“The Menswear Phenomenon,” by Kathleen Beckett, was originally published in the August 1984 issue of Vogue.

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For several seasons now, menswear has been one of the most pervasive—and most applauded—looks to come down fashion runways around the world. In the fall collections, Milan was virtually overwhelmed by an endless parade of tailored overcoats and trenchcoats, especially at Giorgio Armani, the designer many consider to be the “master of menswear.” In Paris, menswear collections ran the gamut from Jean Paul Gaultier’s offbeat interpretations—baggy pants, charming little vests from his men’s line—to Yves Saint Laurent’​s more classic jackets and trousers. Back in New York, everyone from Anne Klein to Calvin Klein offered enough extravagantly cut “boy” coats and pleated trousers in menswear fabrics to fill a football stadium this fall. And everywhere, shoes are tied and flat, so there is no mistaking the menswear message. Underneath it all, there are now other menswear options: Jockey International’s undershirts, Calvin Klein’s briefs, and, at Tous les caleçons in Paris and SoHo, colorful boxer undershorts that often substitute for sport shorts out-of-doors.

What’s particularly striking and intriguing about menswear is the wholehearted way it has been embraced by women, the way it strides confidently down both runways and city streets with equal frequency, the way it has transcended fashion influence to become fashion reality. Women in all parts of the country, from all walks of life, in all economic groups have adopted menswear in one form or another. A lunchtime stroll around the business district of any city will reveal that a pinstripe suit with skirt and bow-tied foulard blouse is the prevalent outfit for many working women. Outside the business world, men’s departments and men’s stores are reporting that their customers are, increasingly, women—buying shirts and sweaters for themselves.

It appears as if menswear for women is a phenomenon of the ’​eighties—one that, closer inspection reveals, has been brewing for years.

The prevalence of menswear dressing in the workplace is one such tradition based on a time-honored fact: Men head the world of business, and at this point the only precedent for women who operate in that world is the dress code men have established—tailored clothes topped with a jacket. Today as more and more women, often by necessity rather than by choice, are working, they consequently are tailoring their wardrobes and their images to that fact. A decade ago John Molloy’s book Dress for Success proffered the grey flannel suit—with skirt—as proper attire for the female executive. Since then, it has become the female “power suit,” the preferred if not requisite uniform. And, despite possible boredom with wearing a “uniform”—and irritation at its symbolic capitulation—the look makes sense for the majority of women who work.

As Alison Lurie notes in The Language of Clothes, when having babies was a woman’s primary goal, fashion helped her achieve success. The bosomy, bustled dresses of the Victorian era and the tight skirts and pointed bras of the postwar years accentuated the female anatomy and heightened a woman’s sexuality, focused on her ability to attract men.

Daniela Ghione in Ralph Lauren.

Photographed by Arthur Elgort, Vogue, August 1984

Now, however, as more and more women enter the work force and head up households, they want to and need to have jobs, not babies. They want clothes that will help men focus on their mental prowess, not their physical attributes. The “armor” of a grey flannel suit, or the more stylish appeal of Giorgio Armani’s or Ralph Lauren’s updates does the job.

As financial writer Jane Bryant Quinn said in one of our recent issues, “You want people to listen to what you say rather than look at what you wear.” To be good at a job requires attention to the business at hand, not to the vagaries of fashion. As Lurie points out, a male employee who pays slavish attention to the width of his ties, lapels, and pants legs might be viewed as unstable or, at best, capricious and vain by his colleagues and superiors. Likewise, a woman who tries to take the trendiest fashion to the office is guaranteed to raise eyebrows and questions about her seriousness about the job.

The adaptation of a man’s way of dressing offers another advantage for a woman—ease in getting dressed. As newspaper editor Nancy Newhouse said recently in these pages, “Men don’t have to have an innate fashion sense to look good—they can just pick the color suit it will be today.” Whirlwind mornings getting the children ready for school and oneself ready for the office afford little remaining time or energy for decisions on dress. Like a man, a woman who can put on a suit and be dressed attractively and appropriately for the day ahead is, indeed, ahead of the game.

When it comes to off-the-job dressing, menswear remains one of the strongest influences around. A whole world of active sports dressing—sweatsuits, track shorts, and T-shirts, borrowed from a man’s locker room and now considered unisex—has developed, as keeping in shape has become a necessary pursuit or even a religion for aging baby boomers.

Unisex dressing reached its peak in the 1960s, when the sexual revolution and political discontent broke down all kinds of barriers, when most authorities and mandates were questioned and many toppled. Dress codes were included in the dismantling, and many men and women started to dress out of the same closet. As Michael and Ariane Batterberry point out in Mirror, Mirror: A Social History of Fashion, it was a liberating time for both sexes. Women could get out of confining skirts and wobbly high heels, into free-striding pants and sneakers. Men could replace the sterility of a white shirt with the colorful embroidery of a peasant shirt, and paint the lily by adding beads. The clothes themselves became neither a man’s nor a woman’s—they were interchangeable. At times they hearkened back to another era (with velvet knickers and billowy poet’s blouses), or looked ahead to a future one (with the “space-age” jumpsuits and helmets of Courrèges), or captured the here and now in the T-shirts, jeans, and army-surplus jackets worn for protest rallies, classrooms, and rock concerts.

