and the jacket extends to below the butt or even as low as the knees.  This elongates the torso and creates rectangle or triangle shapes instead of curved hourglass shapes.

This corset vest manages to both shape the midsection and also follow the above guideline by not shaping it in the same way that feminine corsets do with hourglass silhouettes and extending to the upper hip, creating a long triangular shape by extending the shoulders with the curve in the seams, which is very masculine.

As a straight woman, I'm attracted to masculinity. I just am, I can't help it. I think if I saw a man wearing this in real life, I might just swoon.