‘The Boy in the Dress’ was daring and original television. Why?
By Patrick Cash
Wear tracksuit bottoms instead of skinny jeans and watch London turn, change and snarl. Instead of the bored concession to generic GQ ‘fashion’ you were affecting, you’re now license to be followed around supermarkets by security guards, lest you be pocketing Monster Munch.
Some gay fantasies fetishise the scally lad – let’s sniff trainers and circle wank into a sock – but in mainstream culture to be clad in ‘chav’ garb is, as Owen Jones says, to be associated with the demonised working class. To many street-eyed judges, strutting out of Topman in skinny jeans, it seems that Adidas doesn’t so much proclaim sporty as scream benefits.
All these strands sewn into our cultural tapestry by the power of a pair of pants? The Powers That Be have been getting drunk on judgement and that tapestry is stained with prejudice juice, babes. It’s an interesting experiment to make, like going to Balans with an older friend and having fellow diners assume you’re an escort, but not one you’d want to sustain long-term. The sudden lack of respect is breathtaking.
I’m not too into fashion trends, personally. It genuinely all seems a bit superficial, with self-described River Island fashonistas affecting to shriek ‘individuality’ to drown the drone of ‘uniform’. But I do love personal style, self-expression through clothes, and if I see a Jenkin van Zyl or a La John Joseph, or a Winnifred Wyld, strutting down the street in garments that beguile the eye I try to say with my smile: I think you’re brilliant.
All too often they cast their eyes down at the chewing-gummed pavement. Fantastic figures mistake unspoken praise for a piss-take grin. Not even when I’m wearing tracksuit bottoms, but because skinny jeans and brightly coloured geometric patterns are about as subverting as sI get of conventionally masculine style. And boys aren’t brought up to celebrate other men in peacock feathers.
The metrosexual DILF on The Only Way is Essex might wear a light pink T-shirt and use moisturiser, but purple lipstick, Kerry Katona hoop earrings and a leopard-print gilet? Man, you cray-cray. Not that all men should be forced to sport the East Bloc-afterparty look, that would be like corporations forcing their staff to wear grey personality-leeching suits to work, but we really need to work through this ingrained feeling that men shouldn’t be free to wear this ensemble.
Isn’t it strange that, as a culture, one of the things we’re most suspicious of is aesthetic declarations of others’ individuality? Yes if you’re ‘eccentric dresser’ Lady Gaga; not on my watch, mate, if you’re a nobody down the local at half-five on a Friday. I am a bloke and blokes wear classic Levis and black V-necks from Primark; if I’m feeling adventurous, I’ll go for a polo neck. Suave.
We pour this thinking into our children from birth and because it’s wormed into our own thinking, we don’t think we’re doing anything wrong. Hence why a children’s television programme aired over Christmas on peak-time BBC One was not just brave, but convention-exploding. It was named The Boy in the Dress.
Dennis is a talented thirteen-year-old footballer, who gets whispered to by Vogue in newsagents. He’s enraptured by the glamour of Kate Moss, and the beauty of dresses, and is finally helped to express himself by a fashion-conscious sass-minx at his school. But when his schoolmates discover his cross-dressing, ridicule ensues from his peers and punishment from his teachers until the narrative’s cathartic climax.
Why is this brave television? Break down the gender norms and it translates to: a person wears an item of clothing. Hardly earth-shattering. As the unsurpassable David Hoyle said when I interviewed him last year for a feature on drag: ‘The idea that an item of clothing can have a gender of its own is ridiculous, it’s just a piece of material cut in a certain way.’
Men are from Venus, women are from Mars – or fuck me, is it the other way round? Feminist theory, from Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex to Judith Butler’s performance of gender, proclaims the naivety of ascribing generalised characteristics to people based on their genitals. Characteristics find their symbolism in dress. In the very worst cases we find the tragedy of Leelah Alcorn, the transsexual teenage girl who committed suicide after being forced to dress as a boy by her Christian parents.
For gay men, naturally cut loose from the blokey straight bloke archetype, there appear to be two large camps (pun intended): those who rail against our supposed beta-male status and despise all aspects of femininity, or those who embrace it with gesticulating, ‘girly’ heart-patterned arms. And then there are the queers who twin the Levis with the gold Lamé, or team a dusting of ultramarine eyeshadow with an American military porn haircut.
‘Gender has always been something that I have felt perfectly comfortable playing around with,’ says Mark Delacour. ‘Now I can’t promise you will never find me in a dress in Soho dancing barefoot having kicked my heels off, but on the whole I would categorise my general attire as that of a man. But what does that mean? Waistcoat, starched shirt, pin-stripe trousers and a pair of brogues, perhaps even a pocket watch?
“Men are from Venus, women are from Mars – or fuck me, is it the other way round?”
‘Well, sometimes, yes. But equally it can mean skinny chinos and a vest combined with a long floating cardigan and one of my signature scarves (whatever the weather) topped off with a pair of pink converse. For me it doesn’t matter whether the store merchandising team, applying society’s norms, put the cardigan in women’s or in men’s – if I like the cardigan, then I like the cardigan!’
But there are darker taints attendant on freedom of dress-expression; reactions may be extreme. In his excellent Guardian article, ‘Men in makeup: lawyer by day, glamour puss by night’, Seán Faye writes: ‘Even in daylight, children in parks shout at you, men follow you down the street; sometimes it’s just silent staring, sometimes it’s demeaning questions. It is always threatening.’ QX’s very own James Egan suffered an aggressive, homophobic scare in Homerton last summer, which he accounts to the way he was dressed: ‘boyish gay’.
Why do men – and it is, by all accounts, usually men – feel so threatened by other men in little leather shorts? Perhaps because it’s a sign of the patriarchal castle crumbling; men’s glitter eyeliner is a loose brick in the stonework. Yet the stonework was always built on flawed foundations. Men and women transcending our silly gender norms, both straight and gay, are painting the architects’ vision for a new construction, built on an equality that will liberate all men from a damaging obsession with masculinity.
I hope to be taking part in that build, wearing my trackies or my skinny jeans or my pink corset dress from Primark, depending on how I want to express myself that day.
• The Boy in the Dress is based on a children’s book by David Walliams, and is still available to watch on BBC iPlayer: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer
Mark Delcaour is Director of Experience Company, an events, marketing and online partner for charities.