The music and musicians of the day, who figured so importantly in capturing the dreams and desires of a generation, captured the new way of dressing, too. The Rolling Stones cavorted, in concert and on album covers, in floral shirts and tight hip-huggers; the Beatles and their maharishi blazed a trail to the meditation and the caftans of Eastern cultures. Today, unisex dressing is referred to as androgynous, and still stems from a continuing breakdown of barriers and the status quo. Again, it appears at its most striking, if not outrageous, in the world of music. The tank tops and slidey sweatshirts—along with the “dancing”—of Jennifer Beals in the movie and music videos from Flashdance are interchangeable with those of Kevin Bacon in Footloose. Culture Club’s flowing-locked and heavily made-up Boy George has embraced a post-peasant form of ethnic dress—that of a Hassidic Jew or a geisha girl (the latter, so convincingly he was refused entrance through French customs when officials could not believe he was a man). The T-shirt—slashed, rolled, cropped—and black leather turned up on everyone. Even the “plaid suit” catalogued by the Batterberrys in a list of ’sixties unisex outfits appeared in its bold black-and-white glory on crewcut Annie Lennox, lead singer of Eurythmics, on their latest U.S. tour. The oversized shapes of the Japanese-inspired designers are sometimes favored by Duran Duran (the group many prophesy will be the next Beatles), who carry cross-dressing further with quite definite, yet quite attractive, makeup.

On the streets, from New York’s East Village to London’​s Kensington High Street, boys and girls, men and women sift through the same clothing racks in the cities’ hottest boutiques. Chances are they’re all in tweedy, single-breasted overcoats, with black berets, Ray-Ban sunglasses, neon anklets, and the gargantuan tasseled scarves of the Middle East (in the black-and-white pattern of the P.L.O.; the red-and-white of the Bedouins).

In a more classic vein, more and more women are looking to the men’s departments for their own Shetland sweaters and polo shirts, or opting for the oversupply of designed-for-women equivalents. The result, again androgynous, is a look of all-American, well-bred quality. The classic appeal of menswear is, in fact, based on a real difference in quality.

Men’s clothing is acclaimed for its expert tailoring, attention to detail, and durability of design and fabrication, generally at a lower cost. It is made to last, in part, because few men are inclined to change their wardrobes each season. In the 1970s, many manufacturers of men’s clothing—Stanley Blacker, Arthur Richards—started women’s lines, as one has explained, to provide women with “good tailored clothes” and “better quality fabrics.” Since then, more men’s manufacturers and designers have started women’s lines as more women demand more in return for their fashion dollar. This demand resulted in what used to be called “investment dressing,” and continues to make sense as women bank on clothes that stand up to time and trends.

Concern about money these days offers another reason for the rise in popularity of menswear. Throughout history, in difficult economic periods—which, although indicators are improving, we find ourselves in now—clothing has become more somber, more greyed and muted, as men’s clothing traditionally has been. The Depression of the 1930s and the WW II years of the 1940s popularized a subdued, no-fuss, simple-lined greyed suit, for women as well as men, that resurfaces in the recession-prone 1980s.

Other historical associations with men’s clothing help to explain the phenomenon today. Ever since Amelia Bloomer and her “fellow” suffragettes donned bloused pants under their knee-length skirts, menswear dressing has suggested a daring, even a revolutionary spirit—echoed in the 1960s protest days by blue jeans, as Anne Hollander points out in Seeing Through Clothes.

Coco Chanel added a stylish appeal in the 1920s when she popularized wearing pants, and her lover’s tweed jackets, and kicked off the “garçonne” look—short hair, pleated trousers, tuxedo jackets and bow ties. The look was originally considered “amusingly perverse,” as recorded by photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue, sported only by the young and the shocking, until Chanel added the feminizing element of chain after chain of jewelry and broadened the appeal.

The great beauties of the following decade—Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo—lent more glamour and sophistication to wearing trousers and double-breasted jackets. Yves Saint Laurent, who has always had a menswear element in his collection, explained in one of our recent issues that some of the inspiration for his signature designs—the “smoking,” the trouser suit— stems from a favorite photograph of Marlene Dietrich in a man’s jacket and pants, leg up on the running board of a car, beret pulled down over one eye. You can see the same influences on Armani, page 343.

In 1953, Vogue introduced women to men’s-store shopping when we showed a model in a pink Brooks Brothers’ shirt. It put the stamp of approval on the fashion value of men’s clothing for women. One magazine also credited it with providing “the real spark that ignited Brooks’s move into women’​s wear”. . .and women’s move into Brooks and other men’s stores.

That Brooks Brothers’ shirt still appeals today. The overscaled proportions and authoritative lines of men’s clothes give the wearer a look of dash and swagger, power and assurance. And, as the population ages, a menswear cut offers another boon: a way of staying in style for a figure that no longer can, or should, be part of certain other fashion trends.

But an easy fit can be taken too far. When the jacket becomes too oversized, the sweater too big, another message is delivered: Alison Lurie calls it the helpless cuteness of a little girl playing dress up, characterized by the Annie Hall look, or today by some of the more outrageously overscaled designs coming out of Japan. It’s a look with all the charm of a tomboy at play—not of a powerful executive at work, or a confident woman at ease.

The donning of a man’s sweater or jacket might also remind us of earlier days when we borrowed a brother’​s or boyfriend’s in admiration and affection. It might, as one psychiatrist has suggested, “re-create a closeness to the father”: often a woman’​s first symbol of the authority that she might hope to assume every time she opts for menswear dressing.

As we look ahead to the coming seasons, menswear for women shows no signs of abating: and, knowing the reasons behind its steadily increasing popularity, there’​s no reason why it should.